Buyer Centricity: The Future-Proof for Sales Organisations

Last week I talked about recognising if you are a truly Outside-In sales organisation and why moving from an inside-out to an outside-in sales organisation is essential. Here I will talk about the essential mechanisms to move towards future-proofing your sales organisation.

Just imagine the seismic shift?in the next era in sales that by 2025

80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur on?digital-only?channels.

Millennials now account for 60% of B2B decision-makers, and 44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction.?

Currently, only 17% of your crazy busy buyers' time is spent meeting with potential suppliers, and if you make it to their shortlist, you may only get 1% of their time.

To complicate matters further coming out of the pandemic, the decision-making committee have grown to as many as twenty stakeholders working across many time zones.?

With these adaptions to contend with, there is no surprise that Gartner says 50% of buying journeys end in?no-decision .

There is still a misalignment in perspectives of what buyers want and what sellers deliver. The LinkedIn 2021 global State of Sales reports that 60% of sellers say they always put the buyer first, but only 24% of buyers agree.

The next era of sales requires a dramatic shift.

A shift towards creating ease and simplicity to balance the new levels of complication and bridge the gap, and the preferred delivery channel is digital.

Example of mechanisms

Digital empathy is about humanising the interactions you offer your buyers and customers and demonstrating that you understand your customer's problems from their (the customer) perspective.

To bridge the gap in buyer empathy, Apple created for their retail stores and customer support the 3 F of Empathy: Feel, Felt, Found.

• Feel – is explain that you understand their problems better, creating a dynamic customer relationship.
• Felt – is share how you felt in one personal situation of frustration
• Found - is where customer service or a technical expert explains that they found a solution, implying that the customer will?too.

Story-selling rather than pitching is another method to connect the message from the customer's perspective. Story-selling embeds a human angle to the traditionally dry me rather than your focused concept of selling.

Buyers do not want to be sold to.

They want their questions answered, their problems solved, and meaningful collaboration with a few trusted advisors and suppliers.??

Speaking the customer's language and understanding buyer needs are simple concepts. However, companies continue to focus on the selling process rather than the buying process.

An example is the B2B "handoff" between marketing and sales, or sales and support. Brent Adamson discusses this in the Harvard Business Review article: Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete. An example is how a progressive B2B commercial organisation completely reconfigures their commercial operations to address better the deep misalignment between how suppliers sell and buyers buy.

Your buyers and customers do not care where in your process they are classified as a lead or opportunity, or a customer; they expect a seamless, outstanding, and consistent experience at every interaction.?The problem is that we treat customers as we classify them, and the customer wants to be treated as a customer before becoming one.

Companies that deliver a great buying experience

These companies grow twice as fast as those that provide average experiences. Buyer experience is how your ideal buyers experience making a purchasing decision. Sellers must understand why their customers buy and craft a journey that reflects the buyers' needs, expectations, and motivations.

Buyer Centricity, which buyer experience sits within, requires the whole company to move from an inside-out to an outside-in organisation. Buyer-centricity is when you organise all your various business approaches – sales, marketing, customer service, and product development, from the perspective of the customers' experience rather than from the seller's perspective and preferences.??

The essential physical transformation requires a shift to buyer-centricity. Companies must organise sales, marketing, and support experiences to meet the needs of their most valued customers.?

How I assist sales organisation

I help my clients make the essential transformation from inside-out to outside-in organisations. I have created an eBook for you to discuss some of these concepts with your teams.?

One area covered in the eBook is a journey map that outlines all customer touchpoints and how your ideal customer profile (ICP) and the various buyer personas interact within each touchpoint. This helps you understand what is most significant to whom and why. The moments of truth or the key areas where there is the opportunity to "make" or "break" the relationship.

Use customer data from every touchpoint you have with buyers and customers to extract insights to inform how these experiences could and should be elevated and evolved. These are only a starting point to the future-proofing of your sales organisation.

Let's reimagine the B2B sales process.

You must create buyer-driven experiences and retrofit your organisation, people, and processes to suit the consistent delivery of the experiences that make successful buyer and customer outcomes.?

Today's buyers control the pace of the selling process; it is crucial that you tailor your approach to focus on how you enable your buyers in their choices to buy. For this, you need to deeply understand their buying journey, the internal and external obstacles, people, and processes?

Profit is a requirement but not the primary goal. In a buyer-centric organisation, profit results from the relevant and consistent buyer and customer-centric decisions that create buyer-driven experiences. Your customers will reward buyer-centric initiatives that deliver a better value proposition; over the longer term, this increases shareholder value.

The reimagined B2B sales process is a 180-degree shift to embody the buyer and customer perspective in every interaction and action. Only progressive organisations that physically shift from buyer experience to buyer-centricity, engaging the entire organisation with intention, will succeed.?

Are you that sales organisation?

If you missed the discussion on discussion on Inside-Outside sales organisations click here .

#sales #buyercentric #scaleyoursales #CX #revenuegrowth

If you are a CEO or Sales leader and want to discuss how you can address the gaps in your customer-engaging revenue-generating organisation contact me.