In our Marketing of Life Science Tools and Services group on LinkedIn, we recently discussed an article in the Harvard Business Review on “The End of Solution Sales.” While this is an excellent article and I suggest reading it, we’ll focus on one key finding: that “[…] customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision — researching solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing, and so on — before even having a conversation with a supplier.” This is just the beginning, but it does highlight something of key importance for marketing that is not discussed in the article.

If 60% of the purchasing decision is concluded before interaction with sales, marketing needs take responsibility (and claim the opportunity) for satisfying customers’ self-driven quests for information.

As the default behavior of B2B consumers is changing to include more self-fulfilled quests for information, life science marketers must make the necessary information to drive their target audience’s purchasing decisions available. The ability to predict the information that will be necessary, as well as the downstream ability to shape content to the audience’s measured behavior, is of increasingly critical importance. Marketing campaigns need to be able to respond dynamically to collected data on prospect behavior if the appropriate content is to be delivered at the appropriate time. A content roadmap becomes an even more critical component of generating demand. These factors collectively drive the importance of performing market research / marketing research, developing a clear marketing strategy, and planning a content-driven campaign.

If B2B purchasing decisions are 60% made by the time a conversation w/ supplier occurs, this places more of a responsibility on life science marketers to shape opinion before that first conversation. More planning is required, however such planning will have an increasingly positive effect on marketing ROI. Furthermore, we can conclude that marketing campaigns driven primarily by awareness-generation efforts will continue to decrease in effectiveness.