Gartner’s research on B2B buying finds that buyers spend 17% of their total purchase time meeting potential suppliers. When they are comparing several, that falls to 5% or 6% of the time with any one of them.
The remaining 83% is spent elsewhere: researching independently, meeting internally, and working out what the organisation needs. Your website is present for a portion of that, and your sales team is not present for any of it.
This changes what a B2B website is for. It is not a brochure supporting a conversation. It is the part of the evaluation that happens without you.
B2B buyers spend 17% of their total purchase time meeting potential suppliers, falling to 5% or 6% with any single supplier when several are under consideration.
Gartner, B2B buying research
In this article
What the 17% figure describes
Gartner’s research tracks how buying groups allocate time across a complex B2B purchase, and the 17% covers all supplier meetings combined, across every vendor in consideration.
The per-supplier figure is the one that should worry a sales director. At 5% or 6% of total buying time, a supplier gets a few hours of direct contact across an evaluation that may run for months.
Everything else the buying group learns about you, they learn from sources you do not control or from a website you do.
The figure describes complex purchases with multiple stakeholders. It does not describe a small transactional sale, and applying it to one overstates the case.
The 17% is time, not influence. A single meeting can decide a purchase, and the research does not claim that supplier contact matters in proportion to its duration. What it establishes is that the contact is a small window, and that everything surrounding it happens without you.
The practical reading is about sequence rather than importance. By the time the meeting happens, the buying group has already formed positions from material you did not present in person.
Who is reading, and when
The buying group for a complex B2B purchase typically involves six to ten decision makers, and they do not arrive at your site together or for the same reasons.
The first visit is usually one person shortlisting. They are checking whether you plausibly do the thing, at roughly the right scale, in a way that will survive being shown to colleagues. This visit is short and its outcome is binary.
The second wave is the group. Once you are on a list, other stakeholders arrive with narrower questions: security, integration, commercial terms, references in their sector.
The third is verification after a conversation. Someone returns to check a claim made on a call. This visitor is the closest to buying and the least accounted for in most site analytics.
These waves look identical in a traffic report. All three register as sessions, and nothing separates the shortlisting visit from the verification visit that precedes a signature.
Return visits are the signal worth watching. A rise in returning visitors from a single organisation over a fortnight describes a buying group at work, and it is one of the few things site analytics can tell you about a purchase in progress.
What they are checking for
Buyers evaluating remotely are mostly looking for reasons to eliminate. Shortlisting is a subtractive exercise, and the site is read for disqualifiers before it is read for merits.
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. Most of the studio’s enquiries arrive from companies in Europe, the Gulf and North America that have read the site without any contact first, which is the same pattern the Gartner figures describe and the reason the site carries specifics rather than positioning. 85% of the studio’s clients return for further work, measured across every engagement since 2005.
Scale is the first filter. A buyer needs to know whether you work with organisations their size. A site that names no client size, no project scale and no price basis fails this check by omission.
Sector familiarity is the second. Not because the work differs enormously, but because a buyer wants evidence you have met their constraints before.
Continuity is the third. Whether the company will still exist in three years, and who is accountable. This is why founding dates, registration details and named people carry weight out of proportion to their length on the page.
The pages that do the work
Homepage traffic is the least useful measure of a B2B site, because the pages that decide shortlisting are usually further in. Case studies, service detail pages, pricing and the about page carry the evaluation.
The about page is consistently underestimated. For a buyer assessing a supplier they have never met, it answers who is accountable and how long the company has operated, and both questions sit close to the decision.
Case studies are read for structure rather than narrative. A buyer scans for the situation, the constraint, what was done and what changed, and abandons anything that reads as a testimonial with a logo attached.
Service detail pages are where sector fit is decided. A generic services page tells a buyer you offer a category. A page describing the constraints you have worked under tells them whether you have met theirs, and that is the comparison they are running against two other suppliers.
Pricing pages do work even when they carry no fixed price. Stating the basis on which projects are costed lets a buyer decide whether to proceed, and a buyer who rules themselves out at this point has saved both sides a call.
What breaks under remote evaluation
Claims that would pass unchallenged in conversation fail on a page, because the reader has time and no one to ask. A sales director can qualify a vague statement on a call. A page cannot.
Unsourced numbers are the common failure. A percentage with no baseline, no period and no source reads as marketing to a reader who is looking for reasons to eliminate.
Superlatives cost more than they return. A claim to be the leading supplier in a category cannot be checked by the reader, and it occupies space a verifiable fact could hold.
Missing information reads as a decision. A site with no pricing indication, no client names and no location is not neutral to a buyer. It is a supplier who chose not to say.
Distance makes the checking harder
A buyer in Frankfurt evaluating a supplier in Thiruvananthapuram cannot visit the office, ask a mutual contact, or recognise the client logos. Every check they would otherwise make informally has to be made from the site.
This raises the value of details that seem mundane. A registered company name, a founding year that matches the register, a street address, and named people with verifiable histories all substitute for the informal checking that proximity would provide.
Indian suppliers selling into Europe and North America face this at full strength, and the ones that handle it well tend to publish more detail rather than more polish.
Related reading. How Indian B2B companies win international clients through their website covers the cross-border version of this problem in more depth, and What the Stanford Web Credibility Project teaches B2B companies about trust covers the research on what makes a visitor believe a company.
What this means for the sales team
By the time a buyer makes contact, they have formed a view, and the first conversation is usually a confirmation rather than an introduction. Discovery questions that the site should have answered waste the small share of time the buyer has allocated.
The practical consequence is that the sales team should know what the enquirer read. Most form integrations can capture the pages visited before submission, and that record shortens the first call.
It also means the questions sales answers repeatedly are a specification for the website. If the same three questions come up on every call, the site is not answering them.
What to do about it
List the ten questions your sales team answers most often, then check which the site answers without a conversation. The gaps are the work, and this exercise takes an afternoon with two people.
Then read your own site as a buyer looking for reasons to eliminate rather than reasons to engage. The unverifiable claims become visible immediately once the frame changes.
Publish the things that are boring to write and useful to check. Company registration details, a founding year, named people, client sizes and a price basis all cost nothing and answer questions a remote buyer cannot resolve otherwise.
The short version
Gartner puts supplier meetings at 17% of total B2B purchase time, and 5% to 6% per supplier when several are being compared, with buying groups of six to ten people. Most of the evaluation happens on your website without you, and it is conducted as a search for reasons to eliminate rather than reasons to engage.
Answer the questions your sales team fields repeatedly, publish checkable detail rather than positioning, and treat the about page and case studies as decision pages rather than supporting material. For a supplier being evaluated across a distance, the mundane verifiable facts do more work than any claim about quality.
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.
Your information is
safe with us. No spam.