Why Do B2B Buyers Fear Making a Purchase

I have a friend who is a senior level purchasing decision-maker for a national organization. Like me, he’s in his fifties and has been interacting with vendor partners for over twenty years. From time to time he is prone to outbursts. Not violent outbursts, just stress induced verbal projections at which time he’ll shout, "vendors! They’re all just a bunch of lying whores!"

Now, my friend is generally a very kind man. But once or twice a year he’ll get burned by a "seller’s commitment gone wrong". And because I’ve also been a senior level decision-maker, I find a great deal of humor in his editorial on the current state of b2b buyer/seller relationships. (As a side note, I have no misperception that many senior level salespeople don’t feel the same way about their customers!)

But, the point here is that my friends’ commentary is exactly why b2b decision makers have a hard time making a purchase decision. The reality is that virtually every b2b buyer has been burned at some point by poor after-sale product/service performance. They’ve been letdown by the gap between what they thought they would get and what they actually got!

People with b2b purchasing authority typically have many other duties and obligations besides working with vendors. Their main job may be in managing operations, accounting, marketing, production or some other department. So they have bosses to manage and subordinates to look after as well as their on-going administrative duties. Post-sale drama takes up their time, costs them political capital within their organization and is often their major source of stress as resolution is out of their control.

So what do buying decision makers do to alleviate the stress of making a purchase? (Besides swearing?) Easy: they look for the decision that is the easiest to defend in the event something does go wrong.

-They go with vendors they’ve used in the past because "gosh, we’ve never had a problem with these guys before!"
-They pick the lowest price provider so they can argue that any money saved was put aside to deal with the eventuality of a problem down the road.
-They buy from a referral so they can spread the blame around or at least add to their justification for which they selected.
-They’ll say "well I just gave these folks a trial order in the hopes that we could expand our line-up, I guess they failed the test!"

In short, they look for any help in justifying their partner selection.

If you want to get more new business, or a bigger share of your current customers business, then you need to be the safest choice. Not the cheapest choice, the most dependable choice.

What Buyers Want
What Buyers Want.