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    Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder.: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle
    Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder.: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle
    Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder.: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle
    Ebook346 pages4 hours

    Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder.: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle

    By Garin Hess

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    Enable Your Buyers for Faster B2B Sales

    ​What drives B2B sales most effectively—focusing on what you do as a salesperson or on what your champion and the buying group does behind the scenes? The latest research makes it clear that the B2B buying process has become too complex and difficult and buyers today crave companies and experienced guides who make the process easier. Focus on making buying easier and your prospects will buy from you faster and more often.

    Sales teams can shorten the sales cycle by as much as 68% when they learn to equip their champion—the people promoting their solution inside the target account—using the DEEP-C™ buyer enablement framework: Discover, Engage, Equip, Personalize, and Coach. This book guides sales leaders and professionals through the process of moving from a sales-focused approach to a buyer enablement model that reduces buying friction and accelerates the purchase.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreenleaf Book Group
    Release dateJun 16, 2020
    ISBN9781632992956

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      Book preview

      Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder. - Garin Hess

      me.

      INTRODUCTION

      TAKING CHARGE OF BUYING

      Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

      —UNKNOWN

      When does your success become risky? When you are unwilling to change. And buying behaviors are definitely changing, which means sales behaviors need to change as well.

      Sales enablement and its associated technologies have grown rapidly in recent years. Their underlying premise is sound: providing sales reps with easy access to the specific information and resources they need to execute their sales process. Sounds great, right?

      It is—at least to a point. Sales enablement technologies have had a major positive impact on the ability of salespeople to follow and apply standard selling methods to their organizations. There is a problem, however. When it comes to sales effectiveness, study after study shows that the real challenge for salespeople is to get better at understanding and facilitating their customers’ buying process.

      In short, B2B sales isn’t really about what sellers are doing; it’s about what our buyers are doing. Interactions between your champions— the people promoting you inside an account—and their coworkers are where either the magic happens or a deal tanks. And right now, it’s a lot more of the latter. How do we turn this trend around?

      While you’ve probably already purchased some tech to support sales enablement, that tech is, at best, only half of the equation (if that). It makes salespeople more efficient, which is great, but it doesn’t do much to enable the other half of the sale: the group of people making the buying decision.

      Take Charge of Buying; Let Go of Selling

      Suppose you’re on a journey through the Amazon, and your guide turns to you and says, Well, here we are at a fork in the river. What do you think we ought to do next?

      Wouldn’t you be thinking to yourself, Well, that’s what I paid you to know?

      Most likely, you’d rather the guide say something like this: Okay, we’re at a fork in the river. If we go left, here’s where it will take us. If we go right, we’ll arrive at this other location. This is what I recommend we do right now, and here is why.

      Effectively, that is what we need to do as sales professionals. Adopting a guide mentality is key to buyer enablement. And to do that, you need to rethink what might be some long-held assumptions. Let me ask you two questions with seemingly obvious answers about B2B sales:

      •Who is in charge of selling?

      •Who is in charge of buying?

      Most would answer that the B2B sales team is in charge of selling, and the prospect and any accompanying influencers and decision makers (aka the buying group) are in charge of buying.

      Will you be surprised if I tell you it is just the opposite?

      It’s true: The B2B sales team is in charge of buying, and the buyer is in charge of selling.

      Okay, Mr. Wise Guy, you say. Stop talking in circuitous riddles and get to your point.

      Let’s look at selling first.

      You Are Not in Charge of Selling—the Buyer Is

      In buyer enablement, you are shifting your mindset from selling to enabling the buyer(s). Instead of the focus being on you, the focus is on them. What this means is that, yes, you need to sell to (educate, consult, persuade, etc.) the champion, but after that, you need to empower and equip the champion to sell for you. While you can help, the internal champion is the one who is going to go get the deal done.

      So who is doing the selling? You or the buyer? The buyer. That initial buyer—the one who has decided that your solution is best for them and their company—has to sell to the rest of the buying group. It’s unavoidable.

      I know the person I’m dealing with is going to have to pitch internally. In large organizations, the CFO is not going to get on the phone with me, said Kristin Nagel, senior account manager for ZoomInfo.

      In truth, you’ll both be selling to the buying group, but largely the buying group is going to look to the internal change agent, or champion (referred to as the mobilizer in The Challenger Sale¹), to lead them through the process of making a purchase decision. You are just an enabler.

      The Buyer Is Not in Charge of Buying—You Are

      How many times has your buyer gone through the purchasing process for the product or solution you are selling? Usually never! As an example, if they are purchasing a customer relations management (CRM) system, how many times have they purchased this system? In their career, this is likely the only time they’ve done it.

