Results by Design: UX Insights for Business Leaders

Description: In the latest episode of Results by Design, we are joined by Senior UX Designer, Deborah Roberts, to discuss how B2B buyer behavior has changed over the past five years, what is now obsolete or ineffective on your B2B website because of these changes in B2B buyer behavior, and what to do about it.

Interview Participants:

• Craig Nishizaki, Head of Business @ UpTop
• Deborah Roberts, Sr. UX Designer @ UpTop
• Michael Woo, Director of UX @ UpTop

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Results by Design UX Insights for business leaders, the podcast that dives deep into the world of UX design, strategy and insights. Tune in, take action and design your way to success.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, everyone. I’m Craig.

Michael Woo:
And I’m Michael. And we are your hosts for the Results by Design podcast.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, we’re recording this episode in early December, 2023, so we’re heading into the holidays. Mike, does your family have any holiday traditions or plans that you’re looking forward to this year?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, the second of my three boys was actually born on Christmas Day, so for me it’s always been an extra special day and he’s been the gift that keeps on giving plan wise. We might be traveling this time around to see some family. We’ll see, but it should be fun nonetheless. What about you, Craig? What are your plans?

Craig Nishizaki:
We start Christmas early in our house. Christmas music starts playing right after Halloween. Decorations are up before Thanksgiving. The Elf on the shelf shows up for each of our three girls on December 1st. We’re those people, but our tradition ever since we’ve been married has been to go to Maui for Christmas and New Year’s, but this year we’re going to stay in Seattle and the week after Christmas we’re going to go skiing at Mission Ridge and visit Leavenworth Bavarian themed town and then play in the snow and enjoy a little vacation closer to home. So should be a great holiday for both of us. I’m excited about today’s episode.

We have a special guest joining Mike and I today for our conversation. Deborah Roberts is a senior UX designer at UpTop. Deborah has worked with a range of B2B and B2C projects from designing an in-house quoting tool for an health insurance company to improving the site structure and standardization for a leading app services company. And she’s worked extensively with B2B technology clients and researching and mapping their buyer and customer journeys, auditing their current websites and defining the UX strategy, site structure and web content strategy to more effectively engage with their prospects and customers. Through her experience, Deborah has seen the importance of balancing the need of the customer with the needs of the business, and I’m looking forward to the perspective that Deborah will bring to our conversation today. Hi Deborah, thanks for joining us today.

Deborah Roberts:
Hi, Craig. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, hey Deborah, I’m going to ask you the same question. Does your family have any holiday traditions or plans that you’re looking forward to this year?

Deborah Roberts:
Yeah, we have a 20 month old daughter, so we’re having a lot of fun sharing the holiday with her. We’ve been decorating the house, introducing her to Elf on a shelf too, and just watching her fascination or obsession with the Christmas tree. We’re staying in Seattle this season, but we’re planning some fun local activities. We’re going to the Seattle Symphony’s tiny tot string along this weekend. We’re going to visit the Zoo Lanterns exhibit, and we also learn about the Solstice event at the Museum of Flight where Sasquatch flies in on a helicopter, and that one might be more for my husband than for my daughter, but we’re excited for the holidays. My husband’s mom is flying in from Detroit this year too, so we’ll be spending Christmas with her and his sister’s family.

Craig Nishizaki:
Oh, that sounds great. That’s really nice. Well, today we’re going to talk about how the enterprise B2B buyer journey has changed what is now obsolete or ineffective on your B2B website because of these changes in the buyer behavior and what to do about it. So question to both of you, what do you both think about this topic?

Michael Woo:
Well, I’ll go first. I’m very excited to chat about this and I think this is a very relevant topic that many organizations are going through right now.

Deborah Roberts:
Yeah, I agree. In recent projects with our B2B clients, we’ve encountered these changes in buyer behavior a lot and I think there’s definitely opportunity to improve both the customer experience and also get better results for the business.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, to frame the conversation, I want to share some industry research by Gartner Trust Radius and G two, and I’m going to read some of these notes here. So in 2018, Gartner reported the medium B2B buying group involves 10 stakeholders and decision makers, and 45% of their time is spent researching independently online. Virtually every B2B purchase spans six distinct jobs and buying jobs are broadly shared across buyers regardless of the specific paths they take to purchase buyers.

