Insights
How AI Search Will Change B2B Tech Buying
In my opinion, the overall B2B buyer journey is contracting rather than expanding.
Soon LLM recommendations will own the shortlist for vendor discovery and the buyer’s journey will condense into a few highly impactful points in the decision-making process.
While most trends show increases in B2B interaction touchpoints before a buyer makes a decision, I believe this is driven by the increasing number of available touchpoints, as opposed to B2B buyers taking longer to decide or scrutinising their decisions more.
Buyers are simply seeing more touchpoints because a greater number are available to them. It's businesses driving this trend, not the buyer.
We talk about the number of B2B touchpoints, but we don’t spend enough time thinking of the impact of each touchpoint.
A word-of-mouth referral is worth considerably more than seeing a banner sponsorship on a newsletter and a 4.78/5 review score on G2 drives more credibility than a Google Search Ad.
Not all touchpoints are created equal, and AI and LLMs will disproportionately impact the way B2B buyers discover, consider and decide on software purchases.
These days, LLMs are becoming the first layer of vendor discovery. Instead of comparing 10 tabs, ChatGPT will pre-filter and rank suppliers based on what a user is looking for.
As long as users see LLMs as a trustworthy source of information (which so far they do), buyers will clearly continue using it.
And coming back to the power of different touchpoints, LLMs are more akin to a word of mouth referral than a banner on an email newsletter.
Practically, your company’s influence in the B2B buyer journey will largely be decided by how you perform in recommendation engines. That is determined by:
Once the LLM generates a shortlist, humans spend less time researching and more time validating.
That changes the marketer’s job from nurturing awareness over months to winning the one-shot answer moment.
You need to think about how you can be recommended in LLMs and provide enough information and credibility to be referenced across the awareness, consideration and decision-making stages of the buying cycle.
I don’t believe the decision window will occur in one day, but it will predominantly occur in one place: LLMs.
The rise of LLMs are, in my opinion, the best marketing channel to happen to businesses since Google in around 2008. Search engine competition just wasn’t the same then.
Yes, many were gaming the system, and yes, that paid off (big time) but it’s not the approach a reputable business should take. The word, 'reputable', is really what it’s all about.
Any B2B marketer should wake up asking themselves, “How do I improve the online reputation of my company today?”
