Your sales team is experienced. You've invested in a professional website. You attend the right trade shows and maintain strong relationships with key accounts.
And yet: new leads are thin. Sample requests arrive less predictably than in the past. Sometimes you discover a customer launched a new project, one you didn't know about, and your product wasn't on the shortlist.
Something has genuinely shifted in how product developers find and select products. It has nothing to do with your products.
The change is structural. It's about where buyers spend their time and where product discovery now actually happens.
How materials specifiers decide what to buy
Before we talk about where to be present, let's be clear on how the buying process works in specialty chemicals. The journey from problem to purchase follows five phases:
Pre-project: Material specifiers become aware of a challenge: a new regulation, a performance gap, a customer requirement. They start looking for solutions.
Exploration: They self-educate. They search, compare chemistries, read technical data, and identify candidates. They do it on their own, without contacting anyone.
Screening: They build a shortlist and begin requesting samples from their top candidates.
Test: Evaluation of samples starts in real formulation conditions. This phase is technical, often iterative, and can take weeks or months.
Approval and purchase: If the test passes, the product is approved, and commercial negotiation begins.
What matters for your marketing is where you can influence material specifiers and when you have limited impact. The answer, consistently, is phases 2 and 3: Exploration and Screening. This is when your prospects build their shortlist. By the time they ask for a sample, they've already made most of their decision.
And here's the critical point: phases 2 and 3 happen entirely online, before anyone at your company knows a project exists.
The 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers report confirms this. On average, 62% of the technical buyer's journey happens online before first vendor contact (GlobalSpec / TREW Marketing, 2026). Among engineers under 35, that figure rises to 66%.
Ten years ago, a formulation chemist would pick up the phone. Call a trusted rep. Rely on relationships.
That still happens, but it's no longer where the journey begins.
Today, the Exploration phase happens through digital research. Specifiers use search engines, AI assistants, and material selection platforms like SpecialChem or Prospector® to build their shortlist before anyone knows they're looking.
When they do finally contact a supplier, material specifiers are no longer in a material discovery phase. They want pricing and technical validation. (GlobalSpec / TREW Marketing, 2026). In other words: by the time they reach out to you, they've already decided you're worth talking to. The shortlist was formed without you.
And here's what makes 2026 different from five years ago: Google is less reliable as a discovery channel than it used to be. 60% of all Google searches now end without a click to any website (Bain, 2025). AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews increasingly answer queries directly, without sending users anywhere. Click-through rates fell 61% on queries where an AI Overview appears (Seer Interactive, 2025).
Waiting for engineers to find you through your own website is becoming less reliable every month. So where are they going?
When a formulator or product developer enters the Exploration phase, they need to answer one question quickly: which products are worth testing?
To answer that, they need structured, comparable technical data across many products and suppliers. Your website, however well-designed, was not built for this. It was built to communicate your company's story, showcase your portfolio, and establish credibility. That's valuable, but it's a different job.
Material selection platforms like SpecialChem were built specifically for Exploration and Screening. Material specifiers can filter by chemistry, performance, regulation, and application. In minutes, they narrow thousands of products to a shortlist worth testing.
This is why over 60% of visitors on SpecialChem are working on an active project when they visit the platform. They're not browsing. They're deciding.
Three reasons engineers turn to material databases first:
Standardized, comparable data. Supplier websites rarely allow side-by-side evaluation. Platforms do without downloading dozens of datasheets.
Greater content depth. A platform cataloguing hundreds of thousands of products carries more indexed technical content than any single supplier site. The GlobalSpec study confirms it: 76% of engineers routinely turn to online technical publications and platforms first, before visiting any supplier website, precisely because they expect to find more there.
AI systems cite structured platforms. When a product developer uses ChatGPT to research a formulation challenge, it pulls from clean, machine-readable sources. The same GlobalSpec research shows 69% of technical buyers now use generative AI during purchasing, up sharply from 42% who said they never used it the year before. Well-documented platform listings are more likely to appear in those results than isolated supplier websites.
Here's the scenario our clients find most unsettling and that we observe most often.
