• by Ray Schultz , January 20, 2023

Email teams seeking to sell B2B tech products face many challenges, including disfunction in the B2B buying process, judging by a new study from Zip: 2023 Trends In “B2B Purchasing.” 

Of finance and accounting professionals surveyed, 79.4% say their firms face challenges when buying software and services. 

There are many possible problems. For one, 48% say their firm requires six or more cross-functional approvals for a new software or vendor purchase. 

And  35.5% are struggling with employee experience, 34.4% with a slowed purchasing process and 29.7% with friction between employees and the procurement or purchasing team.

On the positive side, 71% have a uniform process for employees to initiate a purchase request, although more than 33% are largely unaware of it. 

But companies are buying — 57.7% of respondents are seeing more than 50 new purchase requests for software or services per month.  

Most firms use “old-school” forms of communication to manage initial purchase requests: 

Phone calls and texting—60% 

- Excel—56% 

- Email—56%

Capturing the email address is essential, not only for marketing but for identity verification. 

When managing approvals of purchase requests, the top three tools for communication are email (49.2%), Microsoft Excel (47.7%) and Microsoft Teams (30.1%).

Of the finance leaders polled, 62.6% cite increasing efficiency and team productivity as a top priority for the coming year.

In addition, 48.7% plan to ensure compliance with financial regulations, and 48.2% with security and privacy regulations.  

And almost 50% of organizations hope to reduce operating expenses by more than 20% in 2023.  

The solution may be found in technology: 70.9% believe their processes for initiating purchase requests and approvals should be automated. Only 30% have a fully automated process in place, and 17.8% have none at all. 

The study also uncovered these findings: 

• Only 10.9% say 81%-100% of the spend in their company is under management, or PO-backed.
• 15.8% admit employees at their firm do not follow the correct process for initiating a purchase request. 

“Over the last several years, the digitization of back-office processes has allowed businesses to achieve greater operational efficiency, better positioning them to weather current economic headwinds,” says Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip.  

Nut the end-to-end procurement workflow has remained stagnant for over a decade,” Zaparde continues. “It is becoming ever more critical given the renewed focus among finance leaders to reduce costs and mitigate business risk.” 

Zip surveyed 1,056 U.S.-based finance and accounting professionals.