The Buying Committee Decided Before You Ever Knew They Existed

In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, B2B marketing leaders explore how buying committees form and make decisions long before prospects identify themselves, and what marketers can do to influence buyers throughout increasingly fragmented and self-directed journeys.

The conversation examines the “dark funnel” , from peer recommendations, communities, review sites, events and AI assistants, and explores how marketers can remain relevant across diverse buying committees

Guests

• Lorenza Fedele, Global Digital Marketing Manager at ABB

• Nicole Mills, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Algolia

Transcript

speaker-0 (01:39)

All right, Let's start with the central idea behind today's episode. By the time somebody identifies themselves to your company, they may already have done a huge amount of research and formed opinions about the vendors they are considering. So if most of the buying decision happens before a prospect ever identifies themselves, what should marketing actually be doing before that point?

speaker-2 (02:03)

Yeah, it's definitely true that a large amount of the journey is rep free and it's occurring before prospects are hitting our sites and we're having direct interaction with them. that time is going elsewhere. So that could be, Slack groups, review sites, podcasts like this, and then word of mouth and also AI assistance. So I think that in order to be

In the consideration set and also at the top. you want to be the leading contender in their search. You really have to make an investment in brand and then also awareness work that you're doing at the top of the funnel. So you have to be showing up where they are already gathering information, building credibility with analysts and showing up in rankings like the Magic Quadrant and that kind of thing. You really have to make sure that when they're doing that rep-free experience.

You are coming up as the prime contender because by the time you enter somebody's CRM, they've already got their consideration set. You want to be the number one prospect or the number one vendor in their consideration set. Otherwise, you're going to be relegated to be in a competitive quote, and that's not where any of us want to be.

speaker-1 (03:16)

And I love then Nicole mentioned Slack and forums because these are all community building kind of channels and up to not too long ago communities were always like side activities or supporting activities. But I do think now they are the channel to really tackle the dark funnel.

And if you pair that with then experts, which could be, our teams or employees or subject matter experts, influencers, then you have a power combo to really build that credibility before we even know, who the customers are or they put their hands up. and then one thing that I also think is super important is human interactions.

I think, the human interaction are coming back. Not that they ever left, but the past few years I think we've all focused a little bit on the digital space and kind of forgot the human side of things. And if you think about it, the way people make you feel have a long-lasting duration, basically. You will remember how a company made you feel or somebody made you feel.

even like months or years. And so when you have then that need, you will contact that company. That will be, as Nicole said, one of your favorites or in your consideration set. and so having those in person experiences, I think it's also super important to really tackle the funnels like in the early, early stages or when they're still dark.

speaker-0 (04:36)

That's so true. Everyone is talking about the rise of AI, like yeah, no one can replace human interactions, right? You can't create a bot or someone to be at a conference room and to be a nice person. Like those kind of things are so important today and those feelings, you are so right, Lorenz, that you can remember feelings for a very long period of time, right?

Whereas a presentation probably you forget it in one minute, right? Exactly. But okay, so I think that that brings us to another complication, because we often talk about the buyer journey as if there were one buyer following one journey, but in B2B that's rarely the the reality, right? So you guys you mentioned the buying committee might move

and might involve anywhere from four to twelve people spanning leadership, technical teams, operations, even R D could be part of this buying committee. So how do you influence that entire buying committee when all those people have different priorities and may be consuming completely different information?

speaker-1 (05:45)

And I don't know, Nicola, it is for you. For us, our buying committee is about eleven people. So we are like at the top of the scale. and I don't think the answer is to create completely different strategies and messaging for every single stakeholders, but rather having a consistent and unified positioning.

strategy, maybe core messaging, but then adapt all the proof points. Because you might have a C suite that is interested more in a financial outcome. Then we have, for example, engineers that are interested in the tech specs or operators that are interested in the ease of use or implementation risks and so on. so you need to have consistency in terms of the positioning in the messages because you need the repetition to have

an influence, but you need to be able to adapt and be flexible with the proof points to really cater to their needs. And so I think this is kind of the objective but the challenge at the same time because you have different streams and you need to be able to adapt to each single one of them but be consistent also with all of them and having that repeated reinforcement basically. I don't know if you have the same Nicole is it slightly different for you.

speaker-2 (06:57)

for us, we really take the approach of mapping the buying committee and taking a look at who is influential at what part of the deal cycle. So you're not dealing with all aspects of the buying committee at the same time. So procurement and legal are gonna come in later in the process. at the top of the process, we look at

Who's the scout? So who is probably doing most of that preliminary rep-free kind of recon work for that organization? And then we look at who are the influencers in that buying committee? They may not be the purse holder. They may in fact be the scout.