      Paul Norris, a veteran solution-consulting leader and former vice president at CA Technologies, told me, People that buy software aren’t good at it. They don’t do it often. Internally, the process is not understood.²

      On the other hand, how many times have you experienced the buying process that goes along with purchasing your product or solution? It’s probably too many to count. Depending on your product and industry and how long you’ve been in your role, perhaps hundreds of times. Even if you’re a newbie, you’re still on a team, and collectively as a team, you have deep expertise among you about the buying process and potential pitfalls on the journey. Whatever the case, you’ve been through it many more times than the buyer. And because you have so much more experience in the buying process, who needs to take charge and lead the buyer through the buying process? You do.

      Too many sales reps ask the buyer, What do you think are the next steps? I’m not saying this is a completely irrelevant question or shouldn’t sometimes be part of the process, but generally speaking, buyers want and need you to exert leadership, to be their guide. Even if they don’t realize it for themselves, they need you to take the lead. They don’t know what they should be doing. They don’t know the questions to ask, the relevant pros and cons to consider, or the different roles of stakeholders they need to involve to get the deal done and change implemented in their organizations.

      As an example, how many times have you encountered a buyer who says something like, I think we have everyone we need involved, only to find out later that there are others who need to be a part of the process. That’s not their mistake; it’s yours. You should know that the kind of product you’re selling and the kind of company you’re selling to usually requires input and decision-making from specific roles inside this kind of organization. You are in charge of the buying process, not the buyer. Take the lead. Show them the way. They will appreciate it, and you’ll get deals done faster.

      Buyer enablement means making buying easier by taking charge of the buying process in order to help your customer sell for you.

      Make Buying Easier

      Buyer enablement isn’t as much about convincing buyers that they have a need that should be solved as it is about helping to make the buying process easier. The easier you make the process for the buyer, the sooner they will take the actions necessary to move through the purchasing process and the faster they will make a decision. Moreover, if you can make the process easier on them, they are more likely to choose you as a vendor (a nice side benefit, wouldn’t you say?). But how do you make the buying process easier?

      As with sales enablement, buyer enablement is providing people with easy access to tools and information they need to keep a purchase moving forward, only here the people are the buyers inside your target organizations, not your salespeople.

      There are traditional, low-tech ways to support these buyers as they sell for you internally in their companies, but the real leading edge is to use technology to customize the buying experience to each decision maker at each step of the process.

      The buyer enablement approach shifts the responsibility of getting the deal done from your shoulders to the shoulders of your champion and the buying group. In reality, you can’t get the deal done anyway—only the buyers can sign the contract. So you need to change your mindset from What do I need to do to get this deal done? to What does my champion and the buying group need to do to get this purchase done?

      When buyer enablement combines prescriptive advice and practical support at multiple points across jobs, it becomes a powerful tool for sales to drive customers to buy their solutions. Not only does information help customers perceive a job as easier, but information also helps customers successfully buy a solution, reducing later regret. —GARTNER³

      Buyer Enablement as a Competitive Advantage

      Making buying easier is the essence of buyer enablement, but it isn’t just about closing that next deal. It’s also about an approach to your market that will set you apart from your competition. Companies who are easy to buy from have a huge competitive advantage. 77% of buyers agree that purchases have become very complex and difficult.⁴

      To gain this competitive advantage, you and your teams need to understand what buyers want and how they think; you need to discover and engage the buying group; you need to equip the champion to sell for you to that buying group; and you need to prescriptively guide your champion through the buying process. You’re their guide on what otherwise would likely be a disastrous journey.

      Become a master of buyer enablement and you will shorten your sales cycle and close more deals at the same time.

      ________

      1Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (New York City: Penguin, 2011).

      2Paul Norris, in discussion with the author, January 26, 2018.

      3Gartner, Win More B2B Sales Deals, Brent Adamson, 2018.

      4Gartner, Win More B2B Sales Deals.

      PART I

      CUSTOMER FOCUS AND BUYER EMPATHY: LEAVE YOUR WORLD BEHIND AND GET BETTER RESULTS

      CHAPTER 1

      DEVELOPING BUYER EMPATHY

      Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.

      —DANIEL LUBETZKY¹

      In Celeste Headlee’s now famous TED Talk, 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation, she says, Most of us don’t listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.²

      Doesn’t this epitomize an ineffective salesperson or sales engineer? How many demos have you attended (as a buyer) where the solution consultant wasn’t consulting at all but rather going through the same demo they do over and over, almost entirely disregarding your specific interests or needs? How many sales conversations have you had (as a buyer) where you didn’t feel listened

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