The new generation of buyers is different when compared to the traditional way sales organizations function. These buyers are definitely consumers who have gained a variety of experience as far as B2B sales is concerned. They expect personalization, transparency and immediate fulfillment from businesses out there to serve them.
The reason these buyers are challenging to B2B sales reps is that they bring in their B2C shopping experience to the B2B sales mix. They have the expectations of your regular shopper, which changes at a rapid rate.
“In many ways the single biggest obstacle to purchasing today is a buying problem that has nothing to do with the supplier at all,” — Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Adviser at Gartner
There is a gap between B2B sellers and buyers, and the gap has been created because of a perception. B2B sellers have a detailed image of their customers — empowered with information and clear about their requirements.
The sellers think that B2B buyers do not need them until towards the end of their purchasing decision.
In this article, we will be breaking this myth with facts and figures, so that your B2B selling experience entices your buyers and helps in better buyer enablement.
B2B customers might be more informed in this technological era, but too much information makes it difficult to understand the value for money too.
With so many choices, it is obvious that they get too many options to choose from, yet, it makes their own decision-making process longer than normal.
As per a CEB research, B2B buyer are deeply uncertain and stressed while buying complex solutions like enterprise software or manufacturing equipment.
The B2B buyers do have some upper hand in the sales process. Apart from the readily available data on any solution over the internet, various partners or buyers involved in the purchase process, and the ever-expanding options of vendors.
Because of the aforementioned reasons, B2B sellers find it tougher to close the deal. The B2B buyers are overwhelmed yet somewhat paralyzed because of these options.
Some interesting facts and figures for you
As per a CSO Insights study,
- more than 70% of buyers engage with salespeople only after they realize their needs.
- 44% of these buyers identify their solutions on their own.
- 20% of them only want to lock down the details with salespeople, before they make a purchasing decision.
- 90% of the buyers are ready to engage with salespeople earlier along their customer journey.
Let’s break down the 90% B2B buyers based on their level or inclination towards engagement with salespeople.
- 34% — When the business challenge was new to the buyer
- 21% — When the business challenge was perceived as risky for the organization
- 19% — When the business challenge was perceived as risky for the buyer
- 16% — When the business challenge was complex in nature for other departments
The study conducted by CSO Insights had approximately 500 executives from around the world. Yet, just 23% of them wanted to engage with salespeople and considered them amongst the top three resources for solving business problems.
It means that B2B buyers often turn to resources other than consulting salespeople. But why?
We think the notion that sales is a numbers game has made a deep impact on the B2B buyer segment and they do not want themselves to be considered as some figure in the sales professionals’ spreadsheet.
What are the other resources that the B2B buyers turn to?
- SMEs
- Vendor websites
- Industry events
- Peers
- Colleagues
- Social networks
- Industry publications
- Web searches
Salespeople were ranked ninth source of resource, simply because the B2B buyers are not seeing them as problem solvers. The image of a seller or vendor that has stuck in the buyers’ mind needs to be eradicated to enable the buyer see the value of their purchase directly by consulting the sales rep.
The B2B buyer preference
B2B buyers, based on the study conducted by CSO Insights, want to work with salespeople who clearly understand their business and their role. They like it more if the salespeople show better communication skills if they focus on post-sale with better insights and perspective about their problems and the solution as well.
Effective buyer enablement approach depends heavily on how businesses are strategizing their customer engagement. Is the approach covering the entire buyer journey? Customer engagement helps business organizations determine how they are going to interact with the buyer on their journey.
Will they use sales enablement tools such as the eBook, PDF, and whitepaper to make the buyers aware of their ability to solve the problem at hand. The main motive of customer engagement is to make sure their prospects and buyers are perceiving every interaction as relevant, valuable and differentiating.
The value for money in case B2B buyer depends on which stage they are in the customer journey. Is the data being fed to them relevant as per the stage they are in?
To differentiate the customer approach, businesses must understand that their sales and marketing modules are not similar to what the competition is already offering. Same goes for their customer approach.
What is effective customer engagement?
When you, as a business, successfully align the enablement services in your customer journey with related content, training and coaching, and see the buyer successfully adapting to your methods, then you have created effective customer engagement.
CSO Insights asked around 500+ global participants some questions about the fundamentals of driving customer engagement.
The first question involved effective alignment of buyer enablement services in the customer’s path for improving customer engagement and customer experience:
- 42.0% agreed
- 58.0% answered neutral or disagreed
The 42% that aligned their enablement services effectively to the customer’s path experienced 8.1% better win rates.
How do sales enablement teams achieve the effectiveness?
By developing and providing related content and delivering it in a tailored way to the buyers.
It must be kept in mind that the target industry’s language must be involved while developing the content.
It also involves sending out tailored content to a differentiated crowd for registering better success.
Conclusion
While 42.0% of organizations revealed that they had effectively aligned their enablement services with the buyer’s journey, only 25% of them were applying the necessary steps to reach buyer enablement.
To have a better success rate in your B2B sales process, you need buyer enablement. For that you need to have all the basics in the right place.
Yet, that means you have accomplished the half task. Sharing content with your prospects is not going to be enough.
Your salespeople must learn and practice how to use and apply the sales enablement strategies and services successfully.
Train and coach them to be a problem solver and not a salesperson who is out there to achieve their sales quota.
We hope this article enabled you in understanding why buyer enablement is important to your sales success as a B2B seller.
You need data, but most importantly, you need a sales tool that can crunch these numbers into meaningful insights in the form of detailed report.
This sales tool must also be able to automate most of your sales tasks as sales reps spend most of their time in non-selling activities.
You also must have a tool that takes care of differentiating the database of prospects and customers based on their behavior and interaction with your sales modules.
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