Docmation: B2B Buyer Behavior Explained: Online, Offline, or Omni-channel

Any B2B organization that wants to be successful in the long run must amend its business architecture by putting buyer behavior at the center. Most successful B2B players realize the importance of learning their customers’ buying patterns at an early stage.

To understand buying behavior, marketers need to understand how buyers make decisions. Buying behaviors that drive the customer’s decision-making journey are extremely complicated and may be impossible at times for mediocre marketers to completely grasp.

Getting to Know Your Buyer is one of the keys to running a prolific B2B enterprise as it helps analyze any customer’s needs with precision. It can help in more than one way by feeding each customer with only those products and services that matter to them.

How can it be done?

There are primarily 3 channels that are responsible for running a business: Online, offline, and omnichannel. Categorizing buyers is the first step but to get deeper into the psyche of buyers, careful analysis of buying patterns and behaviors, the KPIs and a lot more.

Let’s understand buying patterns and behaviors in detail.

Online Buyers

After its inception, ecommerce has remarkably changed the ways of doing business. Buyers are more inclined towards an online approach. However, even after online being the most preferred choice, the actual sale sometimes does not satisfy business-owners.

It could be due to the lack of addressing issues such as complex reordering, difficulty in placing orders, laid backorder delivery, or inefficient order tracking.

Offline Buyers

Buyers belonging to this category have either tried purchasing online earlier but left unsatisfied, or they are yet to try ecommerce.

While some like to research and try a product or service before making a purchase, offline buyers are termed as traditional in nature as they like to visit a store, take assistance from sales representatives and then purchase the product/service.

Omnichannel Buyers

An omnichannel strategy enables live interaction and allows customers to purchase anywhere at any time, creating a seamless shopping experience that breaks down the barriers between sellers and buyers.

A large number of customers have started using multiple channels during their shopping journey.

For example, an omnichannel buyer might look for a product or service using a smartphone or a desktop computer, ask for a quote or read customer reviews, and then finally make the buying decision.

Key Stats

75% of B2B product purchases are already made online, but buyers want to make even more purchases online.
47% of buyers conduct web searches to look for information during the B2B buying process.
33% of B2B buyers are persuaded to choose a vendor based on the ability to place, pay for, track, and return orders online.