Report: 88% of B2B Buyers Prefer to Meet with Marketers During the Buying Process

Although B2B marketers have a wide range of ways to reach out to their target audiences, new research suggests that B2B buyers are still interested in phone calls and virtual appointments.

This is according to new research from TimeTrade, published in the “What Buyers Want: The State of the B2B Buyer Experience” report. On average, 88 percent of B2B buyers believe it is important to have live meetings or appointments with a company they may do business with. Furthermore, buyers also claim that their relationship with a company improves when they have the option to schedule in-person or virtual meetings to ease the buying process.

B2B marketers are not always delivering on this front. About half (51 percent) of buyers state that it is often “very difficult” or “somewhat difficult” to schedule time to speak with a sales or customer service representative when making a purchase. That being said, 95 percent of B2B buyers say that they prefer to work with companies that make it easy to meet with them.

“Customer Obsessed” Marketers See More Success

Previous research suggests that marketers who spend most of their time “obsessing” over their customers are more likely to see success.

Forrester Consulting and Adobe published the “Email Marketing Can Launch Customer Obsession” report and found that 45 percent of marketers are at least “customer aware,” while 12 percent are “customer obsessed.”

“In addition to greater revenue, more customer-obsessed firms report higher customer satisfaction scores, differentiate from competitors, innovate, and accelerate with digital than respondents who are committed, aware or naive,” wrote the authors of the report.

Nearly 91 percent of “customer obsessed” marketers said that they use their email marketing program as a strategic asset for innovation. About 50 percent use email to test and learn what products or promotions customers like the most.