During our recent holiday, we fell in love.

Not with each other – that was many years ago. (13 to be precise and still going strong!)

Instead, the object of our affection was a super simple coffee machine, which we used to make our mid-morning brew each day.

We’re no strangers to coffee machines – we’ve got one in the office, and an all-singing, all-dancing espresso machine at home.

Both of those machines do the job, but they’re also both rather complicated, with all sorts of bells, whistles and best practice required in order to get the best out of them.

And with the best will in the world, neither of us are coffee aficionados – we like a regular cup, but definitely don’t know our arabica from our excelsa.

So when we arrived at our holiday destination, it was rather refreshing to be presented with a super simple pod machine with only two buttons on it – one for espresso, one for a longer coffee.

With the barrier to coffee lowered considerably, we drank a lot more coffee than we usually do, and there’s definitely a business lesson there about reducing the friction in the way of your customers using and benefitting from your product.

But that’s not my point today – instead, I’m writing about what happened when we returned to the UK.

Fresh from our low-friction coffee experience, we decided to invest in one of these super simple machines for our home.

So the research began, understanding the various pros and cons of the different machines out there, getting our head around the good and bad of each model, investigating which pods work with which machine, and grappling with the environmental question, and whether compostable pods were a viable option or not.

We still haven’t pressed ‘buy now’ on anything, but I’ve probably put at least a couple of hours into the process, with Google and ChatGPT by my side to create shortlists, weigh up options and come closer to a buying decision.

The amount of brands I’ve spoken to or given my details to throughout the process?

Zero.

Welcome to the modern marketplace, where prospects spend more time than ever researching before they even contact any potential purveyors of the product they’re looking for.

Rather than being obsessive coffee weirdos, turns out Grace and I are very much the norm – 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying from or contacting a business, and for higher-consideration purchases, nearly a third of consumers admit to spending several hours (or even days) researching before taking the next step.

And it’s not much different in the B2B world – 62% of B2B buyers will consume between 3-7 pieces of content before making any sort of contact with a salesperson, and by the time they do reach out to a supplier, they’re often nearly 70% of the way through their decision journey.

Clearly there’s no universal truth here – the lead time between interest and action differs wildly based on what you sell and who to – but it does highlight the fact that we live in an economy where a whole world of research is available with one thumb-swipe.

Right now, much of that research is done manually, but as the AI chatbots get in on the act, more and more of it will be done by them, with them then feeding information back to a human who can then take it forward.

(In some cases, agentic AI will take care of the whole lot, but that’s another story for another day!)

My overall point is this: given that both B2B and B2C prospects are doing more research than ever, and are increasingly reliant on content to guide them towards their purchasing decision, it’s even more critical to ensure that they come across your business during that research process.

Many of us will be familiar with the “They Ask, You Answer” approach recommended by Marcus Sheridan, and it’s a book well worth reading.

At its core is the principle that you need to be answering the questions that your prospects have, and the more effective you are at answering those questions, the more trust you’ll engender, the more authority you’ll build and the more your business will grow.

And with prospects choosing to spend more and more time researching before contacting a business, and that pre-contact research playing a more and more prominent role in the purchasing decision, creating content that guides a prospect towards you isn’t optional – it’s likely to be the difference between a sale being won and lost.

So if you know you’re not putting enough good quality content out there, and not meeting the needs of those people in research mode, here’s your nudge to change that.

And if you have any advice on coffee machines, I’m all ears, having STILL not reached out a single business.

(Oh, and one final plug – if you are looking for a commercial coffee machine, I can highly recommend James Parker and his team at Allied Drinks Systems Ltd)