The rise of the anti-social B2B buyer

How you can leverage smart CRM to connect to buyers who want to drive their own process

Selling is the most social aspect of any business. It’s where your team connects with potential customers, understands their needs and develops the relationships that ultimately result in transactions.

Sales people are those gregarious types, with an indefatigable approach to reaching out and nurturing relationships with any manner of potential buyers. They are the ones doing the presentations and demos, hosting the lunches, being the life of the party.

As Frank Bettger wrote in his 1947 classic, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, "All things being equal, people will do business with people they like; all things being not so equal, people will still tend to do business with people they like.”

The business lunch is the classic example of this process, possibly reaching its height over 20 years ago when five London city bankers were fired for spending £44,000 pounds on a midday meal (with wine).

Putting aside lavish lunches, today sales people are struggling to even connect with buyers for meetings or even phone calls. Buyers have become anti-social.

The rise of the ‘dark funnel’

Anti-social as buyers turn to the ‘dark funnel’, i.e. the larger part of the sales process that buyers are driving themselves, using online data and AI tools, and spending less time with a sales person.

The data is unequivocal. There is a distinct and growing preference for self-service and digital channels amongst B2B buyers:

• 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience, navigating purchases without interacting with sales representatives. (Gartner)
• 79% of buyers believe self-service portals will play an important role in B2B purchasing and after sales within the next three years. (Spryker/Statista)
• When familiar with a product, 64% of B2B buyers prefer a 100% digital buying experience, driven by speed, convenience, and comfort. (Gartner)

Because of this, the buyer is much more prepared and advanced in their process:

• • 91% of buyers come to sales meetings already familiar with the vendor. (6Sense)
  • 85% of buyers have largely established their purchase requirements before contacting sellers. (6Sense)
  • The average B2B buyer interacts with 13 pieces of content (including 8 vendor-created and 5 third-party sources) before engaging with a brand.
  • Buyers only spend about 17% of their total purchase journey time meeting with all potential vendors combined. If you're lucky, your organisation gets about 5% of that time. (HBR)

How do you cope with the 'anti-social' buyer?

Sales teams that can still attract an anti-social buyer have their fundamentals under control, driven by the understanding that their role is not so much to sell, but to help the prospect buy. Appealing to the anti-social buyer takes a strong understanding of who they are, where they are online, what their core problems are, and how your solution resolves these in a uniquely valuable way.

Built on a strong foundation, CRM plays an increasingly crucial role. In the small amount of time you have to engage with a buyer, you need to know as much as possible about them, and be able to provide information tailored to them, their business, and their situation.

Using CRM to maximise your time 'at-bat'

Given sales people only have a small amount of time to engage with anti-social buyers, you need to maximise the number of potential buyers entering your funnel, and then be intentional in how you engage.

This starts with smarter marketing, where a platform like HubSpot excels in catering to buyers that want highly relevant information delivered seamlessly based on their anonymous behaviour.

That looks like tools including:

• Smart content using CRM data (e.g., industry, company size, lifecycle stage) to present dynamic, personalised content on the website or within emails. A lead from a specific industry sees case studies relevant to them, making the information more valuable and trustworthy.
• CRM-powered workflows: create automated nurture sequences based on deep visitor behaviour (e.g., viewed 5 knowledge base articles and an ROI calculator). This delivers the right educational content automatically, helping the buyer self-educate without ever triggering a sales alert until they hit a high-intent threshold.
• AI Agents: use website agents for un-gated qualification. An agent asks qualification questions and provides content links. Only if the buyer explicitly asks for human intervention, or meets a high-score threshold, is a human rep notified.
• Content hub/blog: ensure your content (blogs, videos, guides) is ungated and easily searchable. The anti-social buyer prefers to research anonymously; requiring a form fill too early will make them leave and search a competitor's site.

Once buyers are qualified and sales can actually engage, HubSpot’s sales engagement tools can be applied to maximise the precious time available, for example:

• Meetings links: reps use personalised meeting links (via the CRM) in their automated email sequences and collateral. This puts the buyer in control: they can book a call only when they are ready, not when the rep follows up.
• Snippets and templates: teams can use personalised snippets and templates for repetitive questions. This allows reps to respond quickly and consistently to simple, common inquiries via chat or email, getting the customer the information they need without a back-and-forth conversation.
• Commerce hub & quotes: this allows for the creation of self-serve B2B e-commerce portals and a seamless quote-to-cash process. The buyer can review a quote, modify line items (if permitted), sign, and pay online, all without a manual intervention from the sales rep.
• Documents tool: track exactly which pages of a proposal or document a buyer viewed and for how long. This digital ‘body language’ allows the salesperson to understand the buyer's priorities and progress without having to call them to ask.

While taking a prospect out for a decent lunch is the preferred method of engagement for most sales people, the reality is that AI-empowered buyers are less social and more focused on driving their own purchase process as much as they can.

The good news is that with the right fundamentals in place, technology like HubSpot enables you to meet these buyers where they want to be met, enable them to engage through the ‘dark funnel’, and emerge into the light of a real transaction.

Want to read more? We overview some of these principles in this publication ‘the new sales playbook for manufacturers.’