A formulation team at a company you've supplied for years starts a new project. They need a new additive. They don't call your rep. They open SpecialChem, run a search, apply filters, and build a shortlist of five candidates.
Being listed matters. But it's not enough on its own. What determines whether you win is what happens at the time of the decision.
The specifier has chosen your product. They're ready to move forward but reach a dead-end: no direct sample access. No clear contact. No local distributor listed. At that moment, they have two choices: find an alternative where it is easy to get a sample, or go the hard way and hunt down a local supplier. Most don't go the hard way. They move to the next candidate.
This is where opportunities are lost silently. Not because your product wasn't good enough. Because the path from interest to sample is broken.
What suppliers often discover through SpecialChem lead intelligence is names they already know: existing accounts, researching products in their category, without any signal sent. Those opportunities existed. Whether they were captured came down to two things: whether the product was visible during Screening, and whether acting on that interest was frictionless.
Presence gets you on the shortlist. Easy sample access gets you the project.
🚀 Activate one-click sample access to your products
Your website still matters. But its role is different from what most suppliers assume.
By the time material specifiers visit your website, they've already shortlisted you. They arrived from a platform, a search result, or an AI citation. They're not discovering you, they're evaluating you.
At this stage they want answers to three questions:
Can you solve my challenge? Application notes, case studies, and technical documentation that show you've worked on problems like theirs.
Are you a credible partner? The GlobalSpec study found 70% of technical buyers are likely to choose the better-known brand when two solutions are technically similar. Brand is built through consistent, quality presence. Your website is one place where that impression is formed or confirmed.
How easy is it to work with you? You’re evaluated on your response time, access to sample, and technical expertise. Buyers who've spent weeks in independent research don't want friction when they're finally ready to engage.
If we were advising a specialty chemical supplier today, this is what we'd prioritize:
Be present and easy to act on. List your products on specialist platforms with complete, current, standardized data, and make sure material specifiers can request a sample directly from your listing. Visibility gets you on the shortlist. Frictionless sample access gets you the project.
Make your website a validator and trust signal. Invest in content showcasing your application expertise: case studies, technical guides, formulation notes. Your people and their knowledge are a competitive advantage. Put them on your website.
Respond fast, respond well. A lead from an active project has a short window. Pricing and technical validation are what finally bring buyers out of independent research mode. We ran a study in 2025 on 5331 scored leads: project detection rate increases by 44% when you act at the intent peak vs. few days after. The supplier who responds first with a technically informed answer wins. If your average response time is measured in days, that's the first thing to fix.
📅 Book a free 30-min consultation to strengthen your lead follow-up process
Go where your buyers are, don't wait for them to find you. In a world where 62% of the buying journey happens before the first contact, and where a growing share of searches end without a click, publishing content only on your own website is insufficient in 2026. Your buyers are on specialist platforms, reading technical publications, and using AI tools that aggregate information from multiple sources. Being present in those environments with accurate, structured product data is how you influence the shortlist before it's even formed.
Do I still need my website if I'm listed on a material database?
Yes. The platform is where material specifiers discover and shortlist your product. Your website is where they validate you as the right partner. Both need to be strong.
Why do material specifiers use SpecialChem even when they already know you?
The platform makes comparison fast and easy, and the next step equally simple. If your product data is complete and a sample request takes one click, you benefit from the process rather than being bypassed by it.
How does AI search change things for chemical suppliers?
As per the GlobalSpec study, 69% of technical buyers now use generative AI during purchasing. Product developers use it as a starting point, not the final answer. Structured platform listings are more likely to be pulled into AI-generated starting points than isolated supplier web pages.
Our website traffic is low. Should we invest in SEO first?
SEO for individual supplier sites in technical B2B is genuinely difficult. You're competing with platforms carrying far more indexed content. A more direct path to active buyers is a presence on the platform they already use. That said, your website content still matters for validation and AI citation.
SpecialChem is the material selection platform for the specialty chemicals industry giving formulators and materials engineers free access to the world's largest Master Catalogs of ingredients, additives, and materials, and giving suppliers direct access to millions of active material specifiers. See how many active projects are considering your products right now.