
Beyond Borders: Why Your B2B Growth Strategy Needs to Be Vertical-First

For years, B2B companies have built their strategies around geography, carefully tailoring sales and marketing for the nuances of regions and countries. But what if this foundational assumption is flawed?
Our new 2025 B2B Buyer Benchmark Report, created with our partner Contentful, puts that question to the test. After surveying 900 B2B executives and purchasing leaders, the data revealed a crucial insight: industry context dictates buyer needs far more than geography. This simple fact challenges the conventional wisdom of regional business development. It means the digital commerce strategy that secures a deal with an industrial machinery manufacturer in Germany will likely fall flat with an aerospace components supplier just down the road.
The most significant differences in buyer expectations, common sales frictions, and digital maturity are not found between countries, but between the verticals themselves. This shift is driven by a new generation of “digital native” procurement leaders who expect a B2C-like experience – autonomy, 24/7 access, and intelligent self-service.
Here are the verticals we’ve covered:
- Industrial machinery and equipment
- Manufacturing tools and components
- Electronic components and hardware
- Food ingredients and processing
- Energy equipment and infrastructure
- Packaging materials
- Aerospace and defence
What Your B2B Buyers Prioritize, by Industry
A one-size-fits-all digital experience is no longer a viable strategy. Our research shows that each industry grapples with distinct challenges and therefore prioritizes wildly different B2B self-service platform features. Some might argue that core needs like good pricing and service are universal, and while that’s true, the way those needs manifest is industry-specific. Here’s a breakdown of what the data shows.
Industrial Machinery and Equipment: Mandating Seamless Integration
Procurement teams in industrial machinery have a high rate of ERP adoption (over 46%) and consistently deal with multi-vendor, multi-step workflows. This complexity, often coupled from the hidden costs of legacy systems, creates enormous friction. The solution isn’t just a better portal; it’s better integration with your buyers’ systems.
The most valued features are advanced ERP connections, automated contract-to-quote generation, and consolidated procurement dashboards. The strategic priority is to digitize the manual hand-offs between systems to increase both speed and auditability.
Manufacturing Tools and Components: Automating Repetitive Purchases
Manufacturing buyers are juggling numerous vendors and frequent, repetitive orders, making template management a constant operational drag. They value saved purchase preferences, multi-vendor carts, rapid reordering from past purchases, and self-service order tracking.
The objective here is clear: make bulk and template-based purchasing seamless and error-proof. This frees up procurement teams from tedious administrative work, allowing them to focus on more strategic sourcing. Many leaders are also exploring how AI in manufacturing can further optimize these processes.
Electronic Components and Hardware: Providing Clarity in Configuration
The demand for technical configuration and immediate inventory transparency defines the electronic components sector. Purchasing in this sector includes complex specification, not casual browsing. They require precise product configurators, real-time technical data sheets, and clear inventory levels to make decisions.
Winning in this market means accelerating the specification and validation process with integrated tools and live data, ensuring your customers can source the exact components they need, precisely when they need them.
Food Ingredients and Processing Equipment: Delivering on Speed and Certainty
In the fast-moving food ingredients sector, inefficient reordering is a direct threat to production lines. Buyers here demand reordering speed (a top friction point for 33%) and absolute supply chain transparency.
What does this look like in practice? Effortless self-service reorders, real-time order status tracking, and simple returns. The leaders in this space are automating routine orders and providing transparent, real-time logistics updates. Without this level of detail, your platform is a liability.
Energy Equipment and Infrastructure: Engineering for Compliance
In the highly regulated energy sector, compliance burdens and approval bottlenecks are the primary causes of delay. For buyers in this industry, automation is primarily a tool for governance.
They prioritize automated, multi-stage approval flows and integrated risk dashboards. The most successful suppliers are those who streamline audit and compliance reporting with end-to-end platform integration, transforming a complex requirement into a competitive advantage.
Packaging Materials: Making Transparency Tangible
For buyers of packaging materials, ambiguity is a dealbreaker. Our data shows a staggering 53% demand pricing clarity, and 48% require full access to their order histories to manage budgets and inventory.
A common objection to price transparency is that B2B pricing is too complex and customer-specific. A practical solution is to automate a standardized commercial model for your B- and C-tier customers, while reserving high-touch, custom pricing for your A-tier accounts. This frees your sales team to focus on high-value relationships, while still providing the transparency your broader customer base demands.
