B2B UX

The admin who signed the contract is happy. The forty people expected to use it every day were never asked. They were trained in one session six weeks after purchase, and have gone back to the spreadsheet they had before.

Nothing on any screen is broken. The product was bought by one person and is used by another, and nobody designed the distance between them.

What This Domain Changes

Two facts drive everything else here.

The buyer and the user are different people, and there are more of them than you think.Gartner puts the buying group for a complex B2B purchase at 6 to 10 people, holding five or six distinct roles that the next article names. Somebody evaluates, somebody signs, somebody reviews the security, somebody administers it, and somebody uses it all day. They want different things from the same product, and a design that serves one of them can be actively hostile to another.

The cycle is long.Weeks to years, with procurement, security review and legal in the middle. Somebody who meets your product today may buy in eight months, and every contact between now and then is part of the experience whether anybody designed it or not.

So the patterns you already know still apply, and where they land changes. A signup flow is not the way in when the way in is a contract. Onboarding is not one person's first session when it is forty people arriving at once on a date somebody else chose.

Anatomy of a Buying Group

Gartner puts a typical B2B buying group at six to ten people. Consumer design has one person, and this is the single biggest structural difference between the two.

Those people are not six versions of the same reader. They hold distinct roles, they open the site at different times, and several of them will never touch the product they are approving.

The Five Roles

The end user.The person who will work in the product every day. They care about whether it does the job and whether it is unpleasant, and they are usually the one who found you.

The champion.An internal advocate, often the end user's manager, who has decided this is worth pushing. Their problem is not evaluating your product. It is explaining it to four colleagues who have not read anything, which is why the material they can forward matters more than any page they read themselves.

The economic buyer.Signs the contract and asks what it costs, what it replaces and what happens if it stops working. They rarely see the interface at all.

The technical reviewer.Security, IT or data protection. They are looking for a specific document, and every hour they cannot find it is an hour the deal is stalled.

The blocker.Procurement, legal, or an existing vendor's account manager. They are not looking for reasons to say yes.

A sixth role exists once the deal closes and is easy to forget: the administrator who configures the thing, adds the users and gets called when it breaks.

What Each One Needs From the Screens

The roles map onto different artifacts, and a site built for one of them stalls for the rest.

The end user needs a trial, a demo or a video that shows real work. The champion needs a page they can send, a one-page summary and a price they can defend. The economic buyer needs pricing, contract terms and a named customer of their size. The technical reviewer needs a security page, a data processing agreement and a status history. The administrator needs documentation that exists before they ask for it.

Missing any one of those does not lose the deal loudly. It leaves it sitting still.

Where They Are While This Happens

The group is not on your site for most of the process. Gartner's research puts the time spent with all potential suppliers combined at around 17% of the buying cycle, with as little as 5% going to any single sales rep.

So the majority of the decision happens in rooms you are not in, using material somebody exported, screenshotted or half-remembered. That is the argument for designing things to be forwardable. A shareable link, a page that survives being pasted into a slide, a summary that reads correctly on its own.

Find the Real Group

The roles above are a starting shape, not a finding. The actual group differs by company size, and in a regulated industry the technical reviewer may outrank everybody.

Ask three recent customers who was in the room, in what order they got involved, and what each one asked for. That conversation usually surfaces one role nobody in your team had accounted for.

Pro tip: List your site's main pages down one side and the six roles across the top, then mark which page serves which role. The empty columns are where deals go quiet, and there is almost always one.