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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
The sales process for B2B companies is at odds with what buyers expect today.
Thanks to Amazon, our expectation of instant gratification is constant. Buyers are opting for more self-serve options.
They are wanting to do as much of the sales process on their own, and as such, B2B companies need to adapt.
This report highlights what the b2b buying experience is like today, through 4 key areas:
Co-authored by Natalie Marcotullio and Arthur Castillo.
The sales process for B2B companies is at odds with what buyers expect today.
Thanks to Amazon, our expectation of instant gratification is constant. Buyers are opting for more self-serve options.
They are wanting to do as much of the sales process on their own, and as such, B2B companies need to adapt.
This report highlights what the b2b buying experience is like today, through 4 key areas:
Co-authored by Natalie Marcotullio and Arthur Castillo.
The buyer best practices from this report come from roughly 30 interviews we conducted with B2B SaaS professionals about the B2B buying experience. We asked these buyers about ways B2B SaaS companies can create a frictionless buying experience for them. The three most common themes that came up from these interviews were:
After conducting these interviews, we wanted to see how many of the largest SaaS companies were following these buyer best practices. See below for the results.
Data note: See Buyer Experience Tips and Improving B2B Buying Process for interview responses
We reviewed the Top 100 SaaS companies (the top being defined by company size) provided by Peer Signal.
To see if they followed the buyer best practices we looked for:
When requesting the demo on their website, we used a Chili Piper alias to make sure they did not disqualify it as a Gmail or fake email.
Below is an overview of the researched companies sub industries and size:
Top sub-industries represented include security, data & analytics, work management, operations, fintech, and martech.
The largest employee group represented is 2000 - 5000. The average number of employees is approximately 13,000 and the mean is 5,000.
Below is a high-level overview showing how these companies stacked up to the buyer best practices mentioned above.
Throughout our interviews, buyers referenced how difficult it can be to set up that first meeting with a company's sales team. Even though the buyers expressed interest, they mentioned long response times and answering countless BDR questions until getting to talk to an AE and seeing the product.
Interviewee quote: “The fewer human beings in the process, the better. Do not hand me off to three different people to help make a buying decision.”
For this section, we looked at how long it took a sales rep from each company to get in touch with us after requesting a demo. We counted “Getting in touch” as an email response back to book a call. We did not count phone calls as prospects often miss phone calls or may not accept calls from a random number.
We also looked at how many emails reps sent to try to get us to schedule the first call and if it was an SDR or an AE who first reached out.
Most of the companies fell into two buckets - either responded to us the same or next day or they never got in touch with us. On average companies took 2 days to respond.
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The most popular email cadence was three emails and the average number of emails sent was 2.3 emails.
A majority of the time the follow up email to schedule a demo came from an SDR.
Takeaways:
With averages of 2-day response time and 2.3 emails sent per inbound request, the state of inbound is dire in B2B SaaS. Sales are only able to work the leads once they’ve been properly handed off and routed from marketing. If this isn’t happening in real-time, it makes it extremely hard for any sales rep to reach out in record time.
Companies are still gating high intent demand with SDRs and not putting prospects in front of a rep that can: share pricing, show product, and answer buyer questions.
Reward your buyer for doing their research — don't penalize them and have SDR qualification be the first sales touch.
For this section, we looked at whether or not websites had a direct way to book time with their sales team, using a direct calendar scheduler like Chili Piper.
We also wanted to see if companies with a direct calendar scheduler were more likely to get in touch with us than those without one.
11% of companies use direct calendar schedulers on their demo page.
Of the 35% of companies that never got in touch with us, 97% did not use a calendar scheduler.
Takeaway:
B2B sales processes require a meeting to move the deal forward. AKA the sales process doesn’t start until they meet with the AE.
Many B2B companies are elongating the sales process and the buyer's journey by not allowing buyers to bypass the back and forth of getting a meeting scheduled.
Another common response in our interviews was that buyers wanted a way to get hands on with the product from the websites and on their own time, without needing to always talk to sales.
Interviewee quote: “I love seeing a demo right on a company’s website. To me, it shows how much they believe in their product. They don’t need to trap you on a call or hold your inbox hostage with an infinite drip” - Evie Carpenter, Director of Marketing at Chassi
For this section, we looked at which websites included a way to get hands-on with their product.
Hands-on product access was measured by either a click through demo with screenshots or a fully interactive HTML/ CSS clone of the product, using an interactive demo tool like Navattic.
