"57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier."
Gosh. That seems like a lot. Anyone going higher?
I like it. Do I hear 73?
. . . 90?
It's apparent that we're edging toward 100%, at which point, the venerable salesperson will quietly slink from corporate org charts, tail tucked. An anachronism, squeezed out of a job, along with coopers, wheelwrights, and telephone operators. Press delete. Good. That wasn't very messy. Now, where were we? Oh yes - generating revenue. Please, let's continue.
These predictions would not perpetuate without idealizations of B2B buyers as intellectual superheroes - infallibly rational, knowledgeable, no-nonsense, process-oriented decision makers. Numbers-driven C-Somethings who are never, ever persuaded unless there's a strong business case. The right business case. Behold, surviving salespeople, The Buyer's Journey Workflow! Understand it. Accept it. Hold it close, for it is sacred.
A fantasy that Hans Christian Andersen could have spun into a fairy tale, The Paved Pathway to Purchasing Perfection. On PowerPoint, the buyer's journey always progresses left-to-right, or top-to-bottom. Nested colorful arrows represent the steps, each one distinct, separate, and clearly labeled. Some journeys have three steps: awareness-consideration-purchase. Some have seven. There are other versions, too. I like the one with seven.
For me, a better, albeit darker, title for the buyer's journey would be Lost in the Woods. I haven't published my flowchart, but I offer the Tokyo subway map as a useful approximation. A twisted convolution of overlapping lines pointing in every direction. Some going off the page, others coming back on. I've carefully labeled each node: Fits and starts, Squabbles, Indecision, Indifference, Infighting, Infatuation, Inaction, Firm Commitment, More indecision, Hidden agendas, Misunderstanding, Reconsideration. At the terminus of this mess - assuming a terminus exists - is a box labeled Just do Something. So, if you're into mapping out buying steps, go ahead. Pick out some milestone events and plug them into a schema. Just remember that they are often imaginary, and they rarely happen in the order rendered.
If you subscribe to a less-linear, more imperfect notion of the buyer's journey, then it seems a stretch to assign a percentage to how much can be complete before engaging with sales. Or the reciprocal, how much of the sales process is complete before engaging with a buyer. Complete and engaging are themselves imprecise terms, subject to rancorous debate in Philosophy 101. I won't even go there. So when I read precise-sounding predictions like 73%, I start to wonder. Not 72%? Not 74? A rounder, friendlier number, perhaps? Whoa, buddy! Time out! I'm more comfortable with honest vagueness like pretty much all, or darn near every bit.
To me, asserting such hair-splitting numbers to processes as poorly defined and understood as selling or purchasing a complex B2B solution is the statistical equivalent of dropping a raw egg on the floor, then, after using only a fork, boasting to the world that you successfully collected very bit of what splattered.
When I dug into the provenance of the 73% prediction for seller engagement, this story took an interesting and quite unexpected detour. Turns out, in business development, 73% is a wildly popular finding. For example, I learned that,
73% of all CEOs feel that their CMO lacks credibility with regard to generating revenue.
73% of IT executives are influenced by social networks in decision making.
73% of [b2b customers] have engaged with a vendor on a social network.
73% of B2B marketers are producing more #content than they did a year ago.
73% of B2B organizations have a person dedicated to overseeing content marketing strategy.
73% of sales enablement teams share best practices for sales techniques and tactics.
73% of companies have no process for requalifying leads.
73% of marketing executives use spreadsheets for analytics.
73% of companies currently use, or plan to use, buyer personas.
73% of B2B marketers are not even measuring mobile traffic by device.
73% of B2B marketers use video as a content marketing tactic.
This, just a partial list, culled from my new-found collection. Coincidence? As I read through these findings, it's hard not to suspect a hidden purpose for this alleged precision. A revenue purpose. After all, in a persuasive argument, 73% has more gravitas than its homelier cousin, around ¾. 73% connotes that the provider has paid rigorous attention to detail, and has the chops to grant statistical granularity. I'd use it with my teenaged son regarding how we interact when I ask him to clean his room. "Over the past three months when I made this request, you acted sullen 73% of the time." He might just reply, "You know, Dad, no need to fact-check. You must be right. Again."
In this age of lauding data analytics, performance and productivity measurements, and statistical exactitude, no one wants to say, "A whole bunch of the time it seems like . . ." - at least not among peers. But often, I think vagueness is more reasonable and appropriate. Maybe, even more credible. In the meantime, if anyone asks me to speculate on what percentage of CMO's will leave their jobs for better pay in the year 2020, I know what number I'm using. And I'm guessing there's a 73% probability I'll be correct.
Oh - one final note that I promise to keep brief: The SiriusDecisions prediction that by 2020, 73% of the B2B sales process will be complete before a sales person is ever engaged? I never did find the detail that became the genesis of this article. If anyone knows of a study that was conducted, please send me an email.