CSO Insights completed their first ever buyer preference study earlier this year, it is a 45 minute read and covers a number of areas. Tamara Schenk has also taken the time to put these into a series of blog posts.
As a salesperson the below caught my attention. The full post contains the top four behaviours buyers wish sales people would do differently and more consistently.
In line with the findings of CEB and Gartner, number four is 'give me insights and perspective'. As detailed below, this needs to be insights in context of the buyer's challenges and not centred around your product. Typically the best source of insight on these challenges are sales (buyer-facing) or those researching the market (marketing).
The study also found that 70% of buyers typically engage with salespeople later along their buying journey because they find other resources more relevant and valuable.
Combining the two findings would indicate that to inject yourself into the conversation with the buyer earlier as they scope their requirements needs to be done through relevant, timely and expert insight.
It is not an option either since less email, voicemail is answered whilst more and more content is produced.
In my opinion and from working with a number of enterprise clients, the ideal setup to enable this process looks a bit like this:
Listen:
Enable customer-facing staff to suggest content, based on the relevant challenges of the buyers they talk to.
Create:
Turn these suggestions into posts by your internal experts and also enable the experts in your firm to react to industry news and trends.
Engagement:
Deliver this content across all the channels. Your sales people will know best and let them add the context ensuring that the right message is received by the right people at the right time.
Doing this will enable you to conduct a frictionless sale and attract the buyers to your organisation whilst making your sales people relevant, timely and valuable.
No. Are there any new skills and behaviors listed? No. Are these behaviors unattainable? No. However, the combination of the expected behaviors might be different compared to the focus many enablement teams might currently have, because the buyers’ desired behaviors don’t mention the word “product.” Yes, exactly. The buyers’ desired behaviors are not centered around products! They didn’t say, “Tell me more about your product.” Instead, the buyers’ desired behaviors are all about the idea of, “Put your expertise into my context and share with me what your products and services mean in my context to achieve my goals.”
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