Recent and abrupt shifts in buying behavior might look like challenges facing your sales and marketing leaders, but they can actually become opportunities for business growth. We learned from our 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect report that virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve part or all of their buying journey, and a large portion check review sites as their first step after identifying a need. 

In addition to millennial and Gen Z’s B2C buying preferences transferring over to the B2B world, organizations are seeing the need to become smarter and savvier than ever, with tighter budgets and higher demands.

However, and even with an impending recession hitting deadlines, data collected on this new-age buyer is good news for technology vendors. It turns out that by keeping these new buying preferences in mind, tech businesses can not only stay afloat during the recession, but can also find new ways to thrive.

To become recession-proof, a B2B GTM strategy has to be shaped around today’s buying habits. Relying on outdated tactics, such as buying large volumes of leads and not focusing on quality, is much more likely to fail. Not to mention the fact the leads are less likely to be people in-market who convert quickly and are more likely to be contacts that marketing teams will have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money nurturing. B2B marketing needs to be much less about the “numbers game” and much more about meeting buyers where they are in their journey. Reaching and engaging downstream buyers brings better-quality accounts into the sales cycle. Collecting a high lead volume is inefficient, especially because many of these top-of-funnel buyers won’t even convert into pipeline.

There are a few powerful ways to ensure you’re positioning your brand in a way that today’s buyers want:

Discoverability

Your brand needs to be discoverable—both via your website and on third-party resources about your products. Vendors can boost discoverability by working on SEO for their websites as well as investing in third-parties like review sites, forums, and/or communities. Because so many tech buyers research online, often starting with a Google search, it’s important to make sure that your brand is at the top of their search engine results page (SERP). It‘s also important to make your pricing and other tangible product information like customer reviews readily available. Eight out of ten buyers want to find pricing information on their own.

TrustRadius’ TrustQuotes for Web widget syncs your user reviews straight to your website. The QuoteFinder chrome extension also allows you to pull user reviews, sort them by product or topic, and place them within emails and other marketing materials very easily. All content syndication from TrustQuotes for Web gets indexed by Google, meaning the keyword-rich content helps your site rank for more keywords and therefore SERP. Not only do our customers see an increase in engagement because of these interactive elements, but their SEO metrics also see a positive impact. 

Matillion, a cloud-native data transformation solution, used TrustQuotes for Web, our review syndication widget, on their prominent landing pages and, through paid ads, saw a 70% increase in conversion and a 30% decrease in cost-per-lead. “Having quotes on our pages … we’ve seen nearly triple the conversion rates on those pages,” said Sonya Hansen, Director of Demand Generation at Matillion.

Elevate the voice of the customer (VoC)

The truth is, tech buyers don’t trust the claims of your marketing and sales people anymore. This is why you need social proof within your marketing materials: quotes, case studies, and anecdotal stories.

Because of this shift towards VoC as the primary source of truth, vendor reps need to play a different role in the sales cycle to be successful. Rather than serving as the primary gatekeepers of basic information, sales representatives need to play a more consultative role while validating their claims with social proof. After all, buyers are already collecting the stats on your product from third-party sites, so it’s the job of the vendor reps to support a buyer’s decision-making process with expert knowledge and help them make sense of all the third-party information they’ve gathered.

TrustRadius enables vendors to transform the reviews on our site into a variety of powerful resources. With our TrustRadius for Vendors portal, you can take the detailed user reviews from our site and turn them into powerful social proof. A few of these features include:

• TrustRadius QuoteFinder Chrome extension allows you to search relevant quotable moments by keyword or topic and use them in customer touch points or marketing channels
• TrustRadius TrustQuotes for Web allows for content syndication of dynamic customer quotes to important landing pages on your website
• Premium licensed content, such as battle cards, pdfs, and one-pagers, promote your awards, badges, and customer quotes for use in ads or landing pages

Downstream intent data 

Downstream intent data enables vendors to find and convert buyers when they’re closest to a purchase. Different from other intent data, downstream intent data puts in-market buyers on your radar, enabling you to distribute buyer-preferred resources, such as social proof, to an audience that’s ready to receive them. 

Downstream intent is second-party intent data. It is a great way for buyers to respond to the upcoming cookieless future. Rather than relying on data collected by third-party cookies (which will soon be obsolete), your organization can find buyers who are already researching your products, your competitor’s products, and your product categories.

TrustRadius downstream intent data surfaces in-market buyers who are actively evaluating both you and your competitors on TrustRadius. Access to TrustRadius buyers means access to exclusive mid-market and enterprise buyers who value in-depth reviews as part of their decision-making process. Up to 80% of the TrustRadius audience doesn’t visit other review sites, so marketers have an opportunity to reach a large population of their in-market buyers. 

TrustRadius provides three different types of downstream intent data: 

• Product intent data – to see accounts researching your product
• Category intent data – to find new accounts researching your competitors’ products
• Comparison intent data – to position against your competitors or target accounts for competitive take-out campaigns

In addition, we integrate this powerful, downstream intent data with ABM platforms (6sense and Demandbase), LinkedIn, and CRMs (Salesforce), in order to seamlessly activate data.

TrustRadius is the only second-party intent data provider fully integrated with 6sense.

Learn more about TrustRadius

TrustRadius mends the trust gap between technology buyers and providers. By delivering the most credible research and review platform for software across industries, TrustRadius helps decision-makers confidently choose technology with vetted, peer-based guidance. Providers are empowered to tell their unique story, engage high-intent buyers, improve conversion, and gain customer insights. More than 12 million annual visitors generate and use high-quality content like verified reviews, data, and ratings on TrustRadius.com.

We are in the age of the self-serve buyer with a looming recession on its way. Sales and marketing leaders will need to adapt by aligning their GTM strategy with today’s buying preferences. Want to read more about today’s buyers? Check out our recent 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect report.