Think about a purchase more in terms of discrete tasks than as a step-by-step journey. And the journey from starting point to purchase is not linear, it can be unpredictable, inconsistent, and sometimes repetitive. According to the 2022 Trust radius buying disconnect report, the demographics of who the technology buyer is has changed over the past five years. There’s five critical traits of today’s technology buyers. Some interesting findings.

In 20 21, 80 7% of buyers wanted to self-serve part or all of the buying journey, and today it’s virtually a hundred percent, and if buyers can’t find pricing easily 43% say they will delay and collect as much information as possible, and 16% say they will stop considering a supplier or a product altogether in the 2020 3G two software buyer behavior report, buyers still trust software companies websites and rely on them when making major purchasing decisions for their company, but they’re slowly reducing an importance going from 38% in 2021 to 32% in 2023, and buyers want to self-service most or all of the buying process validating what Trust Radius Report said.

So I know both of you have worked on several projects across multiple B2B clients that share the same challenge. Let’s start with you, Deborah. Why do you think the buyer behavior and buyer journeys have changed?

Deborah Roberts:
I think one significant factor is the evolving demographics. Many individuals in purchasing positions today grew up with technology and they’ve become accustomed to the smooth online purchasing experiences and they now anticipate a similar level of ease, user friendliness, and also personalization in their B2B buying process. And I think notably that ease of accessing information has really transformed the landscape online channels, including social media reviews, analyst rankings have become important sources for learning about and comparing different products and vendors. And this in turn has kind of altered the power dynamic as buyers are no longer solely reliant on vendor content or sales teams.

I think also the marketplace is also more competitive than ever with an abundance of choices. Buyers have become discerning and selective and they invest significant time in researching and comparing vendors to find the best fit for their specific needs. Another factor I would say is the size of the buying committees and involvement of multiple stakeholders has added this additional layer of complexity is each stakeholder brings different priorities and concerns to the table, so that leads to longer and more intricate buyer journeys.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, those are great insights. Mike, do you have any thoughts on this?

Michael Woo:
It’s amazing that times have shifted so much so quickly. I think about the five buying trends from the trust Radius report and say, sure, this all makes a ton of sense. As a general consumer myself, all of these buying behaviors resonate with me and I can’t think of a time even within the past 10 years where I didn’t want to have complete control of my own buying process or wanted to find information easily and quickly myself or be able to try things out if possible before purchasing or know how much things cost before making a decision. I would say the last trend, virtual collaboration within a team construct makes a whole ton of sense if you’re planning on a purchase that impacts more than one person, given how virtual we’ve been lately, but even after a global pandemic, which in itself has altered how we think and how we behave in many ways it was a bit surprising for me to see how disconnected the buying experience is for many B2B buyers, but more specifically how vendor websites have not been evolving with them over the years, whether it’s been a lack of research data about these buyer behavior changes or a lack of internal resources or expertise to know how to adapt your marketing strategy.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, that’s interesting stuff. Deborah, what have you seen in regards to the research the Gartner Trust Radius and G two reports in terms of the projects that you’ve worked on?

Deborah Roberts:
In my experience with B2B, one of the predominant trends in the buyer’s journey is the growing inclination towards self-service. Through every stage of the process, we’re seeing that buyers are dedicating extensive time to online exploration, gathering information on products, services, pricing reviews, vendor reputation through multiple sources. So by the time that they initiate direct communication, they are often well-informed about a vendor, their offerings and even the features and requirements that they need. One notable challenge challenge we’ve encountered with our B2B clients is the reluctance to display pricing on their websites. And the issue is that our research has shown that buyers increasingly want easily and accessible and transparent pricing information that was mentioned in the reports. Many look for that during their initial research, and the absence of this information can cause delays in the buying journey or even result in elimination from consideration. We’ve also seen that buyers want easy access to demos and free trials as well as an easy way to compare and consume product details.

