What you need to improve to make your B2B sales more human-centered

While some buying mechanics and considerations are unique to B2B settings, there’s still plenty of room to design with the human in mind. Customer-centric product teams can improve the B2B customer experience and brand perception to improve sales, growth, and retention.

This guide covers the key stages and touchpoints in your B2B customer experience, plus tips for improving each. 

What is a B2B customer experience?

Business-to-business (B2B) customer experience, also known as B2B CX, is the culmination of how your customer—in this case a business or organization, and their teams by extension—experiences your brand, services, and products. 

Customer experience (CX) and perception influence your customers' actions: every interaction and touchpoint someone has with your company affects how they feel and whether they'll buy (and rebuy) from you. 

Creating positive associations seems simple enough if you only have a few touchpoints, but B2B customer experience trends point to an increasingly involved buying cycle. In 2020, as more businesses went remote, the average number of buying interactions a B2B buyer had jumped from 17 to 27.

B2B companies have more to track, manage, and improve than ever before. Elements of your B2B CX touchpoints include:

• Self-guided research

• Personal conversations and recommendations

• Content marketing

• Product pages

• Sales reps

• Reviews

• Customer support

Each of these customer experience touchpoints, on their own and as a whole, influence your customer’s decisions. 

You cannot separate the B2B customer experience from your business success, because it measures the human relationship with your brand—and (surprise!) humans are the ones buying your products and services.

The 4 stages of B2B customer experience 

Improving B2B customer experience is a big task, so approach it with order and organization to make it easier to tackle. 

Here are some B2B customer experience examples across the four key stages of the B2B buyer's journey, plus ways to make positive changes to your B2B CX. 

1. Exploration

Exploration is at the top of your B2B sales funnel, and the first stop on your customers' buying journey. At this stage, potential customers learn about your company, products, and services, to decide whether your solution will work for them. 

Customers will interact with your marketing and positioning campaigns, product pages, website, review sites, and B2B influencers to make buying decisions. Content is also increasingly important for B2B companies, with 62% of B2B buyers relying on content marketing to research purchases.

At this stage, you want more people to spend more time with you, so measure metrics like:

• Website traffic

• Average session duration

• Bounce rate

• Marketing engagement

• Impressions

• Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)

• Pages per visit

• Search engine ranking

But keep in mind: while traditional analytics indicate how a page performs, you’ll need behavior analytics tools to understand why customers interact with the page the way they do. 

For example, Zenprint, an Australian B2B online printing service, used session recordings and heatmaps to decrease a drop-off rate by 7%. Google Analytics could tell them that potential customers left a particular page at a higher rate, but couldn’t tell them why they left. 

To get more context into customer behavior, the Zenprint team watched session recordings to see how customers interacted with the pricing page, and quickly discovered a design issue that confused visitors. They tested a few solutions based on what they learned to decrease the drop-off rate and increase conversions by 2%.

How to improve your B2B customer experience at the exploration stage

• Use an exit-intent survey to learn why people leave your website

• Create a customer journey map to find potential gaps in your CX

• Update your user personas to create relevant marketing and positioning

• Use competitor analysis to identify your unique selling proposition (USP) for product pages

• Use SEO analysis tools to increase organic traffic

• Monitor reviews and listings on review sites 

• Analyze heatmaps to ensure people are seeing and interacting with critical info

2. Procurement

The B2B procurement process usually involves a lot of hoops to jump through. 63% of B2B purchases involve more than four people, including champions, influencers, decision-makers, users, or ratifiers. If you want to increase sales and customer satisfaction, it’s in everyone’s best interest to have a quick and smooth buying process.  

Many buyers want to see self-service buying options. 70%-80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interaction or self-service, and McKinsey found that even deals of over a million dollars have a market for self-service interactions.

Touchpoints in the procurement stage of your customer experience can include:

• Demos and sales calls

• Contract negotiation

• Pricing plans

• Self-service buying

• Customer success support

• Order forms

• Your checkout process

At this stage, you should measure demo requests, inbound leads, add-to-cart rates, conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, time to close, and average order size.

Materials Market, a website that connects construction material suppliers to buyers, improved their purchasing pages and tripled conversions. The company watched recordings to see where customers hovered their cursors with uncertainty, and analyzed heatmaps to see how far people scrolled before they left the page. 

After spotting the challenges, Materials Market updated page designs, included extra information, and added a TrustPilot rating. As a result, their conversion rate increased from 0.5% to 1.6%, representing tens of thousands of pounds in annual revenue. 

How to improve your B2B customer experience at the procurement stage

• Create a buying guide for buyers to share with their stakeholders to get approval

• Make it easy for buyers to contact sales reps for support and guidance

• Ask people who bought from you what nearly stopped them

• Regularly review session recordings and heatmaps on self-service sales pages 

• Add guest checkout options to improve your cart abandonment rate

• Use a post-purchase survey to get feedback on the buying process

3. Product support

After the sale, your job transitions to helping new customers make the most of your product or service. Educating customers and quickly resolving issues or questions makes them more likely to have a great time with your brand. 

You can support new customers through educational content, product documentation, customer support, and customer success. Measuring support requests, time to resolution, and customer effort scores helps you gauge whether you’re effectively helping new customers. 

For example, your company could send a series of ‘what’s next’ emails to teach customers about the next steps in their product onboarding. Here’s what those emails could include based on what you sell:

• If you sell a product, send quick tips and comprehensive guides, so customers can get to work and start realizing value quickly.

• If you sell a service, transparency about timelines and deliverables makes customers feel secure in their choice.

If you aren’t sure where to start with product support, look at your customer support requests. If there are recurring themes, it may help to create self-service documentation. 

You can also proactively make changes based on product experience insights collected from tools like session recordings and heatmaps. Feedback widgets that collect customer perspectives on specific pages or website elements are another useful way to find and prioritize changes. 

How to improve your B2B customer experience at the product support stage

• Create a getting started guide so people can learn to implement your product or service or best prepare for it

• Calculate your customer effort score (CES)

• Create excellent customer support channels to help people resolve issues faster

• Use customer retention emails to stay in touch and increase repeat orders

• Prioritize great customer support 

• Use a first contact resolution survey to measure the effectiveness of your support

4. Renewal

The two levers of boosting profit margins are 

1. Lowering acquisition costs

2. Increasing repeat orders

When you expand renewals and reorders, you drive more sales and create brand advocates, which might be a relevant goal for your brand.  

Every touchpoint after a sale impacts your renewals, including emails, customer success interactions, and marketing. At this stage, you should measure your repeat customer rate, Net Promoter Score® (NPS), customer lifetime value, and customer retention rate.

For example, your company could use NPS surveys to find your most engaged customers, then use that information to contact them for a case study, which would help with future acquisition. You could also take time to learn about how they use your product or service to further refine your positioning.

How to improve your B2B customer experience at the renewal stage:

• Use a B2B churn survey to understand why people leave

• Launch a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey

• Conduct jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) surveys or user interviews to understand how people use your product or service

• Implement design thinking for continuous improvement

B2B customer experience is a team sport to connect with customers

Improving your customer experience delights customers, increases retention, and helps your business stand out from competition. Since your B2B customer experience considers every touchpoint in the buyer's journey, you need to work across teams to make progress efficiently.

Cross-functional collaboration through shared goals and information is essential to ensure your customer experience is cohesive. When you remain customer-centric and collaborative, you can create better experiences with less guessing and checking.