Videos were not considered interactive demos.
17% of the companies use a click through or interactive demos on their website.
The top industries that adopt interactive demos are security software, data analytics, and customer engagement.
Takeaways:
It’s not surprising that companies that tend to be more complex and have multiple product lines (like security and data analytics companies) are the ones with the highest adoption of interactive demos.
These companies often have a long time to value in a traditional free trial or PLG motion. Both security and data require hefty setup through integrations or uploading data.
Admins at the prospect’s company may also not give individual users permission to set up an unvetted tool. These companies are starting to opt instead for a way to show potential prospects a fully loaded demo environment that can guide prospects through their software.
Of the companies that use an interactive demo on their website, we looked at what pages they were included on and whether they embedded or linked out to the interactive demo.
We also analyzed the breakdown of companies gating (including a form at the beginning) vs ungating (no form at the beginning) their interactive demo.
The majority of companies include a CTA to a specific product demo on the corresponding product page. The most common copy for CTAs is “Take a Tour”, “Start Demo”, and “Try it Out”
The majority of demos are ungated and accessible directly from an interactive demo CTA on the landing page.
Takeaways:
Given that the main way enterprise companies use interactive demos is on a specific product page, it is not surprising that they are mostly ungated.
We view demos on specific feature or product pages as a similar experience to showing a gif or screenshot of that feature. If your main goal is to educate website visitors on that specific feature functionality, then it doesn’t make sense to gate that short demo.
Also given that product pages are more product focused, they are a natural starting point for companies to add in interactive demos.
The last repeated request we heard from our B2B buyer interviews was to include pricing on the website. Whether it was full pricing or just a minimum, buyers preferred to have some type of range to understand if this software is within their budget.
Interviewee quote: “Share your pricing on your website. At bare minimum, tell your site visitors "pricing starts at $x per month." That way people can get a general sense of whether or not to proceed. They don't waste time sitting on a discovery call and getting grilled only to discover your product is out of budget.” - Erin Balsa, Founder of Haus of Bold
For this section, we looked at which websites had a pricing page on their website. We included pages that did not show the actual cost but outlined the different packages and plans.
The majority of companies have a publicly available pricing page on their website.
The top industries that have pricing pages are data & analytics, work management, and security software.
Takeaways:
While it shows some progress that a majority of these enterprise companies have a pricing page, many of these companies have multiple product lines aimed at different market segments.
Often the pricing page was shown for specific product lines or plans aimed at the lower end of the market.
Of the companies that have a pricing page, we looked at how many included the pricing amounts and how accessible the pricing pages were.
The majority of pricing pages include the price amounts or at least a pricing minimum
The majority of websites include a link to a pricing on the main navigation bar on the website.
Takeaways:
Given that most of these companies featured their pricing page on the main navbar, they must be seeing good conversion numbers on these pages.
Navbar real-estate is a big deal to enterprise companies with advanced website teams, so our assumption is the pricing page performs better than most of the other pages on the website.
We were pleasantly surprised to see most of the companies are actually showing their prices.
These enterprise companies though may have the luxury of not needing to serve every inbound lead since they have such a high volume of leads, and may be ok with qualifying out more prospects by showing their pricing.
When we look at the buying experience in B2B, it still has a ton of room for improvement.
Buyers want to know pricing before engaging with sales. We were surprised to see over 50% of companies include a pricing page, with only 21.4% choosing to hide pricing and to speak with sales. 78.6% did include price amounts or at minimum a pricing range of "starting at $$."
This is an incredible step in the right direction to buyer transparency and removing friction in the B2B buyers journey.
As for showcasing the product before engaging with sales, that trend seems to be increasing amongst this subset of SaaS companies. 17% of companies have invested in an interactive demo to showcase their tool earlier in the funnel. Most companies are ungating their product demos as well, with over 70% allowing you to click through their product without entering in an email.
On the flip side, buyers are still waiting when they want to purchase a product. Two days' average response rate is still too long for an engaged buyer to hear from a human, let alone book a call to keep the sales process moving forward. And that was the average when we factored in those companies that did respond.
35% of companies never even reached out to understand the intent of our request and how they could help! Interestingly enough, 97% of those companies don’t use a calendar scheduler.
Companies that rely on manual routing are way more likely to have their prospects get lost in the shuffle. Not reaching out to prospects who have raised their hand for a demo has a direct impact on Closed Won revenue.
