There have been countless articles written about how the B2B buying journey has become much more complex as users do extensive research across multiple channels prior to engaging with a company. The common suggestion in these articles is that marketers have to spend more time developing their top-of-the-funnel tactics to better engage the prospect in the research phase. While this is certainly true an even more important takeaway is the need to successfully identify actual active buyers. Based on our experience, because active buyers convert at a much higher rate, it can be worth spending 30X more in advertising and resources on an active buyer in your ICP than a prospect who is in an unknown phase.
In ‘Mapping the Market Opportunity’, we defined the active buyer as follows:
An active buyer is someone within your ICP that has initiated the buying process. This means they are at least aware that your product or product category exists and show clear signs of starting down the purchase consideration and/or purchase intent path. It’s important to keep in mind that, at any given moment, it is likely that less than 3% of your ICP can be called an active buyer.
So how do you identify active buyers?
- Paid search – The key to finding active buyers via paid search is to use keyword modifiers to separate the users who are just browsing vs those ready to buy. Modify industry keyword phrases with keywords like software, solution, reviews, pricing etc…. Conduct a similar exercise with competitive keywords making looking for users who are looking for a competitor name plus pricing, reviews and comparison against other solutions.
- Comparison sites like Capterra, G2 and others – Comparison sites have consistently been a top performer for driving deals among all paid channels because they attract active buyers who are conducting research.
- Your website – Many marketing automation platforms give you visibility into companies that have visited your website, but what you really want to know is who visited your pricing page, your request for a demo page or more specific feature pages. The visitors to those pages will likely be your active buyers.
- Forums/Quora/Reddit – Though a little more challenging and labor-intensive there can be active discussions on these sites among users considering a solution. It is not recommended to engage in these discussions trying to sell your product, but you can contribute with helpful general advice.
- Surveys – A simple way to find users who are in the active buying stage is to conduct a survey of your existing prospects or using a panel from a survey tool.
- Sales intelligence tools – Sales intelligence companies offer buying alerts for prospects they have identified as having entered the buying process via the sales intelligence software’s data collection process. While these alerts can have value, often the information is out of date and you end up in a conversation with someone who has recently purchased a competing product.
- Intent data – There are a number of solutions that offer web intent data to help you determine prospects that may be in the active buying phase based upon the websites they have visited. While this data is generally more timely than the sales intelligence tools alerts, the data can also be imprecise because of the complexity in truly understanding who is an active buyer in an automated fashion.
TL;DR
The B2B buying process is increasingly complex which means it is more important than ever to identify the prospects that are active buyers. While there is no perfect solution to finding active buyers, companies do need to start establishing tactics for identifying active buyers in order to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing efforts.
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