Evolve Your B2B Sales Team From Pitch to Purpose

The bad news for B2B sales cycles everywhere is that 84% of B2B buyers report that purchase decisions take longer than expected – twice as long for most. One reason for the delay is that modern B2B buyers want help accelerating the decision process and assuring decision success. Read on to learn how top-performing b2b sales reps break the mold and co-create value for their buyers through interactive, collaborative, and personalized engagements that demonstrate an understanding of their buyers’ industries, unique challenges, and outcomes from Mediafly’s Chief Evangelist Tom Pisello.

Every time a B2B buyer considers a purchase, they face internal struggles. Inundated with a ton of similar looking and solution-centric content, Gartner reports the average buyer squanders two-thirds of the buying cycle gathering, processing, and de-conflicting information to try to gain consensus and arrive at a purchase decision. Having a whopping six to ten decision makers involved in every purchase complicates things further, with 84% of B2B buyers reporting that purchase decisions take longer than expected – twice as long for most. Even more troubling is the fact that 94% of today’s B2B decision makers have participated in a canceled buying cycle. Can you imagine spending all that time and effort to have the purchase end in “no decision”?

Fix a Broken Buyer Journey
As your prospects struggle to overcome increasing buying friction, your sellers could be the heroes your buyers need. Modern B2B buyers want help accelerating the decision process and assuring decision success. They want a concierge – someone to guide their journey, proactively help them sift through every option to find the best solution for their unique situation and to ensure a great experience along the way.

Yet, 48% of sellers still fail to articulate business value outcomes, pitching what their company and solutions do versus what business impact can be delivered and further disengaging troubled buyers. Instead of acting as a concierge, they’re delivering cookie-cutter PowerPoint pitches on how great their company is and blindly demoing all the features and functionality of their solution. Overwhelmed with similar presentations from other providers, today’s buyers struggle to prioritize their decisions, align the demonstrated features to business value outcomes, and differentiate between competing solutions.

Whether you realize it or not, this can have a tangible impact on you and your business, with:

• More stalled deals, as prospects can’t prioritize the issue you are trying to address and justify your proposed solution over your competitors and the multitude of other business options
• Longer sales cycles, as buyers struggle to gain consensus from all decision stakeholders and deliver the financial justification executives require to approve the deal
• Increased discounting to differentiate, get stalled deals moving again, and attempt to artificially motivate the decision to close

Top-performing sales reps break the mold and co-create value for their buyers through interactive, collaborative, and personalized engagements that demonstrate an understanding of their buyers’ industries, unique challenges, and outcomes. They replace linear PowerPoint presentations with customized insights, guided Socratic discovery and assessment, intelligent advice, financial justification and an interactive, data-driven experience. By doing so, they answer key buying questions for each stakeholder at each step in the journey: “Why Change?”, “Why Now?”, “Why You?”, and for recurring purchases, “Why Renew?”.

Move Beyond the Status Quo
So why continue to publish enormous PowerPoint decks that sales reps spend countless hours unsuccessfully attempting to personalize? Why not use sales enablement technology to divide your presentation content into dynamic elements, providing a wizard to automatically assemble the right presentation for each unique prospect? And enable sellers to navigate through their presentation content in a value-driven, and collaborative way that resonates with these struggling buyers?

Shifting static presentations to interactive engagements puts the buyer in the driver’s seat and ultimately improves buyer satisfaction. Quantifying the cost of “doing nothing” and ROI of proposed solutions using interactive selling tools creates motivation and financial justification for all stakeholders, delivers a differentiating conversation, and results in improved outcomes for both buyer and seller.

Effectively evolving your customer conversations from pitching products to selling with value requires you to advance beyond a content repository and presentation tool. This means leveraging your technology investments to not only help sellers find and utilize current content, but reimagining this content: leveraging interactive value storytelling, diagnostic assessments and business value quantification to transform “last mile” interactions.

Organizations that enhance their sales enablement strategy by reshaping content from the buyer’s business value point of view lead more differentiating and impactful customer engagements, accelerate purchase decisions, rely less on discounting to win deals, and improve win rates.

You likely already have the components in place to implement the shift from pitch to purpose, but it is not fully codified and scalable. Your team may be having a hard time visualizing what’s possible and how to deliver that experience. Mediafly Advisory was created to help explore the “what-if”, with consultative workshops to help you codify, visualize, and reimagine your seller engagements. In collaborative workshops with you and your team, we rapidly explore and prototype the “art of the possible”, visualizing what better looks and acts like.

Whether sales enablement is a new endeavor for your organization or you’re ready to take things to the next level, we have a workshop right for you. To learn more about evolving from pitch to purpose one step at a time, contact Mediafly Advisory today.

Source:
Gartner Says B2B Buyers Want More Simplicity in Accessing the Right Information, With or Without a Sales Rep – https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gartner-says-b2b-buyers-want-121500657.html