The Re:catch team, an expert consulting unit of AX enterprise Business Canvas for B2B sales organizations, and Remember, the country's largest business platform, said on the 7th that they jointly published the B2B benchmark report "The people who buy and sell B2B, changed by AI."
While earlier reports mainly focused on the "seller" perspective, this report is distinguished by analyzing the structure of B2B purchasing decisions in the AI era based on a large-scale "buyer dataset," which is rare in Korea, and by presenting practical AX (Artificial Intelligence Transformation) execution measures. According to the report, corporations with sales growth stood out when they embedded AI systematically in the purchasing process.
The report contains the results of a survey of 205 decision-makers at Head of Team level or above who actually purchased or reviewed B2B products or services worth 5 million won or more at corporations with 50 or more employees, and department heads or higher in sales and marketing at 200 B2B corporations with sales of 1 billion won or more. In particular, on the sales side, it conducted an in-depth comparison of organizations that experienced sales growth and contraction in the previous year, focusing on identifying the practical strategies of corporations that gained an advantage in sales growth in the rapidly changing AI era.
Among B2B sales organizations, 54% were using AI in a fragmented way at the individual level, and only 24% had official adoption at the organizational level. Among sales growth corporations, the rate of embedding AI at the organizational level was 27.7%, about twice that of declining corporations (14.8%), placing the AX success focus on the combination of AI utilization and data infrastructure. In organizations where both elements were in place, the share of sales growth corporations surged to 87%.
The gap between growth corporations and contracting corporations was also clear in marketing strategy. The share implementing an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy was 21.3 percentage points higher among growth corporations than among contracting corporations, and growth corporations were more than twice as likely as declining corporations to regularly publish high-value content such as reports and white papers.
Re:catch marketing and sales consultants note that as AI search becomes more common, the website "zero-click phenomenon" is intensifying, making it difficult to track buyers' paths using only public content. In practice, sales growth corporations secure AI search exposure with high-value "lead magnet" content containing proprietary data, while using a "two-layer architecture" strategy that places key insights there to make buyer journeys traceable from any funnel, which has been leveraged for effective sales.
Cheon Hong-jun, CEO of Meisters, a Re:catch client, said, "AX is now a necessity, not a choice, but performance is not guaranteed by simply introducing a system," and added, "Through our collaboration with Re:catch, we confirmed that minimizing silos between marketing and sales data, and consolidating them into the business context, is the key that leads to actual results."