The Rise of the Self-Serve Buyer

As we’ve all heard, B2B buying interactions have changed dramatically over the past few years. According to a recent TrustRadius study: “in 2021, 87% of buyers wanted to self-serve all or some of the journey, whereas this year, virtually 100% want to self-educate and manage the buying experience on their own.” According to a Gartner® report, “nearly three-quarters (72%) of buyers prefer a seller-free buying experience and are devoting less time to meeting with suppliers than they do to independent research.”¹

So what’s a B2B company to do?

At Demandbase, we primarily still sell through a sales-led growth process, though we’ve recently branched out into product-led growth with our Account ID Free Edition and have more PLG motions planned this year. But we were keenly aware of these trends towards buyer self-research, so we set out to launch a brand new initiative around building tools and content to encourage buyers to self-qualify themselves on our solutions. Internally, we call this initiative Project Jetsons after the animated sitcom from the 60’s and 80’s where one of the key ways the characters ate was via a self-serve food generating machine in their kitchen.

We wanted to address common buyer questions like does Demandbase solve my problem?, does it work with my tech stack?, and does it fit within my budget? We already oriented much of our content around our key use cases: Build, Find, Engage, Close and Measure. But, as is common with many tech vendors, we didn’t publish our prices on our website — until now. To answer the last question — which to many buyers today is often the most important — we recently launched a pricing estimator tool that guides buyers through a short wizard asking them about their business challenges and the departments who will use Demandbase. This allows us to recommend a Demandbase solution and provide an estimated price buyers can take back to their buying group to plan their budgets.

We believe strongly in making sure buyers find out as much about Demandbase as possible, either self-serve here on our website or via our value-oriented selling team. We’ll continue to produce content like our pricing estimator tool to provide more resources for buyer research. Check out some of our currently available resources today and keep coming back to see what’s new in the future!

¹ Gartner, Increase Buyer Engagement by Deploying 3 Prospecting Fundamentals, Alyssa Cruz, Shiela Rahimian, Dan Gottlieb, January 4, 2023. ​​GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.