G2 Buyer Behavior Report 2023
G2 is the largest software review platform, with over 80 million people a year using it to inform their technology purchase decisions.
Each year they survey a subset of these buyers and publish a Buyer Behavior Report, and the 2023 edition has landed.
G2 surveyed over 1,700 B2B decision makers, including individual contributors, managers, VPs and higher across a range of SMB, Mid-Market and Enterprise companies from across the globe.
Why is the G2 Buyer Behavior Report important to you?
Today your buyers are travelling anywhere from 70% all the way up to 100% through their buying process before they put their hands up to speak to your sellers.
This is the age of the self-serving buyer, and if you put all your investment and focus on your sales process and sales team then you will miss the opportunity that buyer enablement presents.
The G2 report gives you an outside-in perspective of what your buyers’ value and can inform your Go To Market investment decisions.
I recommend downloading the full report, but here are some highlights
Buyers are continuing to spend on software
The tech industry has experienced economic challenges and layoffs in 2022 and 2023 as investors prioritise profitable growth over growth at all costs.
It can be easy to conflate this with the tech industry being in trouble.
Instead, the G2 survey shows that 91% of buyers plan to either spend the same or increase their spending on software in 2023.
And in 2024 that number increases further to 94% - buyers are bullish on what they plan to spend and you should continue to invest to capture it.
Buyers want quick returns on investment
Whilst buyers are continuing to spend, they are now more focused on seeing an immediate return on that spend.
Buyers need to be able to see a return on their investment in a matter of 6 months, rather than multiple years.
This is driving a reduction in the average contract length, as buyers seek monthly plans, or commit only to a year at a time.
Sellers pushing multi-year contracts will find these only land with customers who have already proven the value of the product and in exchange for some hefty discounts.
You should consider how your buyer can demonstrate back to their leaders that your product has returned value in a matter of months.
This value needs to be hard benefits - “we sold more”, “we spent less” - anything clouded in ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ is not specific enough.
“As a buyer I want to know, if I put $1 into this machine, will I get $3 straight back?”
What are the most valuable use cases, and how can your onboarding team focus on demonstrating this value to your new customers?
Research takes up most of the buying process
83% of buyers said they had an official buying process, and that research was ranked as the phase of that process that was most time consuming.
Buying is difficult - there are so many problems to solve, so many competing solutions and so much cross-over between similar vendors.
Buyers seek out independent recommendation from their peers, from analysts and from trusted partners to help guide their thinking.
Respondents stated that the top 85% of most influential sources included:
Industry experts
Colleagues or professional networks
Online reviews
Other internal influencers
Just 1% listed the software company’s salesperson as influential, down from 3% last year.
You should consider how you can get your message into the hands of relevant industry experts, professional communities, product review platforms and analysts - as this is where your buyer is going to learn about the problem and uncover possible solutions.
Ease of onboarding and achieving ROI quickly are top considerations
Whether you are selling to small businesses or large enterprise, the top five considerations for buyers are consistent.
Buyers want to know how easily they can implement and use your product,
And therefore how quickly they can get value from the product.
Topics that your sellers might focus on including number of features and price barely make the top 10.
You should consider how you can support your buyer by providing:
free and un-gated demos or licences,
getting started webinars
how to guides for the most common use cases.
Knowing that your buyer is thinking “How quickly can I get the team up and running and demonstrate value back to my company?” build out self-serve tools to assist them in answering their question.
Check out how Airtable do this really well in this blog article:
Think from your buyer’s perspective
As you scale your Go To Market team, and hire in new leaders across marketing, sales and customer success, the temptation to focus internally and think how to develop your own sales processes can be strong.
The G2 report reminds you that the most important person in the process is your buyer.
If they don’t come across you through peer recommendations, if they can’t sample your product through ungated demos and free licences, if they can’t see how they would quickly onboard their teams and demonstrate value back to their leaders,
Then it doesn’t matter how well your sales team is mastering MEDDPICC - they will have no buyers to qualify.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
Business Model Design Workshops - I’ll work with you and your team to design or refine a business model for a new or existing product.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.