Phone: 
How to Win Over B2B Buying Committees with Best Answer Content
By Lee Odden I think we can all agree that today’s B2B buyers are not waiting for your sales call. They’re already deep into their research and in most cases, more than halfway to a solution shortlist or even a decision before you even know they’re looking. The question for B2B marketers is, whose content is guiding them? Yours or your competition’s?
Buyers pulling themselves through the sales cycle is the new reality in B2B marketing. The linear, sales-controlled funnel (if it ever really existed) has been replaced by a complex, self-directed journey involving sophisticated buying committees. Made up of 6-10 stakeholders (Gartner) across departments, buying committees are using everything from Google to Reddit to LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity, to actively seek the best information sources to guide them to credible solutions. To earn their attention and ultimately their business, your content must be the best answer wherever those buyers are looking.
The Invisible Gauntlet: Self-Directed B2B Buying Committees
Forrester research shows there are an average of 13 stakeholders in a buying group, each doing their own research on solutions and insights relevant to their specific roles and responsibilities. This “invisible” research phase is where B2B brand influence is won or lost. If your content isn’t surfacing as the most credible, comprehensive, and discoverable answer to buyer questions, you’re basically sidelined. The challenge isn’t just about creating content; it’s about architecting your brand and solutions as the definitive resource for what matters to your buyers when and where they are researching.
The Strategic Opportunity: Embrace a “Best Answer” Content Ecosystem
If B2B buying committees are charting their own course, then your marketing needs to provide the most trustworthy and comprehensive map. This approach requires a shift from simply creating what your brand thinks is useful content to taking a more strategic approach that better empathizes with the buyer information journey. Understanding how the different roles of the buying committee discover, consume and act on information is essential for engineering Best Answer Content.
At TopRank Marketing, we’ve been advocating for a Best Answer Content approach for over 10 years. The idea was first documented in the book, Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing – back in 2012. Fast forward to 2025 and the most important aspects of a “be the best answer” approach continue to be relevant. Understanding buyer and buyer group preferences for information discovery, content consumption and triggers that motivate action is what enables the strategic creation of a content ecosystem, including distribution and engagement. The formula is timeless. It’s the variables that have changed.
Becoming the Best Answer: 5 pillars for engaging B2B buying committees
So, how do you operationalize a “Best Answer Content” strategy to engage the B2B buying committee of 2025? It boils down to a few key concepts:
1. Uncover the core questions: empathetic journey & ICP-driven query mapping.
To deliver best answer content, you have to understand the questions being asked. This means drilling down into the specific needs of each stakeholder on the committee from …read more
Source:: Top Rank Blog
