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Successful selling assumes a deep understanding of your buyer, your market and your competition. A recent study offers some key insights on the characteristics of what is increasingly the most important category of B2B buyer and decision maker: Millennials.
Though often painted with broad strokes as a job-hopping, Snapchatting plague on the workplace, millennials are, in fact, a practical bunch. They share the Get it Done attitude of the most pragmatic-ist Baby Boomers; they’re just getting it done on their phones. They are now the largest generational representation in the North American workplace. One-third of survey respondents report being the primary buyer in their department. They are making big decisions. Buying decisions. Decisions that impact you.
The study from Sacunas digs deep on the behaviours and preferences of millennials who are involved in B2B buying decisions: in a survey of almost 2,000 millennial B2B buyers in the US, it finds, to no one’s surprise, that the number one preferred content format is video. Demo videos are by far the favourite way to gather product knowledge, followed by case studies and white papers. Webinars and infographics rank lower on the list. This makes sense given time spent on mobile devices. 82% of respondents said that mobile devices are important when researching new products. A three-minute video is easily consumed during a coffee break. A white paper can be downloaded and read in an Uber on the way to a meeting. Webinars demand too much time and infographics tend to be more form and less function.
The same study reveals that millennial B2B buyers want the intel direct and to the point. That means product knowledge up front. One respondents notes that “You can watch a demo online with your team and make an immediate decision. I want to see it work before I talk to the sales people.” Let that sink in. That’s the power of content. What you put online to represent your product or service might be your only chance to convince this buyer to take a personal meeting. The best sales rep and the strongest pitch mean nothing if you don’t get in the door. Your content must be educational, authentic and very, very clear with your value proposition.
So, we know that millennial B2B buyers embrace the flexibility of mobile content; we know they get quite far along the buyer path before speaking to your accounts pros and we know that they are on the same path with your competitors. Make it easy for them to chose you. Remove the barriers. Burying gated content behind clicks and forms will not do you any favours. Good news, too, if your rivals are listening, because it gives you a free ticket to what would previously have been put of reach or at least require a lot of digging. Instead, it’s all right there.
You know what they want and how they want it; you know what the competition is putting up against you in this crucial evaluate and compare stage of the sell. Make it easy for your B2B millennial buyers. Tell them exactly how your product will help them do their jobs better; how it will make it easier to succeed and how it will free up some precious resources (time) to do the many other things they are responsible for. And—no pulling punches—tell them precisely how and why you will do all of this better than your competitors.
The best part of it is that you can replicate the buyer journey for each of your competitors. There is no secret sauce or magic machine hiding behind the curtain. It’s simply a matter of collecting the information and analyzing the experience your competitor offers. Combine that with your sales data and you’ve got an accurate idea of who you’re up against, what they do well and where you’re besting them. It’s your competitive roadmap. And you’ve likely already got everything in place to build it.
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