But who is influential, who can make or break your deals? And I think taking a look at your close one, close loss data and really examining your past deals, you can identify who basically can throw a wrench in your deals. And then I think that you have to figure out what is the right communication for that scout, that influencer.

that economic buyer and deploy that at the right time, in the cycle. So I say all of that, but I think it's important that we as marketers don't try to make one campaign or one tactic be all things to everybody on that buying committee. This is where the art and the science of true integrated campaigns really comes in because what we look at

I don't try to make a campaign that is geared towards, let's say, an e-commerce merchandiser who is my scout and my influencer. I don't try to make that campaign that's geared toward them and their concerns and their pain points. I don't try to make that work for an engineer or a developer. I hand that off to our growth team and they are using their tactics and campaigns and touch points to make sure that the developers' needs are met.

So that that particular type of influencer doesn't come up as a detractor in the deal, that they can actually be cultivated to either be neutral or positive in the deal. And so we we look at how you can use demand gen, field, web, growth marketing, also partners are a very significant influencer, in enterprise deals often.

So you look at how can you partner with partner marketing and those other functions within marketing so that you're covering that map, but that you aren't overworking or overextending any one particular tactic or campaign for a member of the committee that it's just really not geared for.

speaker-0 (09:40)

Yeah, you definitely need that balance of personalization and also creating that broader presence and consistency on your messaging that Lorenza you were saying, right? So you your brand keeps consistently top of mind in my opinion. okay, so I think this creates an obvious measurement problem as well.

Because if a lot of the journey is happening somewhere we can't directly observe, traditional attribution can only tell us part of the story. So which signals can marketers realistically use to understand whether they are influencing a buying credit?

speaker-2 (10:20)

Yeah, Lorenzo, do you want to take that first?

speaker-1 (10:22)

No, no, go for it.

speaker-2 (10:23)

Okay. So this is interesting. I have this conversation internally, a lot of it when we're talking about demand creation versus demand capture. And I firmly believe that if you overindex on demand.

capture metrics, pipeline, high intent hand raisers, ops and things like that. You will shortchange the value of top of funnel channels like page social display that really aren't geared to give you a pipeline. They aren't necessarily geared to give you, that MQL.

But what they do is they build capacity for you to be able to harvest that demand further down the funnel. And so I think that you should look at directional signals from the top of the funnel. And so, that can be search volume around your brand of keywords, it can be sessions, it can, be reach metrics.

And I do like some of the metrics where you're looking at kind of a weighted score and paid social. So it's, how do you take, clicks and views and things like that and decide for, okay, for every one thousand accounts or every 10,000 accounts, I wanna see, X number of responses, associated with them so that you're given a weighted view to what's happening at the top of the funnel.

But historically, I can say I have definitely seen a correlation to when I am reducing my budget on the brand and awareness side. I do later on see a reduction in what I'm seeing on the demand capture side. So they're close, they're tied together. And I think sometimes we just have to, rely on our historical correlations as opposed to looking for a very clean.

attribution and a dollar for dollar, kind of connection between what's happening at the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel. You really have to look at historically what's been happening in your program and what goes up when you your awareness budget, what goes down, or I actually I should say that inversely, what happens when you manipulate, the budget at the top of the funnel in, what do you see happening, at the middle of the funnel?

And then that will give you, sort of guardrails for your own program, what your audience to respond to and how they behave.

speaker-1 (12:46)

Yeah, so it's interesting because just a couple of days ago I was having this conversation with my colleague and we were both being frustrated that we can't have the perfect attribution model, right? because we said it earlier almost or a lot of the interactions happen, in the dark funeral where we can't measure them and we can't see them. And so we were really discussing this, the patterns that, we can use to really have a strong indicator or influence.

And so branded research, that searched results or campaign interactions, account penetrations, are we getting more and more people from the same accounts interested, new accounts, what about repeated engagements of the same either accounts or individuals like engaging several times across a specific time length? And so

These are kind of like the patterns that then give you an indication that you are building the influence, you are building that credibility, then we'll go that extra mile towards a conversion. So yeah, I totally agree with what Nicole was saying. And it's a good reminder for me. I'm always one that search for the perfect attribution model and it gets me every time. I'm like, it doesn't exist.

speaker-2 (13:52)

Yeah, when you said that I said, I have to talk to Lavorenza because I want to know what her perfect attribution model is

speaker-1 (13:58)

No, it doesn't exist.

