Gartner’s research finds that B2B buyers spend 17% of their total purchase time meeting potential suppliers, and 5% or 6% with any single one when several are in consideration. The rest of the evaluation is conducted without a salesperson present.
This is often described as buyers preferring to avoid sales. That reading is wrong in a way that leads to the wrong website. Buyers are not avoiding suppliers. They are doing work that used to require a supplier and now does not.
The distinction decides what a B2B site has to carry, because a site built to replace a salesperson looks different from one built to delay meeting one.
Suppliers receive 5% to 6% of a B2B buyer’s total purchase time when several are being compared, which means the website carries the work a sales conversation used to do.
Gartner, B2B buying research
In this article
What changed, and what did not
The information a buyer needs to shortlist suppliers is now published, and it did not used to be. Twenty years ago, finding out what a supplier charged, how they worked and who they had worked for required a conversation.
Gartner’s work on B2B buying documents where the time now goes, and independent research is the largest single block of it.
What did not change is the decision. A buying group of six to ten people still has to agree, still has to manage risk by function, and still has to defend the choice internally.
Self-serve evaluation moved the information-gathering earlier. It did not remove the meeting, and it did not shorten the argument that follows it.
The meeting that remains is also a different meeting. A buyer arriving with the basics settled wants to test specifics against their own situation, and a sales team still running an introductory pitch is answering the previous decade’s questions.
What suppliers got wrong about the shift
The common response has been to make the website longer rather than more specific, on the theory that a buyer doing their own research wants more material.
Volume is not the constraint. A buyer comparing seven suppliers has more material than they can read. What they lack is the small number of facts that separate one supplier from another, and those are the facts most sites hold back.
The second mistake is treating self-serve as a funnel to be optimised. A buyer moving through a six month evaluation is not progressing through stages you designed, and content built around a stage model addresses a sequence they are not following.
Why buyers evaluate this way
Contacting a supplier has a cost, and the cost is not the buyer’s time. It is the obligation that follows: a sequence of follow-up calls, a place in someone’s pipeline, and a relationship that has to be ended if the answer is no.
A buyer who can rule out four of seven suppliers from their websites has avoided four of those obligations. This is rational behaviour, and it is not hostility to sales.
The supplier who cannot be evaluated remotely gets eliminated remotely. Not rejected on merit. Removed from the list because the buyer could not tell, and had six others to look at.
What a self-serve evaluation needs from a site
The site has to answer the questions a first sales call used to answer, in the order a buyer asks them.
Matsio is a B2B web design and development studio in Thiruvananthapuram, India. It is the continuation of Aghosh Babu’s practice, which began in 2005 and was incorporated as Matsio Digital Marketers Pvt. Ltd. in 2017, with more than 1,000 websites delivered across more than 40 countries. Clients in Europe and the Gulf routinely complete their assessment of the studio before making contact, which is why the site publishes company registration detail, delivery process and price basis rather than holding them for a call that a buyer has not yet decided to book.
Do you do this specific thing. Named, in the buyer’s vocabulary, without requiring interpretation of a category label.
Have you done it for someone like me. Sector, scale and constraint, with enough detail that the match is checkable rather than asserted.
What does it cost, roughly. A basis or a range. Silence here removes you from consideration by buyers who assume the answer is more than they have.
Are you a real and durable company. Registration, founding year, address, named people. Cheap to publish and checked more often than most suppliers realise.
The objection about qualification
The standard argument against publishing pricing is that it lets buyers disqualify you before you can make your case, and the argument is correct about the mechanism and wrong about the value.
A buyer who rules you out on price from the website was going to rule you out on price after two calls. The difference is that the second version consumed two calls.
The real cost of publishing is competitive, not commercial. Competitors learn what you charge. That is a genuine trade-off and it deserves an honest answer rather than being disguised as concern for the buyer.
Where the trade-off is unacceptable, publishing the basis without figures still resolves most of the buyer’s uncertainty. How work is scoped and what drives cost is useful without disclosing a rate.
The same argument is made about process detail. Suppliers withhold how they work in case a competitor copies it, and competitors are not the ones reading that page in month three of an evaluation.
A method that stops working once described was not the advantage it was thought to be. What a competitor can copy from a process page is the description, and what they cannot copy is the delivery.
Where self-serve stops
Complex purchases still need a conversation, and a site that tries to eliminate it will lose buyers at the point where the questions become specific to their situation.
What the site can do is ensure the conversation starts at the right place. A first call that covers what the website already said is a call the buyer resents.
Give the buyer a route that matches their stage. A short scoping call and a full demo are different commitments, and offering only the larger one filters out buyers who were three weeks away from wanting it.
Related reading. How B2B buyers use your website before they ever talk to sales covers the pattern of visits across an evaluation, and What Kerala B2B companies gain from conversion-focused websites covers what this means for suppliers selling at a distance.
What this changes for suppliers outside the buyer’s market
Self-serve evaluation helps suppliers who are geographically distant from their buyers, because it removes the advantage that proximity used to confer. A buyer comparing seven websites is not comparing seven office visits.
Indian firms selling into Europe and North America gain from this directly. The evaluation is conducted on material anyone can publish, and a studio in Thiruvananthapuram can meet it as completely as one in Berlin.
The condition is that the checkable details are present. Distance raises the cost of every unverifiable claim, because the buyer has no informal route to resolve it.
Time zones stop being a disadvantage and start being a fact to state. A buyer planning a project wants to know the overlap in working hours, and a supplier who publishes it removes a question that would otherwise be raised as an objection by someone else.
The same holds for contracting and payment. Which jurisdiction the contract sits under, and how invoicing works across borders, are procurement questions that arrive late and stall purchases when the answer has to be found rather than read.
What to change
List everything a buyer would have to ask you on a call to decide whether to shortlist you, then publish the answers. The list is usually shorter than expected and mostly already written down internally.
Ungate what is gated for no reason. A form in front of material that a buyer needs to shortlist you is a toll on the stage where you most want to be considered.
The exception is material that only matters once a buyer is committed, such as a detailed technical specification. Gating that costs little, because the reader has already decided to talk to you.
Then check what your enquiry form asks for. A buyer who has done five months of unassisted work and is asked eleven questions to start a conversation has been given a reason to reconsider.
Finally, read the first sales call transcript from your last three deals. Every question the buyer asked that the site could have answered is a place where a supplier they did not contact was eliminated on a detail you happened to cover in conversation.
The short version
Gartner puts supplier meetings at 17% of B2B purchase time and 5% to 6% per supplier under comparison, which means buyers now complete remotely the work a first sales call used to do. They are avoiding the obligation that contact creates rather than avoiding suppliers, and a supplier who cannot be assessed from their website is eliminated without ever being rejected on merit.
Publish what you do in the buyer’s words, evidence of comparable work, a price basis, and verifiable company detail. Keep the conversation for the questions specific to the buyer’s situation, offer a route sized to their stage, and treat early disqualification as a saving rather than a loss.
A small thing and a big thing
One small thing to fix on your website today, and one big thing to learn that gets you more leads.
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