A number of B2B clients that we’ve worked with have struggled with using internal or complex language and explanations, and that can lead to a lack of clarity. Buyers ultimately want to quickly ascertain if a solution can solve their problem, fits in their budget, works with their systems, is easy to use, and can also grow and scale with their business. One interesting point in the G two report was this importance of implementation and when we’ve conducted research for our clients, there’s often a lot of interest in the buyer journey up until the sale is closed. However, in a recent project for a B2B client, we learned that a number of customers were experiencing issues with implementation and that had an impact on their overall view of the vendor and buying process, and I think that’s significant because that can influence their decision to renew and also impact how they talk about or recommend the vendor.

Michael Woo:
Deborah and I have worked on a lot of the same projects, so we’ve seen the same things. The patterns that have been revealed after talking with prospective customers and internal stakeholders are spot on to what’s in these two reports. The website and sales data provided by our clients have supported this as well. Since Deborah spoke to the changing behaviors prospective customers, I’m going to speak to four observations of our overall engagements with our B2B clients. So the first one is teams are having trouble figuring out where to start, whether it’s the marketing team or website team, they have data that tells them that KPIs like sales contacts are consistent or inconsistent decline or that their website, which is their main marketing tool, isn’t serving their prospective customer needs. Secondly, initiatives this size require the experts. So for some of them, even basic changes on their website are an uphill climb because of things like template restrictions or just procedural red tape, that’s when they need experts like us to come in with a neutral perspective and with no political agenda to help take in all of these business requirements and customer needs and to devise the proper strategy and approach for tackling them.

Third, internal teams are definitely operating in silos. We’re always surprised, although we shouldn’t be by now, how often internal teams don’t talk to each other. They often share the same common goals, but don’t have the processes in place to communicate on the activities and insights that each are working on that could be beneficial to all that are involved. That’s why we make client workshops standard as part of our process to get everyone on the same page and just rowing in the same direction. Lastly, the patterns we’ve seen are the same between client to client. There are a few nuances, but some may be further along on their brand presence or tech stack than others, but other than that, their issues are very similar. With some clients we’re only providing our recommendations which are rooted in research while others we’re providing that plus an entire envisioning experience, which is essentially a redesign of their website buyer journeys with our recommendations integrated for their internal teams to actually take in and implement themselves.

Craig Nishizaki:
It’s interesting when you think about where that friction lies in the process, and oftentimes in an enterprise organization or sales organization, it even comes down to attribution of the lead and the sale. And so having self-service experiences oftentimes is counter to what the salespeople ultimately get measured upon in terms of getting a sales qualified lead or a marketing qualified lead and then taking it through the sales process. But in reality, the buyer behavior has changed. Our own consumer behavior has changed in such a way that avoiding a self-service experience along the way just adds friction to that whole process. So I love the input that both of you provided there. So what have these changes in buyer behavior and buyer journeys made obsolete or ineffective on B2B websites from both of your perspectives?

Deborah Roberts:
Yeah, I think traditional brochure style websites, websites with limited content are becoming obsolete. When visitors come to a site, they expect more than a static presentation. They want videos, graphics, interactive elements that allow them to explore the offering and guide them towards relevant content to aid their decision-making process. I also think sites lacking personalization. So B2B websites that lack personalized experience may find themselves ineffective as modern buyers anticipate tailored content and recommendations based on their preferences, their industry or past interactions with the site, and companies that can offer new relevant content throughout that long sales cycle will really stand out from others that don’t. One common pitfall we’ve experienced with our B2B clients is excessive content gating. As buyers increasingly conduct in-depth research independently and hesitate to engage with sales early in the cycle, restricting access to essential content can deter potential customers who are not yet ready to connect with the sales rep.

