Enquiro Survey: How Business to Business (B2B) Purchasers Buy

We've found that when it comes to search, the business to business (B2B) market is largely ignored. That was the reason we did our initial B2B survey back in 2004. While we never expected it to become a seminal work in understanding B2B buying decisions, because of the sheer lack of other research in the area it has come to be regarded as such. Over the past year, we've had a number of people ask us to conduct the site study again so we would have a more recent point of reference in trying to understand how search plays a part in B2B buying decisions. Thanks to the help of supporting partners (see Methodology); we're now happy to share the initial results from the survey with you.
There are some significant differences from the 2004 B2B survey. As we learned more about business to business, we found that it was important to dissect B2B buying decisions in a few different ways. In the survey, we made sure we identified the role that our respondents played in their respective organizational buying decisions. We identified four major roles within an organization that are typical. For the purpose of this survey, we called them the economic buyer, the technical buyer, the user buyer and the coach buyer.
The economic buyer is the person who ultimately makes the buying decisions and signs the check. The technical buyer is a person within an organization who is tasked with ensuring that whatever solution that is purchased needs the technical requirements of the company. For technology purchases this would often be an IT professional. For accounting software you would typically be a controller or financial officer. And for sales relationship management software it would be sales manager. While these people usually don't have final financial approval they are integral to the purchase process as they are the ones that ensure the potential solution is the right match with the organization’s needs and requirements.
The user buyer is the person on the front lines who will actually use the solution or product purchased. It's often this person the first identifies the need it makes the organization aware that they have to explore potential solutions. And, after the purchase is this person who has to ensure that they implemented solution is the right fit for their need.
Finally, there's the coach buyer. Often this is an internal champion who helps move the sales process along and usually has a vested interest in the purchase of the solution.
Another difference from the 2004 B2B survey to this survey was that we carefully determined what phase of the purchase cycle our respondents were in. We divided the purchase process into four phases, awareness, research, negotiation and purchase. We believed that there could be significant differences in the influence of different factors on the purchase process depending on what phase the buyer within. The impact of a vendor website, a trade publication or attending a trade show could be significantly different for an organization that's at the very early phases of awareness as opposed to an organization that was deep in the intricacies of the final negotiation. As much as possible, we wanted to provide a timeline of the purchasing process based both on the role of the individual involved and the type of industry they were in.
In this initial report, we’ll cover off our findings at a high level. We’ll provide quick insight into the significant findings and notable trends that we saw. But, in analyzing the data, we found that there is a lot here to cover in one white paper. For that reason, we decided to release three subsequent white papers that will provide further insight and analysis based on the three primary roles we saw emerge in the survey data. We had significant numbers of respondents in the economic buyer, technical buyer and user buyer categories. We found it would be most useful for the marketer to focus individually on each of these roles and provide a much more comprehensive picture of purchase behavior and how that translates into both online and offline activity. We’ll be releasing these three subsequent white papers over the coming three months.