Handshakes or hands-off: Managing the B2B sales experience
Today's B2B sales experience blends digital sales with the human touch. What's the right mix right for B2B sales success?
The modern B2B sales process is dynamic with fast-paced sales cycles and digital-first engagement. But in most markets, buyers have been inundated with digital noise. Junk mail, corporate communication, webinar invitations… the list goes on.
Even when an opportunity has been qualified, it’s easy for sales communication to join the junk mail in the abyss. This is where guided selling can help.
Creating a focused, structured sales process can help improve outcomes. Here are three critical reasons guided selling might be exactly what your sales organization needs:
- Businesses need to align buyers and sellers
- Buyers expect value with every engagement
- Organizations need to respond quickly to customer needs
Let’s delve into these three key reasons guided selling is becoming so essential in today’s B2B sales process.
Guided selling improves the B2B sales process
The intersection of buyers and sellers is where relationships are created and advanced, with the ultimate goal of winning business. But purchase journeys are complex.
Modern sales involve complicated business scenarios, cross-functional requirements, and varying LOB priorities. There are several business stakeholders, who each determine their own purchase journey based on their top objective.
B2B purchase journeys are nuanced, and data suggests that the majority of buyers break away from traditional sales cycles to revisit previous steps as their knowledge grows and requirements deepen.
This is the modern selling arena and the pace of engagement isn’t slowing down. Businesses need to empower sellers with data-driven insights and guidance in real time to improve how they engage and collaborate with buyers. Getting sellers and buyers on the same page is critical, and guided selling supports that.
Make every interaction in the sales process meaningful
Every communication your organization has with a prospective customer either adds value or it doesn’t. With so much useless, attention-wasting digital noise out there, the last thing you want to do is get lumped into the junk category.
When your communication consistently adds value, sellers can more easily move into the coveted “trusted advisor” position. This might not be surprising, but for sellers to contextually respond to buyer-driven signals, they need a structured process that helps them understand how to respond.
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Traditionally, sellers learned these signals from experience over time. However, in the new normal, organizations don’t have the luxury of an entire sales force of top-notch veteran sellers.
Businesses need to help every seller, regardless of experience, deliver value with every interaction in the B2B sales process. Guided selling helps organizations create a consistent sales process and when executed properly is dynamic, providing sellers with intelligent recommendations of how to best add value in response to buyer-driven signals in real-time.
Rapid response removes sales barriers
The complexity of B2B sales cycles often dictates sales cycle length, but the more organizations can decrease cycle length the better.
Beyond the obvious, “won revenue is better than forecasted revenue” and “shorter sales cycles means more sales per quarter,” responding to customer needs quickly helps establish the tempo of the buyer-seller interaction.
When a sales rep quickly answers a prospective buyer’s questions or proactively provides valuable information, barriers to a sale are removed and the opportunity can move along seamlessly. Consequently, the longer questions and concerns remain unaddressed, the greater the chance that they become larger issues with the extend buying team.
Dynamic, guided selling enables agile, buyer-focused customer engagements and leverages data to help sellers quickly respond to changing sales stages. It also provides insight for continuous improvement of sales processes.
