B2B Buyers are People Too – That’s Why Personalisation Matters

‘All marketing and sales activities are about ‘business-to-human’ interactions. This is why personalisation is as important for B2B as B2C.’

This is the opening argument of a new report – The Case for B2B Personalisation – produced by London Research in association with Adobe. And the survey-based research finds that B2B marketers are realising the truth of this statement.

Over half (52%) of the 350 European B2B companies that responded to our survey claim to be very much focused on personalisation. That’s up from just over a third (38%) when we carried out a similar survey in 2022.

What’s more, the best performers in B2B marketing are much more likely to see the importance of personalisation. The report splits respondents into three groups; leaders, followers and laggards. Leaders are 69% more likely than laggards to be focusing heavily on personalisation, the research finds.

The report quotes Harpreet Singh Sethi, Global Head of Technology at Unilever Food Solutions: “Personalisation is absolutely essential. Without it, it’s like shooting in the dark, lacking any aim or precision.”

“Personalisation provides the accuracy needed to target customers effectively, ensuring that we deliver the right content to the right customers at the right time,” he says. “This approach leads to optimal results for our organisation.”

Key findings

Using this leaders/laggards approach, the research also found that:

• Leaders are significantly more likely than laggards to be employing a full range of personalisation tactics and initiatives. The gap is widest for permission-based first-party data (+89%), real-time targeting of information based on on-site behavior (+88%), and use of machine learning to serve the next best offer, content or experience (+105%).
• Leaders are 79% more likely than laggards to be focusing their overall sales and marketing activities on multi-person buying groups within an organisation. They are 43% more likely to rate their B2B marketing automation platform as ‘good’ for its ability to identify and target at a buying-group level.
• Legacy software technology is seen as the biggest obstacle to more seamless and personalised customer experiences by 36% of respondents.
• Leaders are 40% more likely than laggards to say they will significantly increase their investment in personalisation-related marketing technology over the next 12 months.
• Leaders are more than three times more than laggards to say that AI has been operationalised into their day-to-day marketing activities, including content creation, conversational chatbots and customer journey optimisation.

Five steps to raise your personalisation game

The report makes five recommendations for better personalisation:

Integrated technology is vital. Leaders recognise that personalised B2B marketing requires an integrated technology set-up. CIOs and CTOs must work with heads of both marketing and sales organiations to ensure the business’s technology infrastructure is geared towards a unified approach to revenue growth.

Buying groups are key to marketing success. High-consideration B2B buying decisions are often made by formal or informal committees of senior employees from across the business. Marketing leaders focus their activities on these groups, and invest in the technology required to do so.

Unifying and activating customer data and insights across channels is fundamental. A 360-degree view of the customer is essential to joining up their path to purchase. It’s also the only way to ensure that artificial intelligence can deliver relevant, personalised messages at each point on that path. This requires investment in your martech stack, and in its integration with other systems across the business, particularly that of the sales department.

Aim for revenue team convergence. A united revenue team means less resources wasted on dead-end leads and uninterested customers. It also helps ensure collaboration on key accounts and buying groups in real time. It should consist of representatives of product and customer success as well as sales and marketing. And it will need both a common view of the ideal customer profile (ICP), and a collaborative approach to identifying and targeting the right buying group stakeholders in each opportunity.

Don’t delay your AI deployment. Or rather, only delay your AI deployment for as long as it takes to create the solid data foundation AI requires. AI will only grow in importance, so those who start to test and learn now will have a head start when the technology becomes even more crucial.

Pauliina Panaite, Global Senior Digital Strategist at Siemens, sums up the importance of a personalisation-based strategy for B2B marketing: “Usually [creating personalised content] would take a lot of time, effort and budget to do, but that’s not the case anymore. It can be replicated and scaled really quickly. But the main thing is knowing what customers are actually interested in because otherwise it’s not relevant.

“Personalisation is not that it’s your name there. Personalisation is actually about speaking to you and your challenges, and how that’s relevant.”

* The full report – The Case for B2B Personalisation – is now available for download.

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