Even with access to new, more advanced self-service tools (hello, generative AI), business buying remains a long and complex process. Tight budgets, complex buying committees, and drawn-out purchase cycles are still very much the norm. Buyers are frustrated — and as our latest global buyer research shows, companies are falling short in helping them.

Forrester surveyed more than 16,000 global business buyers to better understand how they experience the purchase journey. The results, highlighted in our new report, The State Of Business Buying, 2024 (client access only), show that:

  • Buyers are increasingly dissatisfied. Eighty-seven percent of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they choose at the end of a “successful” purchasing process. Price is the reason cited most often — but there are others that are perhaps more instructive. Buyers are not satisfied with the technology, domain, and industry expertise that providers demonstrate, nor their ease and flexibility during the process. The disconnect is worse with Gen Z and Millennial buyers, who express dissatisfaction 91% of the time.
  • Internal processes add time and complexity. Nearly all (91%) of purchases stall at some point in the process, our survey data shows. While budget and price are the leading reasons, “my organization’s purchasing process” was the third-most selected response. Buyers contend with challenges such as managing competing organizational priorities, overlapping technologies and contracts, and financial negotiation. Adding to internal complexity is the growing size of buying groups: On average, 13 people within the organization are involved in the buying decision, and most purchases in our survey involved two or more departments.
  • Buyers crave autonomy. Buyers want to be able to find quick answers to their questions — and they want to be able to interact with experts for deeper conversations once they feel ready. Buyers prefer a near-even split between personal and self-guided interactions during the buying process, which has held consistent over the past few years. GenAI — a new response option this year — immediately rose to the top of self-guided interactions, followed closely by internet searches and vendor websites. Yet it’s not only the early stages of the buying process that buyers lean on self-service for — our research shows that the purchase transaction itself is also moving in that direction.
  • “One size fits all” approaches don’t work. Industry, technology, and domain expertise are among the top technical reasons that buyers cited for selecting a provider. Buyers want providers to understand their specific needs and context and to connect their offering’s capabilities accordingly. They also prize collaboration and partnership, citing drivers such as “ease of doing business” and the vendor’s “investment to co-create or co-innovate with us.” Providers can differentiate themselves by demonstrating a deep understanding of buyer needs and working processes.

Our new report, The State Of Business Buying, 2024 (client-only access), explores these and other findings in greater depth and offers new interactive capabilities for clients to get more detail about their specific target audiences. The report also includes actionable steps for companies to take to provide the seamless interactions and assistance with decision-making that buyers crave.

The report is part of our Buyer Insights series, which will publish between now and the end of January. Other reports in the series focus on buyer motivations and preferences by industry, region, company size, persona, and other variables. These reports are also interactive and allow providers to drill down to more specific details about their target audiences to make data-informed decisions about campaigns, programs, content assets, and messaging.

Contact your customer success manager to schedule an inquiry or submit a request here.