How B2B Marketers Can Overcome Buyer Fears

Business buying decisions are fraught with risk, and that’s partly because there are lots of people contributing to the buying – some known to the marketer but most unknown. New research from LinkedIn and Bain & Company uncovers how different buyers deal with the fear of screwing up and where brand activity can help intervene and improve your outcome.

Why buyer fear matters

Buyer fear matters because it is, according to new research presented at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the reason why the market leaders in B2B sectors tend to enjoy such a big advantage over their smaller rivals, and puts evidence behind the truism that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

It does this by looking at two groups of B2B buyers – though given that the average buying coalition in B2B is 23 people, there are plausibly more. The target buyers are those who propose the solution; they are subject matter experts and they tend to be the target of marketing efforts from the mid-funnel down.

Then there are hidden buyers: financial, legal, or technical experts whose say in buying decisions is critical but who operate according to a different set of objectives. For these buyers, the research suggests, brand building is even more critical in de-risking a business-buying decision.

Effectively, much of the challenge of B2B marketing is building the permission to agree.

The research

Jamie Cleghorn, senior partner at Bain & Company, and Minjae Ormes, LinkedIn’s VP of marketing, brand and consumer, presented the findings at a session on the creative impact stream at Cannes Lions. The survey sample looked at 515 respondents from the US and Western Europe, over half of which were senior leaders in largely enterprise-level companies. These respondents were split, then, by whether they were target or hidden buyers.

What target buyers want: Target buyers care most about advanced features, transformational potential, and innovation, explains Cleghorn.

What hidden buyers want: This group wants reliable brands that bring them peace of mind and are trusted by peers – the safe choice.

The crux

• Overwhelmingly, the best-known brands at the outset tend to win in 81% of cases; in just 4% of cases do brands only known by the target buyer group end up making the deal.
• However, being known by the target buyer doesn’t hurt either: when faced with similar solutions at similar prices, both groups reject less well-known brands, will pay more for well-known solutions, and are more likely to defend known brands.

But there is a difference:

• Hidden buyers are 1.27x more likely to buy when they know a vendor on day one.
• They are 1.31x more likely to reject a vendor for being unknown.
• They are 1.7x more likely to reject a vendor that was not well known to the group.

What this means for B2B brands

• If you’re a big brand, Cleghorn says, the strategy is pretty simple – “keep spending on it”.
• Challengers, meanwhile, need to invest in manufacturing permission to agree, he explains, building the brand’s profile and the perception of safety and reliability long before the buying process.

 Credit: SPT in Cannes, WARC