2. Building B2B Customer Insight
As you learned in your introductory marketing course, strong marketing begins with strong insights about customers, so that you can align your marketing activities with the needs and decision-making processes that drive customer behavior. The same is true for professional selling. Professional salespeople approach their interactions with customers from the buyer’s perspective, using their understanding of the buyer’s journey to position themselves as a helpful guide along the way.
In this chapter, we focus on conceptual tools for building better working hypotheses about how people in organizations make purchase decisions. While these could be any type of buying organization, from household to business to government, our focus will be on businesses, otherwise referred to as B2B customers.
In general, there are more– and more varied— influences on B2B buying decisions, largely because they are nearly always group decisions. We must think beyond buyers to buying centers. There are several useful frameworks from research and practice that incorporate these additional influences. We will integrate these frameworks into a definition of the buying center, and a four-stage general model for the journey a buying center takes together when making a B2B buying decision. We will use these models to build testable hypotheses about how buying decisions might happen in different situations, and then use these hypotheses to predict buying roles and plan our interactions with B2B customers.
Learning Objectives
| By the end of this chapter you should be able to… | (covered in these activities) |
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| A. Explain the similarities and differences between B2C and B2B markets. | 2.1 | ||||||
| B. Identify additional influences on and challenges to B2B buying behavior. | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.5 | ||||
| C. Explain a four-stage general model of the B2B buying journey and how it relates to other models from research and practice. | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | |||
| D. Explain how the phases vary across the three major types of B2B buying situations. | 2.1 | 2.6 | |||||
| E. Define a buying center and the typical buying roles in a buying center. | 2.1 | 2.7 | |||||
| F. Build initial hypotheses about sources of formal and informal influence in a buying center | 2.2 | 2.7 | |||||
| G. Use these hypotheses to predict potential buying center roles and influence at different points in the B2B buying journey | 2.7 | ||||||
Independent Learning Activities
- 2.1 Reading: Kotler & Armstrong, Business Markets and Business Buyer Behavior
- 2.2 Video Lecture: “Building Insight into Customer Decision-Making”
- 2.3 Reading: Kotler & Armstrong, Buyer Decision Processes
- 2.4 Video: Hubspot Academy, Why Inbound Sales (Understanding the Buyer’s Journey)
- 2.5 Reading: Adamson et al, The Challenger Customer, Chapter 1 (excerpts)
- 2.6 Video Lecture: “Modeling the B2B Buying Journey”
- 2.7 Video Lecture: “Analyzing the B2B Buying Center”