The Buyers’ Psychology: Mental Models in B2B Products

More than a user.

Often I like to join a discovery sales call.

They are allowing me to gather more information on the buyer persona while giving them a free consultancy on their customer journey and user experience. Sounds like a deal, right?

Dynamics in B2B products are impressive. It starts with the distinction between the buyer and the user.

We, as designers, romanticize the user because we think that it has the most return on investment since it will use the product daily. We are putting the buyer aside since he will criticize your work without using it for the most part.

Buyers aren’t the enemy; they have different interests, that you have to understand to win the war — shoutout Sun Tzu.

Fall in love with the buyer

When you’re designing, you mostly project the feature you’re working on into the user persona. You’re right, but you miss a lot by not considering the buyer persona.

Buyers and users are equally important trough the design lens. No buyers, no users. It starts there.

You should spend a consequent part fo your research time with buyers even if the users will have to use the product daily for years.

The sales process in B2B is an opportunity for design research since it’s based on successive meetings with different people, no more recruiting.

Following a lead from the discovery to closing gave me a lot of insights that fueled detailed personas.

Jobs to be done

The psychology of buyers is driven by their interest and how it reports to their managers. On which indicators also.

The hardest part is to understand what are their jobs to be done. Every question and objection are implicitly linked by the same motivation, the same prism, the same mental model.

Experimented buyers hide them pretty well, but there’s always a way to put the light on it.

In theory, a buyer wants the better for, the cheaper. But there’s other bias and dynamics that you need to capture.

For example, where UX has a massive impact on the users, making their life more comfortable, buyers can that an eye for beautiful UIs that signal modernism into their old-fashioned company.

Signaling is a widespread behavior from corporates. It may explain why companies buy AI-powered products that doesn’t work. Maybe the buyer wanted to look good in front of his/her manager. The buyer hasn’t purchased a solution but a buzzword in the annual report.

This is the kind of mental model you should find in your buyers. If only users could have the power of buying, maybe less cheap products will be bought.

Also, they want to project into tomorrow’s company needs since they will contract with you for years. Being able to prove that the product will last is a plus.

What to do?

This is what I’m working on:

• Make sure to talk to buyers during the sales process, as a disguised user interview
• Build a distinct buyer persona, ask your sales team if they don’t already have one
• Find what the jobs to be done for the users and buyers are
• Feature prioritize the actual product’s features from a buyer POV
• Make sure to iterate or polish the top features and fuel the product roadmap from buyer’s requests, aligned with their mental model and your vision/north star.

Falling in love with the buyer and your stakeholders will love you since having a well-aligned product on the buyers and the users will boost the closing rate while reducing the churn.