I I always look for it.

speaker-2 (14:01)

Yeah, it's the one that we've all been searching for. But I think also with with the gentic search, we have a another signal to take a look at because how are you showing up in LLMs when your audience is researching? That is a signal in and of itself, So if you if adjacent terms around what it is that you offer and who you offer it for, if you're coming back in those responses, then that means that you're a

Awareness and your brain work is working.

speaker-1 (14:29)

Yeah, no, exactly. And I think also on the branded results, search results, they are becoming more and more important for that reason. so yeah, totally agree. I'm still looking for the perfect attribution model. If I find it, I will let you know. I doubt it will ever happen, but we can dream.

speaker-0 (14:44)

that's so true and some some people put a lot of creativity on the buyer journey to try to demonstrate that if someone is clicking on that ad, no one else apart from I don't know a procurement manager could be clicking on that ad because it's not appealing for no one else. I I've heard some people saying like things like

Don't listen to this reel unless that you work in blah blah blah, things like that that makes you very, very clear that if someone is reading and if someone is clicking that is because they come from certain industry or for a certain job title and that allows you to connect the dots basically. Have you tried things like that?

speaker-1 (15:26)

Well, I think this is now a trend, right? I don't know which is one of the trends. Don't click on this, I've been seeing it and yes. I know we have done some stuff along those lines, not as exactly as you described it, but I know there's been some tests from our social media team on that tone of voice.

speaker-0 (15:45)

Yeah.

All right, so I think this this leads us and you've touched on some of these things already, but this is our final topic. if buyers are forming preferences long before they are ready to speak with sales, brand c clearly has an important role, right? But marketing teams are still expected to demonstrate commercial impact. So how do you connect brand building that we all agree that is so important, right?

How do you connect that with demand and ultimately with pipeline? Like we need to demonstrate that we are generating pipeline at the end of the day. So yeah, how should marketers think about the relationship between awareness, useful content, community, human interaction and the demand that eventually becomes visible to the business?

speaker-2 (16:32)

So I think of it this way. I think that if your brand and awareness is working, then you're gonna see measurable signals in your own domain. So I start to look at things like my direct traffic. I start to look at our traffic overall. So, what's the session volume that I'm getting? am I seeing

very tight delivery between you know the types of ads that I have at the top of the funnel and where I'm looking for that traffic to land on our site. I really feel that you can use things like paid social and content syndication to really seed your audience but then your paid search campaigns and the conversion activity that you have on your site,

Are you actually seeing those high intent hand raisers? what's the quality of that traffic? So is it converting? are you getting opportunities off of them? Are those opportunities resulting in close one deals? That tells you a lot about the health of that traffic that came to your site. And so I am spending a lot of attention, looking at what does the traffic actually get us?

and I feel that if you seeded the right messages at the top of the funnel and the awareness layer, it should pay off with the right people coming to your site and they should be primed and ready to engage on your site and then also to give you the type of conversion that you can quantify.

speaker-1 (18:00)

And on these other thing, Joakin, in the past we talked about bridging the gap between marketing and sales. And I do see some sort of parallelism with with that because we we often talk about, brand and demand gener as, two separate things. And even though within companies very often there are separate teams, the customers don't experience it as separate things. They experience one customer journey. So one of the things that

I'm really focusing on at the moment is really that customer journey orchestration and that experience orchestration end to end, because I think that's where that gap basically you connect the two and you connect all the dots. so it's really the full customer journey experience and how do you orchestrate that across, from branding, which creates preference and familiarity all the way then to demand when that preference is turned into more of an action. So I do see the importance of.

Customer journey orchestration, if we wanna call it that way.

speaker-0 (18:53)

Of course, and that continuum that you mentioned at the beginning, right? That like having the same same brand voice on every touch point is is super important. And before we wrap up, I'd love to get one final thought from each of you. If marketers accept that they'll never see the entire buyer journey, what's the one thing they should focus on to have more influence over the buying decision anyway?

speaker-2 (19:19)

Hmm, that's a question.

speaker-1 (19:21)

That's

a good question. Well, maybe it's because I'm focusing so much on customer journeys at the moment. So I am going to go with that, really have a some clarity on the customer journey. And I know that we talked about the dark funnel, so where you can see, but using community for that and customer journey. So these would be my two kind of like a power combo that I would choose. the community.

And the human side of things and the customer journey.

speaker-0 (19:45)

Yeah.

speaker-2 (19:45)

Yeah, I think I would want marketers just to be grounded in, the fact that attribution tells you where credit landed, incrementality tells you what you cause. And I think that

only one of those is worth a budget decision. So I think making sure that you're paying attention to leading brand signals, around search, around volume, unaided awareness, in your target accounts. And then I think also

There are, also basic things that, you can do, post-sale surveys and things like that. how did you hear about us? you can be surveying your actual customers, pulling your customer marketing team, get after the fact attribution and direction around, what did you encounter in your search journey that led you to make us your favorite or led you to choose us? And so I think sometimes it's, that

after the fact, post-sale conversation that you're having with your install base or your customer base that can also, verify what you've been doing, the effectiveness of your program. So you need to get that feedback on the back end from your customers.

speaker-0 (20:50)

That's great advice. Nicole Lorenza, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation and different perspectives you brought to it. And thank you to everyone listening to B2B Marketing Futures. We'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much.

speaker-2 (21:07)

Thank you.

speaker-1 (21:07)

Thank you.