How Do Businesses Buy From Businesses?

I decided to conduct a survey to find out more about how businesses start their search for a new supplier. For years we've been told how important appearing on page one of the search engines is to driving new business. However, the cost of achieving (and maintaining) this can be high. Our question was, is search engine ranking truly that effective in a business to business environment, are there specific businesses that should or should not spend on SEO, do the returns warrant the investment and are there cheaper but equally effective methods?

My survey revealed some surprising results...