Gartner: Two-thirds of B2B buyers prefer rep-free purchasing

These people will create and publish content for accounts. If you’re just starting with ABM, Wingrove and Davidson both told me the best way to do it is to create a small task force with one marketer and one salesperson. Besides marketing and sales, don’t forget to choose other internal key players — such as customer success reps — who should be aware of and aligned with your ABM strategy. To create a custom buying experience, a customer must have a seamless transition from becoming a lead through the final sale. Having these conversations beforehand will make it easier for your business to create consistent experiences for accounts. Consider following these steps to create an effective account-based marketing strategy.

Addressing concerns early, such as demonstrating clear ROI and tailoring your approach, is key. B2B buyers want genuine solutions, so it’s essential to build trust. Buyers love real results, as they help them see how solutions work.

Manage complex buying groups with Apollo's deal management tools. SDRs must qualify not just accounts but entire buying committees, identifying stakeholders, understanding their priorities, and mapping decision criteria. Companies that deliver seamless experiences gain competitive advantage through higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and B2b buying experience stronger customer retention.

CFOs have the final say in 79% of IT/software purchases, while legal teams block or slow decisions in 61% of cases

Marketers can support this stage with executive-level content, ROI calculators, and business case templates that help champions sell internally. This is the stage where SEO and organic content play an outsized role – buyers searching for information about a problem, not yet a solution. Their research, based on thousands of B2B purchase decisions, breaks the journey into six distinct stages and provides some of the most actionable data available on how modern buyers actually behave. Gartner’s framework is the most cited model for understanding this process. With real-time deal insights and AI agents, sales reps can get timely nudges to engage certain accounts and accelerate lead response.

• It’s no longer just about having the best product; it’s about delivering the best buying journey.
• Implementing SEO can be the perfect growth accelerator, as organic search sees 37% faster growth in marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) than relying solely on paid ads.
• The bulk of their time is spent researching independently online.
• At this stage, the B2B buying committee is ready to choose and wants to make sure they can confidently make the final call.

Act faster on business insights

How does your company decide what a high-value account is? Here are the key parts of an account-based marketing framework. “Sales and marketing need to work really closely together to figure out what is important to that customer to offer them,” he said. He said custom offers give prospects a reason to take meetings or engage in conversation. Well, we just reviewed the definition of account-based marketing — as you learned, ABM is a highly targeted strategy.

How to speed up the B2B purchase process

A single company may operate as a wholesaler, manufacturer, and direct seller, or sell through both their own ecommerce site and third-party marketplaces. This model is thriving online as more wholesalers replace spreadsheets and email orders with streamlined buyer portals. Learn how and why companies are choosing to move the corporate buying experience online. More marketers are using AI to create content.

This stage is all about education and validation. At the Consideration stage, the buyer knows what kind of solution they need. They're not looking for you yet, but they are looking to define the problem and understand what’s possible. The Awareness stage begins when something triggers your buyer to recognize a problem or opportunity. To understand how to sell better, you need to think like your buyer. AI helps buyers move faster, analyze more options, and customize their research.

The B2B buyer journey is evolving rapidly as it becomes more digitized, less predictable and more complex. See why competitors are outranking you and take back your market position with actionable insights. Prioritize ready-to-buy prospects actively looking for your solution. It drastically opens the prospecting door for our company.

Keeps marketing and sales aligned.

A modern B2B ecommerce platform does more than take orders online. Today, ARCA runs leaner and faster, with a B2B site that supports scale, simplifies ordering, and gives their team more time to focus on customers — not maintenance. Today, customers can self-serve online while sales reps focus on building stronger relationships. Slow updates, platform complexity, and rising costs made it hard to keep up with B2B buyer expectations.

Shortening cycles requires removing friction at every stage. Conduct deep discovery to understand business challenges, current workflows, success metrics, and stakeholder priorities. High-ticket B2B sales require specialized techniques to navigate these complexities. They evaluate vendors across functional fit, financial risk, implementation complexity, and vendor stability. B2B sales is the commercial process of selling products, services, or solutions to other businesses.

All the features you need to create custom self-serve storefronts, automate operations across brands and sites, and let buyers order and track their accounts online. This generational shift in technology is reshaping how B2B purchases are made, pushing businesses to adapt and innovate faster than ever. This suggests that tools can help uncover insights faster and help prospects make smarter decisions. B2B marketers have the opportunity today to develop robust digital experiences that make it easy for prospects to progress through each stage of the customer journey.

These capabilities reduce friction, increase order accuracy, and help buyers find what they need faster. Platforms like BigCommerce offer rich content tools, dynamic product discovery, and features like shared carts and approval workflows. BigCommerce integrates with leading ERPs like NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, making it easier to unify operations and deliver real-time data across teams. The best B2B platforms offer API-first architecture, prebuilt integrations, and flexibility to support complex tech stacks without custom rebuilds.

Nearly 9 in 10 buyers welcome insights from vendors when researching, while almost three-quarters (73%) of B2B buyers said prospecting is essential to their new business strategy. As a B2B demand generation agency, we can help accelerate your sales pipeline and connect you with high-intent prospects. This rises to over 60% in large enterprises, with six or more participants, and nearly 30%, with 10 or more participants. This means your marketing efforts should speak to a diverse audience and address key priorities such as technical details, budget constraints, and strategic goals. For B2B tech purchases, 6 to 10 stakeholders spanning IT, finance, operations, and executive leadership are typically involved in the decision-making process. B2B decision-making stats show that on average, 4.14 stakeholders weigh in on purchases.

The B2B buying process involves a series of online and offline touchpoints that shape perceptions and influence purchasing decisions. And they’re rewarding vendors who make solutions easy to implement, integrate, adopt, and expand, while punishing vendors who create friction—even if the feature set is strong. Even if you can navigate the complex web of stakeholders, you might already be too late to influence the outcome. Find the solutions that map to your responsibilities—and the outcomes you’re expected to deliver. Long sales cycles, complex pricing and slow contract negotiations create frustration and increase the risk of lost deals.

BigCommerce helps businesses simplify operations, deliver better buying experiences, and adapt quickly to whatever comes next. Whether you are managing high-volume orders, supporting complex pricing, or reaching new markets, the right ecommerce platform gives you the tools to grow with confidence. With a flexible system in place, large orders can be processed faster, more accurately, and with less back-and-forth. B2B ecommerce platforms are built to handle high-volume transactions and complex workflows.