G2’s 2022 Software Buyer Behavior Report: Self-Serve Channels Rise as Vendor Trust Wanes
Compared to 2021, global B2B survey respondents report buying software directly from vendors less, but more from third-party marketplaces and value-added resellers
G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, released its annual Software Buyer Behavior Report, which examines the state of B2B software buying in 2022, including what has shifted over the past year. This announcement was made at the SaaStr Annual conference, the world’s top cloud gathering, where G2 CMO Amanda Malko presented key findings from the report.
According to responses from more than 1,000 B2B decision-makers across the globe, G2’s survey found that most buyers expect their software and tech spending to either increase or remain the same in 2022 (89%) and 2023 (92%). Despite this optimism, it’s important to note that these are slight declines from what respondents forecasted last year, likely due to current economic uncertainty.
“In the G2 2021 Software Buyer Behavior Report, we saw the balance of power continuing to tip in favor of the buyer,” said Amanda Malko, CMO at G2. “This hasn’t slowed since then. In fact, in this year’s report, all signs point toward 2022 as the age of the buyer. They have more control of the software purchasing journey than ever, as they increasingly embrace self-serve channels and lean into the experts, peers, and communities they trust to guide their buying decisions. For software sellers, this means they’ll need to get smarter about how they engage their audience — meeting them on the channels they prefer, reducing friction to try and buy, and helping them realize immediate value post-purchase.”
Key takeaways and findings from G2’s 2022 report include:
- Disjointed trust convolutes the buying process.
- Compared to last year, respondents prefer to buy directly from vendors less — a 9 percentage point (pp) decrease to 60% — and more from third-party marketplaces (a 6pp increase to 28%) and value-added resellers (a 4pp increase to 11%).
- While 76% say product and service reviews websites are trustworthy or highly trustworthy, transparency in the validation of the reviews is key: 33% of buyers (up from 30%) say transparent validation of reviews is the most helpful feature when using online software / service review sites.
- The B2B buying journey is becoming increasingly complex.
- 68% indicated that decision makers at their company are changing frequently or always during the software buying process, up from 53% who said this in 2021.
- When a software product is up for renewal, the buying committee is more likely to have changed from when the product was originally purchased: 55% said it’s the same, compared to 61% who reported this in 2021, while 22% said it’s not the same, compared to 16% in 2021.
- Early post-purchase experience shapes the rest of the vendor-buyer relationship.
- 93% of buyers indicate that the quality of the implementation process is important or very important when making the decision to renew a software product.
- 57% of software contracts are six months or less.
- The top three most important buying considerations when making a software purchase were reported as: 1) ease of implementation; 2) ROI within six months; 3) ease of use.
- Security innovation is outpacing adoption.
- 88% of respondents say the kind of security a software provides is either important or very important and four out of five consider a vendor’s history with breaches when evaluating new tools.
- However, over half (56%) of those surveyed said they have used software tools that have not been approved or vetted for security by their IT or infosec team.
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