Aerospace and Defence: Mastering Procurement Complexity
Buyers in this sector manage the highest complexity, juggling an average of 6.7 product categories. According to our report, they are frequently frustrated by slow vendor response times (38%), difficult portal navigation (42%), and limited invoice access (39%).
For these buyers, a fast, centralized portal with multi-stage approval workflows represents a prerequisite for doing business. To effectively serve this market, you must provide advanced user management and deep, seamless integration with major ERP and procurement suites like SAP. This is where deep SAP integration know-how becomes critical, ensuring the commerce front-end and the ERP back-end operate as a single, cohesive system.
How to Apply These Vertical Insights to Your Strategy
This data is a call to shift your perspective from “sales enablement” (how we want to sell) to “buyer enablement” (how your customers need to buy). This “vertical-first” mindset is essential for growth.
For single-vertical companies, these benchmarks provide a calibrated view of where you stand. The key metric to track is your “Customer Effort Score” – how easy are you to do business with? If a more agile competitor is easier to buy from, they are winning the next generation of buyers, creating a “ticking time bomb” for your future revenue.
For multi-vertical companies, these findings are a clear signal to abandon the generic, one-size-fits-all approach. Your go-to-market and product strategies must be tailored to the distinct needs of each sector. An automated compliance dashboard, for instance, is critical for an energy buyer but largely irrelevant to a food ingredients purchaser. By customizing your digital experience for each vertical, you deliver an exceptional B2B customer experience that creates a more resonant and compelling value proposition.
How to Run a “Vertical-First” Innovation Sprint
Understanding the theory is one thing; putting it into practice is another. Here are four concrete steps to run a “vertical-first” innovation sprint.
1. Start with the “Boring” Low-Hanging Fruit
Before building a complex, AI-driven configurator, focus on the “boring” processes that cause the most daily friction. The biggest wins often come from automating the basics: orders, adjustments, invoices, and disputes. Can a customer find an invoice copy without calling someone? Can they track an order in real-time? Nailing these fundamentals frees up your sales team and builds the business case for larger transformation projects.
2. Segment Your Voice-of-Customer (VoC) Program
Begin by analyzing your existing customer feedback by industry. Are the pain points expressed by your manufacturing clients the same as those from your energy clients? Segmenting your VoC data – from surveys, support tickets, and sales calls – will uncover the unique challenges and unmet needs of each vertical, giving you a data-driven foundation for innovation. This also helps get your sales team on board, as you are solving their customers’ most common problems, not trying to replace them.
3. Tailor Your Platform with a Composable Architecture
A modern, composable commerce platform is the key to solving the multi-vertical challenge. It allows you to standardize your core back-end processes (an order is an order, an invoice is an invoice) while delivering customized front-end experiences for each vertical.
This architecture treats different functions – like the product catalog, shopping cart, or payment gateway – as independent, interchangeable services. Employing a flexible, API-first approach creates the foundation for the future-proof solutions we build, allowing clients to add new features and adapt to market changes without costly replatforming projects. This flexibility means you can build a streamlined reordering interface for manufacturing customers while providing aerospace clients with the sophisticated, multi-stage approval workflows they require, all from a single, unified system.
4. Customize Your Content (and Compete with AI)
Your marketing and sales materials must speak the language of your customers’ industry. Move beyond generic messaging about “efficiency” and create content that addresses specific vertical pain points.
Critically, you are no longer just competing with other vendors, you’re also competing with ChatGPT. If your technical data is “tucked away in a PDF,” a buyer will ask a chatbot “does part X fit machine Y?” and find a competitor’s easier-to-access answer. Digitize your product information and technical FAQs so you are the source of truth, not a third-party AI.
Your Next Step: Win with a Vertical-First Approach
The future of B2B commerce is deeply personalized to industry context, especially as companies adapt to the expectations of a younger generation of B2B buyers. The companies that thrive will be those that embrace a vertical-first approach. They will understand the unique operational realities of their customers and build tailored, high-impact digital solutions to address them.
The insights shared here are just the beginning. For a deeper dive into the data, including more granular breakdowns and regional comparisons that can inform your strategy, we invite you to explore the full 2025 B2B Buyer Benchmark Report. The findings will provide the clarity you need to build a digital experience that truly resonates with your B2B buyers.
Authors and Contributors

Sebastian Benkö | Composable Commerce Solution Architect
