'B2B decisions are rational.' I think it's actually the opposite. B2B customers are, in the end, people who are anxious, tired and afraid of being held responsible.
I often see the difference between B2C and B2B marketing explained as 'emotion vs. reason.' But the two aren't concepts you can split into a binary, and if anything, B2B is an enormously emotional domain.
A company's decisions are still made by people. And those people decide under the anxiety of making the wrong choice, the fatigue of repetitive work, and the pressure of having to answer for the outcome. In fact, when CEB (now Gartner) and Google surveyed 3,000 B2B buyers, B2B brands turned out to be building stronger emotional connections than B2C brands.1 That's because the personal risk the buyer carries is bigger.
Even when someone compares quotes from three vendors, the weighting is rarely 1:1:1. Usually there's already a favorite, and the others are used to validate that choice. In 6sense's research, too, 81% of B2B buyers already had a preferred vendor at the point of first contact.2
I'm stressing this even though I know there'll be pushback, because if you get this first button wrong, every thought that follows comes out crooked.
1. You don't need to claim to be the best at everything.
A proposal that clearly answers the one thing the customer cares about most gets chosen more often.
2. This is also why the first rule of B2B sales is 'fast follow-up.'
Finding and comparing alternatives eats up a huge amount of a working person's time. According to research in Harvard Business Review, companies that reached out within an hour of an inquiry were about seven times more likely to get to an actual conversation than those that were slower.3 A vendor that responds first and fast is, in itself, saving the customer effort.
3. The reasons customers leave are often dressed up in rational language, too.
The real reason is disappointment or hurt feelings, but it gets explained as 'budget' or 'features,' and uncomfortable feedback gets filtered as it passes through sales or the product team. That's why analyzing churn reasons from text alone sometimes leads to dangerous illusions.
The target of B2B marketing isn't the company. It's the person inside the company making the decision. And that person, as someone with a job, wants to look rational even when they aren't.
This is a pretty big difference. For a B2B marketer, understanding it matters.
각주
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CEB and Google, "From Promotion to Emotion: Connecting B2B Customers to Brands" — Think with Google ↩
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6sense, "2024 Buyer Experience Report" — Business Wire ↩
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Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (2011) — HBR ↩
