Buying behavior has experienced a massive shift over the last decade–buying takes place almost completely in a digital world. This means that buyers have access to more information than ever, and they’re in the driver’s seat of the buying journey. 

We’ve learned that buyers simply do not want to share their information until they’re ready to talk, which leaves a lot of seller questions unanswered. 

So what can we do?

By shifting strategies and tactics (and investing in the right tech!) you can deanonymize your website traffic and serve your buyers the information they need exactly when they need it. 

Old-world marketing to new-world marketing

Buyers used to fill out a form, wait 2-3 days, endure a lengthy automated marketing sequence, and maybe stay interested long enough to chat with a sales rep through several follow-up emails, eventually getting to a face-to-face meeting or demo. 

And this worked–until it didn’t. 

The more comfortable we’ve become online, the more protective we’ve gotten over our information. Buyers have stopped freely giving out their info, or filling out forms at all. Buyers have a whole new set of expectations when it comes to the buying process.

– 72% of anonymous buyers expect personalized experiences at every touchpoint

– 38% of buyers ghost reps when they haven’t gotten a quick enough response

– 81% of buyers avoid filling out forms because they aren’t ready to talk to a sales rep

So buying behavior has shifted–what can you do to meet buyers on their own terms, in their own time?

Build a buyer-friendly website

It takes a website visitor less than 50 milliseconds to decide if they’re going to stay on your site. How can you make sure you’re engaging visitors who are quick to move on, interested in doing their own research and don’t want to talk until they’re ready?

Create the most buyer-friendly environment, right on your site: 

• Invest in the right tech stack
• Ungate your content
• Implement a conversational marketing strategy
• Focus your sales team on the right accounts

Invest in the right tech

Leverage your tech stack to build a powerful, connected website. When you connect to Salesforce, you can instantly know when an important lead, contact, account, or open opportunity arrives on your site. 

Investing in marketing automation platforms (Pardot, Hubspot, and Marketo, for example!) you can automatically surface the relevant lead information and see what campaigns they’ve engaged with already. 

Data enrichment systems that perform Reverse IP lookups can tell you where a visitor works, as well as relevant firmographic data. 

Account-based marketing platforms (ABM) can instantly reveal helpful information about your target accounts, like how they fit against your ideal customer profile or purchase phase. 

‍Ungate your content

Buyers want to get to know your brand and what you have to offer before they’re ready to speak to you. Serve up your best content for free–no strings (or forms) attached. Let your buyers watch video demos, read books, and engage with your content without any hoops to jump through. 

No one has time for forms these days, and buyers will be quick to move on to your competitors. 

Implement a conversational marketing strategy

When you use a platform that allows you to create customer experiences on your website, you can create meaningful automation that helps engage buyers further without being too pushy. A personalized conversational experience with a chat bot captures more leads than a generic form, especially if you’re using it to serve up compelling content to your visitors. 

Pro tip: Don’t think of chat bots as a form replacement, but rather an iterative experience that should always be changing to meet your buyers’ needs. See some of our favorite conversational marketing plays here. 

Focus your sales team on account-based buying intent data

Conversational sales and marketing helps you connect with the visitors that matter most to your business, even if they want to stay anonymous. Prospects and decision makers are poking around your website, and using account-based intelligence strategies to track and measure their engagement is a critical predictor of buying intent. 

When you can easily track this engagement date with AI that gets “smarter” over time, your sales team has access to extremely valuable buying intent, and research intent data, that helps you focus your teams on the right accounts, at the right point in their buying cycle. 

This data helps sellers prioritize prospecting efforts by surfacing which accounts are poised to make a purchase decision–generating more pipeline from otherwise anonymous buyers. 

Pairing conversational sales and marketing with account-based sales intelligence allows sellers to focus on the right accounts that are ready to stop being anonymous and start talking deals. 

The future of B2B buying

It’s more important than ever to have a strategy in place that addresses the rise in anonymous buyers. They know what they want, and they don’t want to spend a ton of time in generic marketing automations. 

Your team needs a smarter website that caters to this new buyer, while still gathering and surfacing the right data your sales team needs ultimately to close more deals. 

The Pipeline Cloud is the #1 conversational sales and marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce. It’s the best way to: 

• Instantly know when VIP buyers are on your site
• Engage high-intent buyers with live chat, voice calls, and conversational content marketing
• Deliver white-glove buying experiences to target accounts
• Harness the power of account-based sales intelligence to understand the intent of your website traffic
• Focus you sales reps’ energy and efforts on the accounts that matter most, at the most important time

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Learn more about the anonymous buyer in our book, Rise of the Anonymous Buyer, here.

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