B2B Wake Up Call: How to Survive the Demanding Millennial Buyer

Welcome to of B2B No Bull! Hosts Liz Brohan, Mary Olivieri, and Mark Brohan are joined by Justin Racine - Principal, Unified Commerce Strategy at Perficient—for a dynamic conversation about how to adapt marketing to attract and retain the Millinnium buyer. Justin explains how his interest in customer experiences started at a young age working at that golf course where he learned a whole bunch about customer experience. It taught him what consumers in general look for and what they want and different personas and behaviors and actions. Justin describes the roots of learning about customers: It’s rooted in consumer psychology and the behaviors that drive people to make decisions and, and why things like cognitive dissonance are what marketers use to create opportunities for folks to buy. One of his examples from the medical product space: create moments of interaction that are empathetic but also useful to that consumer. How has that evolved? You need to truly understand what your consumers and customers want at their core, and then find ways to leverage digital technologies and solutions to deliver on them. How would you describe your focus? Build experiences that surprise and delight consumers based on their needs, but also drive revenue. What is the main purpose? To convert in a way that aligns to who consumers are, and that really is what drives people to come back for repeat purchases. Mark describes a sea change in B2B purchasing: 70% of all B2B buyers that are driven by millennials are not happy with the experience they get on a B2B website. Justin clarifies purchasing data: You know, a B2B buyer likely buys under an account number. They probably purchase through POS, they may not order with credit cards, but have you captured other demographic information around that buyer? Do you know what age group that they're in? Do you know what previous products they've purchased? You know what channel they shop in? Do they shop online or through the app or through customer service? Justin describes another starting point for data collection: A B2B brand should start to collect that data, and start to understand the average age of a person if they can, and start to pull all that information in. Because while a lot of B2B buyers want similar things, each business-to-business brand is unique and different. There are different pricing formulas, there's different ordering workflows, there's different order approvals, collaborative buying environments, all these things come into play. Digging pretty deep on demographic data is needed. Can you speak a little bit to the buyer's journey? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is really understanding each B2B use case. :Justin give another medical products example: a lot of organizations are going to buy vinyl gloves or buy hand sanitizer on a week in, week out basis that doesn't necessarily need a lot of high touch from a sales person or a lot of personalization. It's really just. Rinse and repeat orders. Now in the future world, a personal shopping assistant agnostically, can order that for someone without them having to log into the website. Justin explains how to align with the customer journey. The customer journey is when you pull in all the different touch points and the behavioristic elements that a customer is telling you about including what they're interested in. Justin provides an example: Let's say a hospital needs to order 50 new hospital beds, um, they might mention to their salles rep that in three months we're going to need to put out a bid for 50 hospital beds, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin describes how to leverage that information: That sales rep should then take that information and enter it into the CRM that they have. And in the world of connected unified commerce that CRM should now guide future experiences. When Joe authenticates on that B2B portal to start showing him banners on hospital beds. And emails should have similar product content along with capturing all of his behaviors that he has on that site, on that portal. This should be going back to the sales rep so he can see what products he's looking at, what brand he might have an affinity towards, and then that sales rep can help guide them on the journey that, that that person has in an omnichannel way. What are B2B marketers doing wrong right now? I think a lot of B2B organizations don't dig in super deep on consumer behavior. They're focused on other elements. Also I think a lot of B2B organizations have elements or experience design that are legacy and they're not updated. Justin speaks to the need to update sites and systems. Justin mentions technology to consider: Using things like live chat agents or personal shopping agents and the world of personalization. This will facilitate a lot of upsell and cross sells. What else should marketers focus on? Affinity products that make the most sense. I'd say those are the biggest areas I see ...