Can I win more B2B deals with buyer enablement?, Tim Hughes

In this report by Gartner, they say that you can win more deals with buyer enablement.

What does buyer enablement mean?

To quote Gartner "What is buyer enablement? Buyer enablement is the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase.

Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy, by providing them with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete."

Introduction

Let's get some context from Gartner

"Remember when the hardest part of the B2B sale was cold-calling?

Those were the days. B2B sales have rarely been simple‚ but the demands of the modern B2B buyer have made getting access to buyers increasingly hard. In fact‚ it’s turned sales on its head.

In the digital world‚ buyers seemingly have unlimited access to information and typically compare vendors and offerings — without ever interacting with the actual sellers.

In fact‚ Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers. When buyers are comparing multiple suppliers‚ the amount of time spent with any one sales rep may be only 5% to 6%.

What does that mean practically? For sellers to take control of this situation, they have to be social selling, it's the way sales works today. They have to have buyer centric social profiles, be connected digitally across their territory and they need to be having digital conversations with potential prospects, this will "tease out" the buyers ahead of your competition.

The buyer's journey

Gartner has mapped the buyer's journey as follows.

"Virtually every B2B purchase spans six distinct “jobs” that buyers must complete to their satisfaction to successfully complete a complex purchase:

 Problem identification

 Solution exploration

 Requirements building

Supplier selection

 Validation

 Consensus creation"

The modern seller, needs to understand this and be on social having reconginsed this.

I know a lot of companies that immediatley think the answer to this is easy. We take a load of corporate content that says "buy our product because we are great" and we get employees to push that out over social. There is a massive problem with this.

Buyers are not looking for this, nobody looks for brochures, because we are immune to them. Why? Because they all sound the same. They all tell us that your product is the best. This isn't insight, this means you have megered into the sea of blandness which is most content online.

The other issue is that, you can see from the stages above that buyers wouldn't read this until stage 2 at the earliest. Buyers start off working out what is the problem, this means that companies pushing out corporate content are late to the party. What buyers want is insight, they want the problem is, how to solve and what other people have done. And any content, with a logo on it is treated with suspicion. It stands to reason, anything with a logo on it is assumed to be a brochure and biased.

$Billions is wasted every year on content and so is the money wasted on tools to push this content out.

The answer?

> Make sure your employees have buyer centric social profiles

> Make sure your employees are connected wide and deep into the accounts they want to sell into and they are connected to the people that will buy.

> Make sure your employees have not done this in a spammy way, but have a methodology to build relationships and start conversations. You may find this "smokes out" opportunity you didn't even know about.

> You empower your team(s) of people to create their own content and share this so their networks can see it.

> Don't forget that the buying process takes place through the sale, the validation processes means that you can still win and lose business throughout the buying process.

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Buyer enablement helps buyers buy What is buyer enablement? Buyer enablement is the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase. Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy by providing them with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete.

https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/buyer-enablement