LeadGen: context and challenges for B2B salespeople

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More than ever, salespeople must be able to count on a high-performance LeadGen system

A purchasing journey that stretches out, overcrowded purchasing committees, B2B buyers who move forward in a submarine… salespeople are not necessarily spoiled in the exercise of their (delicate) function. More than ever, they must be able to count on a well-oiled lead generation system . Decryption…

The purchasing journey continues to lengthen in B2B
8 months . This is the average time between the moment the B2B buyer is first exposed to the brand and the moment he (finally) contacts a salesperson .

Across all sectors of activity, the duration of the average B2B purchasing journey is spain telegram data gradually moving away from 6 months and tending more towards 12 months, due to three main factors:

#1 Infobesity
B2B buyers in the broad sense (decision-makers, prescribers, decision influencers) have never had so much marketing content available to make a decision.
Some are high added value, but the majority remain generic, banal, without real added value and without any effort to personalize and contextualize around the specificities of the target's core business.
Moreover, one in two B2B buyers say they are " destabilized " by the abundance of content available on their business issues. This observation has become more pronounced since November 30, 2022, the release date of ChatGPT. Each year, 52% of companies create even more content than the year before .

#2 The expansion of purchasing committees
The purchasing decision has never been so collegial, since it now involves between 14 and 23 people , depending on the amount of the purchase ( Gartner ). The expansion of purchasing committees makes it difficult for the salesperson to understand group dynamics and power relations.

#3 Exogenous factors probably weigh in the balance
Technological developments make solutions more technical and therefore more difficult to understand, with a more tedious documentation effort.
Similarly, competitive intensity means that B2B buyers mathematically have more choices and therefore take more time to decide.
Finally, let us mention the Covid-19 pandemic which has pushed some large companies to further rationalize their expenses, at least during the period 2020 – 2022.

Your prospect has never been so autonomous
Companies don't seem to be fully appreciating the generational shift that has taken place in the procurement function, Forrester concluded in a study published in March 2023 .

In fact, 64% of global B2B buyers are millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) or Zoomers (born in 1996 or later). Another study puts the figure at over 75%.

The arrival of this generation, brought up on digital, is not without impact on the purchasing journey and, consequently, the posture to adopt to generate good leads , engage them and convert them .

Because they have the reflexes of "secondary" research on the web, beyond Google (review platforms, Twitter, Reddit), these buyers carry out between 50 and 70% of their journeys independently . This observation complicates the task of the salesperson for two reasons:


The buyer forms his own opinion about the product, with his biases and a sometimes reductive perception... especially if the marketing content is generic;
The relative absence of the salesperson in the first part of the purchasing journey does not allow him to address the points of friction and to move the prospect forward in his journey. The latter arrives at the discussion table with near-certainties , which complicates the task of the salesperson.