Summary
- Buyers build the shortlist before contact. Engineers spend 62% of their buying journey researching online, and vendor websites remain one of their top sources (TREW and GlobalSpec, 2026).
- The average purchase involves 13 internal stakeholders (Forrester). For most of them, your website is the only version of your company they’ll ever see.
- Most mid-size B2B sites fail on evidence, not looks: missing certifications, vague claims, no commercial clarity, slow mobile pages.
- Fix in this order: evidence, clarity, speed, then design polish. Most of it doesn’t need a rebuild.
Written for: CEOs, sales heads and marketing leads at mid-size B2B companies whose enquiries have slowed even though the product hasn’t changed.
What does a buying group check before it contacts you?
Whether you’re safe to shortlist. Procurement, engineering, finance and the eventual user each look for different evidence, and most of them will visit your site without ever filling in a form. With 13 internal stakeholders in an average purchase, your website is often the only version of your company most of the buying group sees.
| Who’s checking | What they look for | What fails them |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement | Legal entity, GST and registrations, certifications, financial stability, references | Certificates in expired PDFs, no company details, no named leadership |
| Engineering or technical lead | Capabilities, tolerances, materials, processes, capacity, quality systems | “World-class solutions” with no specifics |
| Finance | Pricing logic, payment terms, scale relative to the contract | No indication of size, pricing or commercial model |
| End user or department head | Evidence you’ve solved their problem for someone like them | No sector pages, no case evidence, generic stock imagery |
| Leadership sponsor | Who runs the company and what they stand for | No faces, no point of view, a news page last updated years ago |
How much of the decision happens on your website?
Most of the early part. TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec’s 2026 research found engineers spend 62% of the buying journey researching online before they talk to vendors, and that technical publications and vendor websites remain their top sources of product information. Gartner puts time spent meeting suppliers at just 17% of the whole buying process, shared across every supplier under consideration.
- Researching online62%
- Everything else38%
Source: TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec
Why do capable companies fail the test?
Because their websites were built as brochures for people who had already met them. Four failures account for most of it.
The evidence is missing or buried
Certifications in a PDF from 2021, case studies without numbers, clients shown only as a wall of logos. A buyer who can’t verify you doesn’t complain. They move on quietly.
The claims are adjectives
“Leading”, “innovative”, “world-class”. Buyers skim straight past them. Specifics win: tolerances, turnaround times, sectors served, team size, years in operation, the audits you’ve passed.
It’s slow on a phone
Deloitte’s study for Google of 37 brands found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and travel conversions by 10.1%, and increased page views on lead-generation sites by 7%. B2B buyers are not immune to the same impatience.
Source: Deloitte and Google
It doesn’t answer the commercial questions
No pricing logic, no minimum order, no lead times, no description of how an engagement starts. Buyers who prefer to research alone (Gartner says 67% now prefer a rep-free experience) won’t book a call just to find out.
What should we fix first?
Evidence, then clarity, then speed, then design. The order matters: a beautiful site with no proof still fails the test.
| Priority | Fix | Effort | Why in this order |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A current evidence page: certifications, registrations, named leadership, sectors served, capacity | Days | It removes the most common reason buyers drop you |
| 2 | Capability and sector pages written in specifics | Weeks | It’s what buyers and AI assistants both read |
| 3 | Commercial clarity: pricing logic, lead times, minimums, how an engagement starts | Days | It lets self-directed buyers qualify themselves in |
| 4 | Mobile speed and accessibility | Weeks | Every other fix is wasted if the page doesn’t load |
| 5 | Design and brand polish | Months | It multiplies the first four; it can’t replace them |
When a rebuild is genuinely needed, it should start from information architecture: what each member of the buying group needs to find, in what order. Then design and development follow the evidence, not the other way round. And the site should say what you want AI assistants to repeat, which we covered in our piece on AI search.
How do you run the procurement test on yourself?
In an hour, with three people who don’t work in marketing. Give each one a role card (procurement manager, engineer, finance head), a phone, and your website. Ask each to complete the tasks below and time them. Anything they can’t find in two minutes counts as missing.
| Task | Role | Pass if found within |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm the company’s legal name, registration details and location | Procurement | 1 minute |
| Find three current certifications with their validity dates | Procurement | 2 minutes |
| Find a capability that matches a specification you give them | Engineer | 2 minutes |
| Find evidence of work in their sector, with a result | Engineer | 2 minutes |
| Work out roughly what an engagement costs, or what drives the cost | Finance | 2 minutes |
| Find who leads the company and how to reach a named person | Any | 1 minute |
Watch where people hesitate, not just where they fail. The pages they open first tell you what buyers expect to find, and the questions they ask out loud are the headings your site is missing.
Your website is the only salesperson every member of the buying group meets. Most of them never tell you they visited.
Questions to take into your next leadership meeting
- If a procurement manager reviewed our site today, could they confirm our registrations, certifications and leadership within two minutes?
- Which claims on our homepage are adjectives, and which are facts a buyer can check?
- How fast does our site load on a mid-range phone on mobile data?
- Does our site tell a buyer how an engagement starts and roughly what it costs?
- When did someone outside marketing last try to shortlist us using only our site?
Questions leaders ask us about this
Do we need a new website?
Often not. Most of the gains come from content and evidence that can be added to the existing site in weeks. A rebuild makes sense when the structure can’t hold what buyers need, or when speed can’t be fixed on the current platform.
Should we publish prices?
Publish pricing logic at least: what drives cost, typical ranges or starting points, and minimums. Buyers who research alone use it to qualify themselves in, and it filters out enquiries you’d never win.
How do we know which pages buyers actually use?
Track entry pages, paths and enquiries by source, and connect enquiries to outcomes in your CRM. It shows which evidence moves people forward and which pages lose them.
Expert verdict
Rebuild the evidence before you rebuild the website.
Most mid-size B2B sites don’t fail because they look dated. They fail because a buyer can’t verify what they claim. Put current proof, specific capabilities and commercial clarity where a buying group can find them, make it fast on a phone, and only then spend on polish. You’ll often find you didn’t need a new website at all.
Do now
Ask someone from procurement, ideally outside your company, to shortlist you using only your website, and watch where they stop.
Stop
Commissioning a redesign before you’ve written down what evidence the site has to carry.
Measure
Enquiries by entry page, and the share of enquiries that become qualified opportunities.
Verdict by our Designing lead, 3Anomaly founding team
Sources
- Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2024
- TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers (press release, March 2026)
- Gartner, The B2B Buying Journey
- Deloitte and Google, Milliseconds Make Millions, 2020
- Gartner, “Gartner Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience”, 9 March 2026
