6sense Research: Financial Services Findings from our 2024 B2B Buyer Identification Benchmark

saraboostani

Hey all,

I'm a Market Research Analyst here on the 6sense Research team led by former VP and Principal Analyst with Forrester, @Kerry. Together, we get to research all things B2B. Earlier this week, we published a Benchmark Report all about how teams are identifying buyers and prioritizing their efforts. Below, we list a few findings from the research as told by respondents in the financial services industry!

About the study: we had close to 550 B2B professionals complete our survey, of which 16% were in the Financial Services Industry.

• A question we ask in all of our surveys is how well respondents’ companies have performed financially over the past year on a 10-point scale from “well below expectations” to “well above expectations”. Financial services respondents rated their company’s performance higher than all others. While a modest difference, it’s a statistically reliable trend.

• Financial services respondents report having larger buying groups than their peers in other industries (a difference of about 2 people).

• We then looked at another dataset from a study where we surveyed buyers themselves about their B2B purchases and found that financial services buyers also report larger buying groups compared to buyers in other industries (by about two people).

• Evidenced by the two bullet points prior, financial services marketers clearly understand the sizes of the buying groups they target.
• Larger buying groups create more digital footprints as they comb the internet in search of solutions to their business problems. These thousands of interactions are tracked, linked to their accounts, and are transformed into 3rd-party intent data for B2B vendors. This, along with standard signals like email and ad clicks, provides a vast trove of information for identifying prospective buyers. We investigated whether revenue teams utilize this wealth, considering 23 distinct buying signals. Ideally, all marketing teams should tap into more (the average team leverages just five or six). However, Financial Services teams are ahead, using more signals than other industries, which is great to see.

@crista.messenger

Kerry

It's been really interesting to see how industries differ or don't in their approach to creating and measuring demand. Super interesting to see FinServ companies really coming on strong in their sophistication.