B2B Marketing Charts: Purchase cost for 6 business departments over the last 2 years

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In 2023 and 2024, 6sense conducted studies of 2,768 B2B buyers who had been involved in a purchase of $10,000+ in annual value, with the average respondent having made that purchase in the last eight months.

That data had been published separately in The 2023 Buyer Experience Report and The 2024 Buyer Experience Report, which was recently released. But 6sense offered MarketingSherpa an exclusive on the never-before-published year-over-year change in some of that data – specifically the change in purchase cost.

This data can be helpful to B2B marketers and sales professionals as they set their goals and budgets for 2025.

Before we look at the percentage changes, let’s look at the average purchase costs.

Average purchase cost for six business departments for 2023 and 2024

Chart #1: Thinking about that >$10,000 purchase you were recently involved in, what is the annualized cost of that purchase? (average purchase cost)

This chart is arranged from largest to smallest 2024 purchase cost. And the data is at the bottom of this article in a table so you can see the numbers more precisely.

While there is data on 13 departments, we chose to focus this chart on only the departments that had a substantial sample size (which is why the overall sample size of this charts is 2,310, and not the 2,768 of the full studies). The lowest individual sample size of any of these departments is marketing, at 126.

As you can see, the difference in the averages for some of these departments is quite substantial. While in other cases, it’s hard to see.

Frankly, most marketing publications would probably stop here. But this is MarketingSherpa, so let’s take a deeper dive into the data to get a sense of which departments experienced an actual change in purchase cost.

Most business departments are holding steady in their spend…

Chart #2: Thinking about that >$10,000 purchase you were recently involved in, what is the annualized cost of that purchase? (purchase cost confidence intervals)

Chart #2 is also arranged from largest to smallest 2024 purchase cost. The vertical lines show the range at which we can be 95% confident that the true purchase cost falls within these bounds, and the dot in the middle shows the average.

If the two bars do not overlap, there is a difference between the two years’ purchase cost. If there is no overlap, the spend held steady from 2023 to 2024. As you can see, for the following departments, the spend held steady:

• Information Technology (IT)
• Accounting/Finance
• Purchasing/Procurement
• Sales
• Operations

“For example, in the case of the IT department, even with a large sample size, we detected no statistically reliable difference. This allows us to confidently say that IT spending held steady from 2023 to 2024,” said Sara Boostani, marketing research analyst, 6sense.

Accounting/finance was oh so close to showing an increase. The upper bound for 2023 purchase price was $250,599 while the lower bound for 2024 purchase price was $240,699. So while there was not a statistically significant difference at a 95% level of confidence, or as the 6sense research team calls it a ‘statistically reliable’ difference, if I was a betting man I’d say there probably was an increase in purchase price, we just can’t be 95% confident.

“Readers should interpret statistically reliable differences as real shifts that are unlikely to have occurred by chance. When we find a statistically reliable difference, it means we are 95% confident that the observed difference is real and would likely be replicated if we surveyed another sample from the same population,” she explained.

There was one department that posted a statistically significant difference. And I’m sorry to tell you, it was our own marketing department, as you can see in the next chart.

…but the marketing department is seeing a decrease in its spend

Chart #3: Thinking about that >$10,000 purchase you were recently involved in, what is the annualized cost of that purchase? (marketing department)

“Spending per department seems to be holding rather steady,” said 6sense lead researcher Kerry Cunningham. “The only department we saw make larger shifts was marketing – it decreased from last year. We do not have data on why, but our data do tell us that marketing is one of the last departments you want to cut budgets from” (see the ‘What effect could a drop in marketing department purchase size have for businesses?’ for why that is).

The data revealed a 56.8% decrease in average purchase cost by the marketing department from 2023 to 2024, the only department which reported a statistically significant change.

Of course, it doesn’t mean 56.8% is the exact size of the change, just that a decrease occurred. “Statistical reliability doesn’t measure the size of the difference – just whether it’s real,” Boostani said.

This drop is even more concerning since the marketing department’s purchase patterns tend to favor higher-dollar purchases, as you can see in the 2023 purchase data in Chart #1 above.

Cunningham explains why, “About half of marketing departments and 60% of IT departments are purchasing software, which is slightly on the more expensive side. Marketing [also] has a slightly higher tendency to purchase ‘new business capabilities’ which are more expensive (but still, these folks represent less than 30% of their department sample).”

This decrease could be a result of the artificial intelligence revolution. "With the introduction of tools like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) in late 2022, some marketing teams have likely reduced spending on content creation, data analysis, and predictive analytics software, as LLMs can cover many of these functions more cost-effectively," said said Dr. Randi Priluck, associate dean and professor of marketing, Lubin School of Business at Pace University.

Or it could be a harbinger of marketing budget cuts, and perhaps the marketing department is just the canary in the coal mine experiencing cutbacks before the other departments.

What effect could a drop in marketing department purchase size have for businesses?

Remember how Cunningham hinted about that marketing budget cuts are not a good idea according to their data?  Let’s dive a little deeper.

The marketing department is seeing a decrease in spend, and yet, playing a critical role in the overall B2B purchase process.

“This year’s findings reinforce last year’s: during the first two-thirds of the buying process, B2B teams align on and rank a shortlist of vendors, and only after consensus is reached do they begin contacting vendors – beginning with their top choice. Once buyer-vendor interactions start, buyers rarely switch preferences,” Boostani said.

Which means, marketing is not just a support function for sales.

“During downturns, companies often cut marketing budgets, assuming sales teams can make up the difference by pushing harder to create those initial connections. But we now understand that by the time buyers engage with sellers, they’ve likely already chosen their preferred vendor, and that vendor wins over 80% of the time,” Boostani said.

Limitations of the data

I include this section in MarketingSherpa chart articles to remind you what we’re ultimately trying to do with data – get an understanding of real-world behavior. And all data has some limitations in that regard.

In this article, we’ve already thoroughly gone through and clearly explained most of the limitations by showing you the confidence intervals and statistical significance.

But here’s another possible limitation: purchase costs were chosen from preset ranges – the lowest range was ‘12k to 50k’ and the highest range was ‘>1 million.’ So purchases significantly higher – say, $10 million – would only be factored into the average at the $1 million level.

While this may have slightly changed the reported average, it may not have made the data any less insightful. That’s because average can be misleading because of outliers like this. Those very high and very low numbers are likley outliers, and by essentially removing them, these averages are likely closer to actual real-world behavior of most B2B buyers.

Related resources

Marketing Budget Chart: Is budget size the real challenge? Or is it how you allocate your budget?

Marketing Efficiency and Cost Savings: A low-cost testing method, streamlined asset management, and AI-driven personalization

Outside-In Messaging: Nothing counts more than the language of the customer (podcast episode #75)

Purchase cost data by year and department

Table #1: Thinking about that >$10,000 purchase you were recently involved in, what is the annualized cost of that purchase?