Is this company a lead customer? Estimating stages of B2B buying journey
Access rights
openAccess
publishedVersion
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
This publication is imported from Aalto University research portal.
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
Date
2021-08
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
8
Series
Industrial Marketing Management, Volume 97, pp. 126-133
Abstract
By advancement in digital marketing, business-to-business (B2B) buyers carry out over half of the buying process through digital touchpoints before they establish any significant contact with the B2B seller. Knowing the buying stage of a potential buyer can bring a substantial advantage to the B2B seller given the complexity of the transaction and the associated value. In this paper, the authors propose a machine learning approach to infer the stages of the B2B buying journey by observing the online browsing behavior of buyer companies. It is shown that observing the buyer's online behavior effectively allows us to estimate the buying stages with high accuracy by utilizing the hidden Markov models. Managers in B2B seller companies may use these techniques for adjusting their marketing efforts to improve the fit with the information demands of the B2B buyer prospects along with their buying journey, and thus, improve the hit rate of marketing and sales activities.Description
Funding Information: The authors would like to thank Business Finland (the public organization for innovation funding and trade, travel and investment pro-motion in Finland) for funding this research project (B2BAI). The authors would also like to thank Aalto Science-IT project for providing the computational resources needed to perform the simulations and real-world dataset experiments. Funding Information: This work was funded by Business Finland project number 3380/31/2017 . Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors
Keywords
B2B buyer journey, Hidden buying stage, Hidden Markov model, Internet browsing
Other note
Citation
Marvasti, N B, Huhtala, J-P, Yousefi, Z R, Vaniala, I, Upreti, B, Malo, P, Kaski, S & Tikkanen, H 2021, ' Is this company a lead customer? Estimating stages of B2B buying journey ', Industrial Marketing Management, vol. 97, pp. 126-133 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2021.06.003