If a buyer is raising their hand to speak with your sales team, B2B companies would do better to roll out the red carpet and build on the momentum and intent of the buyer.
Only 11% of companies surveyed are taking advantage of direct calendar booking and bypassing the back and forth to get a call scheduled.
We hope to see this trend continue over time so that more buyers are able to get in touch with the tools they are interested in evaluating.
The buyer best practices from this report come from roughly 30 interviews we conducted with B2B SaaS professionals about the B2B buying experience. We asked these buyers about ways B2B SaaS companies can create a frictionless buying experience for them. The three most common themes that came up from these interviews were:
After conducting these interviews, we wanted to see how many of the largest SaaS companies were following these buyer best practices. See below for the results.
Data note: See Buyer Experience Tips and Improving B2B Buying Process for interview responses
We reviewed the Top 100 SaaS companies (the top being defined by company size) provided by Peer Signal.
To see if they followed the buyer best practices we looked for:
When requesting the demo on their website, we used a Chili Piper alias to make sure they did not disqualify it as a Gmail or fake email.
Below is an overview of the researched companies sub industries and size:
Top sub-industries represented include security, data & analytics, work management, operations, fintech, and martech.
The largest employee group represented is 2000 - 5000. The average number of employees is approximately 13,000 and the mean is 5,000.
Below is a high-level overview showing how these companies stacked up to the buyer best practices mentioned above.
Throughout our interviews, buyers referenced how difficult it can be to set up that first meeting with a company's sales team. Even though the buyers expressed interest, they mentioned long response times and answering countless BDR questions until getting to talk to an AE and seeing the product.
Interviewee quote: “The fewer human beings in the process, the better. Do not hand me off to three different people to help make a buying decision.”
For this section, we looked at how long it took a sales rep from each company to get in touch with us after requesting a demo. We counted “Getting in touch” as an email response back to book a call. We did not count phone calls as prospects often miss phone calls or may not accept calls from a random number.
We also looked at how many emails reps sent to try to get us to schedule the first call and if it was an SDR or an AE who first reached out.
Most of the companies fell into two buckets - either responded to us the same or next day or they never got in touch with us. On average companies took 2 days to respond.
The most popular email cadence was three emails and the average number of emails sent was 2.3 emails.
A majority of the time the follow up email to schedule a demo came from an SDR.
Takeaways:
With averages of 2-day response time and 2.3 emails sent per inbound request, the state of inbound is dire in B2B SaaS. Sales are only able to work the leads once they’ve been properly handed off and routed from marketing. If this isn’t happening in real-time, it makes it extremely hard for any sales rep to reach out in record time.
Companies are still gating high intent demand with SDRs and not putting prospects in front of a rep that can: share pricing, show product, and answer buyer questions.
Reward your buyer for doing their research — don't penalize them and have SDR qualification be the first sales touch.
For this section, we looked at whether or not websites had a direct way to book time with their sales team, using a direct calendar scheduler like Chili Piper.
We also wanted to see if companies with a direct calendar scheduler were more likely to get in touch with us than those without one.
11% of companies use direct calendar schedulers on their demo page.
Of the 35% of companies that never got in touch with us, 97% did not use a calendar scheduler.
Takeaway:
B2B sales processes require a meeting to move the deal forward. AKA the sales process doesn’t start until they meet with the AE.
Many B2B companies are elongating the sales process and the buyer's journey by not allowing buyers to bypass the back and forth of getting a meeting scheduled.
Another common response in our interviews was that buyers wanted a way to get hands on with the product from the websites and on their own time, without needing to always talk to sales.
Interviewee quote: “I love seeing a demo right on a company’s website. To me, it shows how much they believe in their product. They don’t need to trap you on a call or hold your inbox hostage with an infinite drip” - Evie Carpenter, Director of Marketing at Chassi
For this section, we looked at which websites included a way to get hands-on with their product.
Hands-on product access was measured by either a click through demo with screenshots or a fully interactive HTML/ CSS clone of the product, using an interactive demo tool like Navattic.
Videos were not considered interactive demos.
17% of the companies use a click through or interactive demos on their website.
The top industries that adopt interactive demos are security software, data analytics, and customer engagement.
Takeaways:
It’s not surprising that companies that tend to be more complex and have multiple product lines (like security and data analytics companies) are the ones with the highest adoption of interactive demos.
These companies often have a long time to value in a traditional free trial or PLG motion. Both security and data require hefty setup through integrations or uploading data.
