Who are your buyers?
And are you catering to their preferences?
Increasingly, your buyers are millennial—and they have completely different buying expectations than previous generations, says Kenda Macdonald.
Get Kenda’s insights into your younger buyer’s purchasing habits in this clip from B2B Forum 2024, or read the transcript below.
And for more insights into the changing marketplace, check out the dozens of session highlights on the B2B Forum blog. B2B Forum returns to Boston this November. If you’d like to join the career-boosting fun, B2B Forum 2025 tickets are available online now.
The tech that we are utilizing in order to personalize is here to stay.
It’s not going away, but we’re not leveraging it appropriately, if that is our challenge.
And we’re spending money on the wrong things, if budgeting is part of our challenge.
I wanted to take a little look at the marketing technology landscape across the last 15 years or so.
So this is some fantastic work done by Scott Brinker. He always puts this together, ChiefMarTech. Every year, he shows us what the marketing technology landscape looks like.
So the MarTech landscape in 2011—you can actually see some of those logos—not many of those companies exist anymore, but it’s a long time ago. But they’re all stable and you can see them there.
Fast forward three years and the landscape has somewhat exploded. Look at all those different categories that exist as a result.
Go ahead another four years, you can’t see the logos anymore. Starting to look like one of those colorblindness tests at this point in time. You can make out a couple of little individual logos in there.
Then go ahead to 2020. This is just before we’ve really had an explosion happen.
And then we jump ahead. So at this point there were 8,000 tools.
We jump ahead two years and we had 10,000 tools, and now you can’t see the individual logos anymore.
Then you have a look at 2023. It’s all just getting tiny and smaller.
And then, 2024. And it’s like one of those things that you used to look at and then unfocus your eyes and then you see a picture come up. I think when you’re unfocus your eyes and the picture that comes up is this: ☹️
Because it’s a real bad time, not just for us as people who are supposed to be implementing these tools, but also for our end users who are trying to buy stuff from us and we’re just throwing tools and technology at them.
So is it really our fault that we’ve made such a mess?
Or is it—if we want to put our tinfoil hats on—is it the marketing technology companies who are creating lots of cool tools for us to leverage and use and telling us we need to do that?
Not really.
We’ve made a bit of a necessary mess because of the fact that consumers want this and consumers want personalization and they’re driving for personalization and buyer behavior and the way that we go about doing things, the way that we classify ourselves, has all completely changed.
Because technology has enabled us to be more like who we actually are, which is kind of nice in a way, but it’s also a mess for us when we’re trying to do things appropriately.
So that’s why I say we’re in “personalization hell” a little bit.
And what we’re going to do today is, we’re going to go for a little romp through Dante’s Inferno, the Nine Circles of Hell, when it comes to personalization. It’s what we’re going to take a look at today and how AI can help with that.
And now the big challenge with this is, you guys are all going to put on your feedback forms—and I know you’re going to do it—”she didn’t tell us exactly what tools to use!”
And I bloody well can’t, Okay?
If I could be like, “yes, you use this one tool,” I would’ve put it on Twitter and I wouldn’t have bothered coming to stand here. We wouldn’t need to be having this conversation.
I cannot tell you which tool to use if I don’t know what your tech stack is, if I don’t know what your objectives are, if I don’t know what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to achieve and what your audience is trying to do and achieve. I can’t do that. If I don’t know what your challenges are and where you’re suffering as a business right now.
I can’t do any of that!
I’d be doing a very, very bad job if I stood here and was like, “these are the five tools you can use,” when we know damn well there are over 10,000 tools in the marketplace, becauseI’ve just shown you.
So I can’t do that for you. So I’m caveating that.
What I can do is, I can give you some of the areas in which I know businesses are struggling and having challenges and some of the ways that you can look about fixing them.
I can give you the strategy to pare down those 10,000 things, to actually focus on things appropriately.
So if I see on any of your feedback forms anything about, “she didn’t tell me which tools to use,” I’m going to hunt you down!
I won’t. I don’t actually get to see any of them. So I can’t do that for you guys. Sorry, I can’t stalk you.
So effectively, I want to just quantify a little bit.
When I say buyers have changed, I really mean it. And I don’t just mean by behavior. I mean buyers themselves.
So we all like to think that certain people are making decisions in businesses.
Not the case.
So this is from a combination of McKinsey Corporation, Forrester, and some Gardner research, the different stats you’re going to see over the next few slides.
Millennials and Gen Z now constitute over 64% of business buyers. So that’s a significant shift in who is buying.
And we all know that we like to complain about millennials, especially us millennials, and how different and weird we are. And as a result, that makes a significant impact on the way that we go about buying.
Millennials, and Gen Z specifically, are very digitally savvy and they prefer self-service.
They do not want to talk to you. And for the love of God, please don’t phone us. Please.
We’re not going to give you a real telephone number. And we’re going to be very conscious about the information that we’re giving you online.
We also engage in a lot more buying activities than the older generations do.
So what I mean by that is, the fact that we are interacting online, we display a lot of native behavior online. We are very comfortable online, which means we showcase who we are online and we put a lot more effort into how we interact and how we research things.
Around 90% of millennials and Gen Z will cite dissatisfaction in the sales process, compared to 71% of older buyers.
Now everyone looks at that and goes, “wow, millennials, you’re so full of shit.” It’s true. It’s very true.
But on top of that, 71% is still really high. That’s still not a low number.
That’s still the majority of buyers that are unhappy with the way that we are selling to them.
So if we just let that sink in for a little bit and then think about the fact that everybody else, the majority of our business buyers, are now even more unhappy with the process, we’ve got a problem.
But then, the behavior that they’re displaying has changed as well. It’s not just who we are, it’s how we display the behavior.
So we have a massive preference for what we feel is independently gathered information.
We like to gather information from experts, and we like to pull it together from lots of different resources, and we like to see the citations for them.
We don’t take things at surface value anymore, which means we go a lot deeper.
We click through to a lot more links. There’s a lot more interaction that we have.
And only 17% of the time that millennials and Gen Z in the buying process is actually spent meeting suppliers.
And that is not a preference.
So if we think about the fact that a lot of sales efforts and a lot of sales funnels are really, really bottom heavy.
When we think about demand generation, we want to get in a room, we want to get on the phone, we want to talk to somebody.
It’s a very, very limited amount of time.
And by the time you get to that point, they’ve already made a decision.
So the rest of that time, they’re interacting online.
A full 27%, nearly a third of the time that they’re in the buying process, is spent researching and validating the decisions they’re making and the things that they have been told.
So information and their interactions are really, really important in tracking all of that.
And 67% of them will opt away from any in-person interactions. They will spend more money to work with companies where they don’t have to talk to people.
So that should really make us think about how we are doing our sales processes, and this is where AI should be helping us leverage our time.
Published Mar 14, 2025
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