Do You Understand Your Customers’ B2B Buying Behaviour?

B2B buying behaviourWhen it comes to sales and marketing, there’s nothing more important than understanding the needs, wants, and buying behaviours of the people you want to sell to.

That’s why I was excited last week when I came across the >B2B Buying Behaviour for 2013 created by Software Advice, a web-based company that provides marketing software advice. Based on insights gathered from over 6,000,000 unique website visitors over a three-year period, the report was written with the intention of helping the author “discover when B2B buyers perform research on the web, when they convert on a website and when you can get them on the phone”. For startups focused on getting better sales and marketing, this type of information can be invaluable.

These three key takeaways from the report shine light on how startups can tweak their sales and marketing strategies with a better understanding of B2B buying behaviours.

1. Rise & Shine

Being successful with sales and marketing is often a question of timing. If you’re not top of mind when your prospects are gathering information and making decisions, you lose. As the report highlights, most B2B buyer research at Software Advice tends to take place during the first half of the day, with visits peaking around lunchtime (being 90% higher than average). Because they understand this, Software Advice is able to schedule their sales and marketing activities to coincide with their buyers’ activity levels. The takeaway for startups? Embrace the power of free or nearly free analytics tools and be available when it matters. If that means skipping lunch, do it.

2. Act Fast

Making sure that your website is set up to capture information from converted leads is an essential part of any B2B inbound lead generation effort. Assuming all the pieces are in place, it’s also just as important to nail down the internal processes that should follow acts of conversion – namely, follow-up emails and phone calls. As the report notes, the longer you wait, the worse your results will be. At Software Advice, leads contacted within 5 minutes enjoyed higher than average qualification rates, while leads contacted between a half-hour and an hour after converting had much lower qualification rates. The lesson? Nail down what should happen for every lead that comes in and make sure every employee knows their role in the process from start to finish.

3. Nurture by Night

You can’t always be at work, but that doesn’t mean your content do the heavy lifting for you. For example, the report noted that Software Advice tends to enjoy higher than normal conversion rates (up to 15% higher) between 9:00pm and midnight, suggesting that B2B buyers might spend the last few hours of the day educating themselves or trying to get a jumpstart on tomorrow’s workload. If you can find them, use these valuable nuggets of information to target your ‘off-peak’ marketing, social media, and sales messaging accordingly. A tweet at 11pm might be more valuable than you think.

Plan Ahead

If you’re like most companies, chances are you’ve spent a considerable portion of this past month planning for the year ahead. Particularly as a startup, it’s important to understand when in the year you’re most likely to have success. Being armed with this information will allow you to target what limited resources you have where they’ll make the biggest difference. For example, in the case of Software Advice, B2B buyer activity is highest from January to May because that’s the time of the year when priorities and budgets are set in their industry. On a weekly level, Tuesday through Thursday is the best time for them to reach their buyers.

Thanks to Robert Bellovin, Sofware Advice’s Editorial Coordinator for bringing this report to our attention. The report is full of useful insight that might be applicable to your business, but it’s ultimately more valuable than that. The report serves as a great example of how a mixture of analytics and determination can help startups optimize their scarce resources and lead to more effective B2B inside sales and marketing.

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Do You Understand Your Customers’ B2B Buying Behaviour?