15 Mind-Blowing Stats About High-Tech B2B.

The competition to stand out in an extremely cluttered high-tech B2B market has never been greater. Technology is changing at the speed of light and the need to keep up and keep innovating is at the top of the industry’s strategic to-do list.

Adding to the complexity, technology buyers are changing, with great levels of expectations for their experiences. The stats below capture these changes and how high-tech marketers are keeping up.

1. The enterprise technology buyer is changing. One-third of Millennials reported having budget and/or sign-off on enterprise technology purchases of $10,000-plus. In comparison, 23% of Baby Boomers and 27% of Gen X reported the same authority. (Source: Arketi Group)

2. In fact, when evaluating tech purchases, Millennials’ most frequently referred to industry analysts (38%), vendor face-to-face meetings (36%) and websites (33%). By comparison, Baby Boomers said they rely more on analysts (50%), colleagues (49%) and vendor meetings (48%), while Gen X prefers colleagues and vendor websites (both 40%) and analysts and trade shows (both 38%). (Source: Arketi Group)

3. Using data to inform marketing, planning and decision making was named the top digital capability and drove investment strategies for high-tech B2B in 2016. (Source: Adobe)

4. The future of high-tech B2B sales is digital. The same study forecasts that more than half of high-tech B2B sales will come from digital by 2020. (Source: Adobe)

5. In cases where high-tech B2B companies have undertaken broad transformations of their customer-experience processes, the impact has been higher client-satisfaction scores, reductions of 10% to 20% in cost-to-serve, revenue growth of 10% to 15% and an increase in employee satisfaction. (Source: McKinsey)

6. B2B digital leaders drive five times more revenue growth than their peers. (Source: McKinsey)

7. B2B high-tech allocates about 15% of overall budget to marketing each year, on average. (Source: Deloitte)

8. Research that looked at skills for B2B tech marketers found that soft skills, such as good communication and people management are the most important skill sets. (Source: Spiceworks)

9. The same study found that writing skills rank second (80% said they are very or extremely important), followed by content marketing skills (78%), digital media skills (77%), data analysis skills (77%) and email marketing skills (65%). (Source: Spiceworks)

10. Last year, a study asked high-tech marketers to rate the intensity of competition on a scale of 1 to 10. Sixty per cent responded with an eight or higher. (Source: Ovum)

11. A majority of high-tech companies said customer experiences and becoming experience-led was their No. 1 priority in 2017. (Source: Adobe/Econsultancy)

12. In 2016, 36% of technology marketers said they had a documented content marketing strategy (up from 33% in 2015), a proven tool for improving content marketing effectiveness, the aforementioned report found. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)

13. 62% of B2B tech marketers said producing engaging content is their greatest content marketing challenge (and, accordingly, 70% are focused on creating more engaging content). (Source: Content Marketing Institute)

14. Competition is heating up. The number of martech vendors has soared from about 150 in 2011 to almost 4,000 today. (Source: Blogger Scott Brinker)

15. On average, 6.8 people are involved in purchasing decisions in B2B high-tech. (Source: CEB)