Another thing we’ve seen is that it’s really become essential to allow visitors to explore product offerings independently. So if a company is relying solely on live demos with sales representatives, that may put them at a disadvantage as competitors who offer virtual demos or free trials create a more flexible and appealing way for buyers to experience the product firsthand and on their own terms. And then lastly, I’d say in our experience, we’ve seen clients sometimes put too much reliance on things like quantitative data, visual design, refreshes, or just a single stage of the buying process, and to provide a really great customer experience and reduce churn. It is so important to have a clear understanding of the key personas in the buying committee, their different needs, their goals, pain points and behaviors throughout the entire journey.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, oh god, that’s a great list, Deborah. Let me see if I can try to add some things that might not have been included there. I think there’s poor navigation. Being able to self-serve means enabling users to find what they need easily and quickly. Then there’s hard sales CTAs, the contact us now buttons that you see everywhere. There’s nothing more pushy, I think, than to start off a product or a landing page with contact us now before a person has even read a single thing about your product or service. And then related to that is long contact us forms. What bigger friction point is there to having users fill out a myriad of inputs before they can tell you, yes, I want to inquire more about your products or services. That’s a very common thing that we’ve seen. And then there’s what bigger red flag is there with regards to trust if you’re hiding information.

So for example, one of those is when it comes to pricing, the common mental model is that the price is going to be really high when you don’t show it. So why would you turn away prospective customers and not even give them or give yourself a chance to say why there might be more value in your offering. Then there’s things like a generic website without personalization. I think this is kind of similar to what you were saying about static websites, but with so many different personas, segments and stages of the buyer journey. A site that has no personalization is like you speaking to everyone and no one at the same time. So personalization is not easy, otherwise everyone would be doing it, but it is a part of the user’s experience that needs to be invested in as it’s what users are expecting from companies today.

Then there’s inflexible page templates. This ties into the previous point, but you can’t have good personalization if your page templates aren’t structured to be flexible. So for instance, you may want to display a module on a page to a particular user type or hide that module altogether, but without this type of flexibility, you’re very limited in your content strategy. And the last thing that is actually related to that content strategy. So clients we’ve worked with have really good content. That’s what we’ve seen so far, but in many cases, the content is not being surfaced effectively, whether they’re buried within some downloadable PDFs and just need to be pulled forward onto the website, or they’re just being locked behind gated walls. So those are a lot of the common things that we’ve seen added to Deborah’s list there.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, that’s a great list both of you. I think if anyone took notes during this conversation, that would be a great checklist to start from. If you were thinking about where might we be having some issues, but Mike, outside of that list, what are some of the symptoms that a business leader or a marketer might see that indicate a bigger problem

Michael Woo:
As a business leader or marketer? Some of those early symptoms that are indicative of a larger buyer journey problem might be consistent and or significant decline in conversion rates or marketing qualified leads, MQ ls or a high abandonment rates throughout the different stages of the journey, which could speak to dissatisfaction or confusion along the way. Then there’s extended sales cycle from awareness to purchase. So high churn, opting out of subscriptions may imply expectations aren’t being met. Then there’s limited customer feedback or reviews. This might suggest customers aren’t encouraged or motivated. And then lastly, just poor customer satisfaction scores is another metric to watch out for.

Deborah Roberts:
Beyond the metrics that Mike mentioned, other symptoms could include an increase in customer support inquiries. This could indicate that users are having difficulty finding information or completing tasks independently. Also, if there were a high volume of search queries, so frequent search queries for specific issues, a high volume of support related queries or searches for features not found on the site could be indicators of a problem. We’ve also seen with a lot of our client B2B clients that many have had a lot of acquisitions in recent years. So if there are acquisitions that have not been incorporated or if there’s multiple satellite sites, this can create a really disjointed and confusing customer journey and also water dam company’s brand. And then I think just not sucking up to the competition. So it’s just a great practice to regularly compare your website performance and features against competitors, and that can help to identify areas where your website might be falling behind in terms of the user experience and functionality. And that could include accessibility, outdated design trends, personalization, pricing, transparency, or the virtual demo experiences.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, that’s a great list as well. One thing that you talked about in terms of acquisitions and companies coming together and then having a disjointed experience, I remember Michael, you had told one of our clients in a strategy session, is your goal to be a house of brands or a branded house? And I think that’s something we can dive into deeper in another episode. For companies that are acquiring other products or other companies to add to their portfolio, how do they want to strategically incorporate that or keep ’em separate as part of their go-to-market strategy? Here’s a good question. I think for both of you. If you were spending your own money, where would you start to fix the problem? And Deborah, we’ll start with you.