Admins at the prospect’s company may also not give individual users permission to set up an unvetted tool. These companies are starting to opt instead for a way to show potential prospects a fully loaded demo environment that can guide prospects through their software.
Of the companies that use an interactive demo on their website, we looked at what pages they were included on and whether they embedded or linked out to the interactive demo.
We also analyzed the breakdown of companies gating (including a form at the beginning) vs ungating (no form at the beginning) their interactive demo.
The majority of companies include a CTA to a specific product demo on the corresponding product page. The most common copy for CTAs is “Take a Tour”, “Start Demo”, and “Try it Out”
The majority of demos are ungated and accessible directly from an interactive demo CTA on the landing page.
Takeaways:
Given that the main way enterprise companies use interactive demos is on a specific product page, it is not surprising that they are mostly ungated.
We view demos on specific feature or product pages as a similar experience to showing a gif or screenshot of that feature. If your main goal is to educate website visitors on that specific feature functionality, then it doesn’t make sense to gate that short demo.
Also given that product pages are more product focused, they are a natural starting point for companies to add in interactive demos.
The last repeated request we heard from our B2B buyer interviews was to include pricing on the website. Whether it was full pricing or just a minimum, buyers preferred to have some type of range to understand if this software is within their budget.
Interviewee quote: “Share your pricing on your website. At bare minimum, tell your site visitors "pricing starts at $x per month." That way people can get a general sense of whether or not to proceed. They don't waste time sitting on a discovery call and getting grilled only to discover your product is out of budget.” - Erin Balsa, Founder of Haus of Bold
For this section, we looked at which websites had a pricing page on their website. We included pages that did not show the actual cost but outlined the different packages and plans.
The majority of companies have a publicly available pricing page on their website.
The top industries that have pricing pages are data & analytics, work management, and security software.
Takeaways:
While it shows some progress that a majority of these enterprise companies have a pricing page, many of these companies have multiple product lines aimed at different market segments.
Often the pricing page was shown for specific product lines or plans aimed at the lower end of the market.
Of the companies that have a pricing page, we looked at how many included the pricing amounts and how accessible the pricing pages were.
The majority of pricing pages include the price amounts or at least a pricing minimum
The majority of websites include a link to a pricing on the main navigation bar on the website.
Takeaways:
Given that most of these companies featured their pricing page on the main navbar, they must be seeing good conversion numbers on these pages.
Navbar real-estate is a big deal to enterprise companies with advanced website teams, so our assumption is the pricing page performs better than most of the other pages on the website.
We were pleasantly surprised to see most of the companies are actually showing their prices.
These enterprise companies though may have the luxury of not needing to serve every inbound lead since they have such a high volume of leads, and may be ok with qualifying out more prospects by showing their pricing.
When we look at the buying experience in B2B, it still has a ton of room for improvement.
Buyers want to know pricing before engaging with sales. We were surprised to see over 50% of companies include a pricing page, with only 21.4% choosing to hide pricing and to speak with sales. 78.6% did include price amounts or at minimum a pricing range of "starting at $$."
This is an incredible step in the right direction to buyer transparency and removing friction in the B2B buyers journey.
As for showcasing the product before engaging with sales, that trend seems to be increasing amongst this subset of SaaS companies. 17% of companies have invested in an interactive demo to showcase their tool earlier in the funnel. Most companies are ungating their product demos as well, with over 70% allowing you to click through their product without entering in an email.
On the flip side, buyers are still waiting when they want to purchase a product. Two days' average response rate is still too long for an engaged buyer to hear from a human, let alone book a call to keep the sales process moving forward. And that was the average when we factored in those companies that did respond.
35% of companies never even reached out to understand the intent of our request and how they could help! Interestingly enough, 97% of those companies don’t use a calendar scheduler.
Companies that rely on manual routing are way more likely to have their prospects get lost in the shuffle. Not reaching out to prospects who have raised their hand for a demo has a direct impact on Closed Won revenue.
If a buyer is raising their hand to speak with your sales team, B2B companies would do better to roll out the red carpet and build on the momentum and intent of the buyer.
Only 11% of companies surveyed are taking advantage of direct calendar booking and bypassing the back and forth to get a call scheduled.
We hope to see this trend continue over time so that more buyers are able to get in touch with the tools they are interested in evaluating.
Interested in improving your B2B buying experience? Schedule a demo of Chili Piper now!
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