Deborah Roberts:
I would definitely start with qualitative research. So customer interviews or possibly usability testing of the current site experience. I think some of the symptoms mentioned earlier, like low engagement or high bounce rates can let you know there’s a problem, but you don’t always know why. So when you talk to customers, you just get such a better sense of what they’re looking for when they come to your site and what improvements would have the largest impact on their experience. And so once you’ve identified some key themes from the customer interviews, I would then follow up with a survey to the pull from a larger pool of participants to make sure that the findings aren’t skewed by outlier data. And then from there, you can start to flesh out the customer personas and build journey maps to get a better understanding of who your primary users are, how they’re engaging with your brand at each individual touchpoint.

This approach not only uncovers the largest opportunities, but then it allows you to prioritize your efforts so you can build out a roadmap for improvements as a part of that, if possible. I would also include internal data points below the customer journey map, almost like a service blueprint. We’ve been starting to do that with some of our clients, and that shows internal actions, internal pain points, technical limitations, and this has been really helpful in identifying some of the root causes of issues that might be tied to internal processes or an outdated tech stack.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, that’s great. Mike, what about you?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, going back to the question, how much money do I have to spend again? No, I’m just kidding. Let’s pretend if resources were limited because that’s usually the case that we see. I first want to know where my current buyer journey stand. That would mean getting an expert audit of my personas and journeys by performing a modest number of prospective customer interviews and interviewing key internal stakeholders from marketing, customer service and sales.

Same as what Deborah said, if I had additional means for research like Deborah, I’d want to perform buyer journey mapping for my key persona or personas on top of my product or service. Having the outline for a buyer journey map will set you up for the long-term by giving you the option to build upon them or create more of your own in the future. And just to elaborate a bit more, the journey map or MAPS created will provide plenty of value.

They will help you to a, visualize clearly the steps, actions, and emotions that your prospective customers has throughout the buyer journey. They will identify the gaps and friction points along the way. Depending on how detailed your math is, we can inform you of the internal interactions, processes, and technology that are interfacing at each step of the way the buyer journeys a tangible output that can help build alignment and foster collaboration, hoping to knock down those ever present silos. But most importantly, the maps are a tool to help you identify opportunities for improvement with each friction point. Honestly, I get a little excited talking about Journey maps because they’re such a useful tool for both UX researchers and for our clients.

Craig Nishizaki:
Well, that’s great stuff. I appreciate both of your expertise and your experience because I think what you were able to do today was take research that’s available publicly from Gartner Trust Radius and G two, and really look at it and validate that yes, the buyer journey has changed, and here are the behaviors that, and trends that they are seeing through their research with enterprise B2B customers and buyers and their behavior. And then you were able to also tie that back to real life work in terms of looking at what you’ve seen from the research that our team has done with our clients, along the lines of the impact of the buyer behavior changing and the buyer journeys changing, and what is obsolete on B2B websites and what needs to be improved yet, a great checklist. And then also talking about how you would go about investing your time and your money if it was your money to get the most bang for your buck.

And I think that that all ties wraps it up into a great episode for a business leader or a marketer to really say, Hey, let me do a little bit of a review of where we are and where we want to get to and see how we might go about making those improvements. So I really appreciate both of your input and your expertise today. So well, that’s it for today’s show. Join us again next time as we explore innovative approaches to enhance your products and services, optimize customer interactions, and ultimately drive success for your organization. Tune in, take action and design your way to success. We’ll see you next time.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to Results by Design. If you liked this episode, be sure to share and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are also playing on all your favorite audio streaming podcast platforms, so stay connected and join us for the next one. Results by Design is brought to you by UpTop. Our mission is to equip business leaders like you with the knowledge and tools needed to leverage UX methods and strategies to achieve tangible business outcomes and create lasting value. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or just starting to explore the world of UX, results by Design is your go-to resource for unlocking the potential of user experience to achieve remarkable results. Tune in, take action, and design your way to success.