Buyer Dysfunction in Complex Sales

In this post, we review Buyer Dysfunction, what it is, why it happens, how it screws up your sales process and why ABM matters.

I’m a complex sales guy.

Okay, that doesn’t mean I’m deep and profound. It just means that I’ve spent my career trying to perfect the art of managing a complex sales cycle, business-to-business deals that involve multiple stakeholders.

And one of the biggest problems with these complex sales cycles is that buying groups are often dysfunctional. This slows down the process , creates new barriers, and quite often, it results in a much smaller deal size.

Where does this dysfunction come from?

Each stakeholder has their own personal agenda, they have their own departmental priorities. Internal relationship issues and politics come into play too.

And each one of these individual stakeholders has got to gain alignment with all of the other stakeholders involved in the process.

With four, five, six, or more stakeholders involved in the process dysfunction often occurs.

Me vs We

Dysfunction is the gap between all of the different stakeholders’ agendas. It’s the difference between the “me” and the “we.”

Buyer Dysfunction Over the Course Of the Buying Process

The Corporate Executive Board, which is now part of?Gartner, studied this and got feedback from over 3,000 business-to-business buyers. They asked them to rate how difficult decisions were to make over the course of a buying process.

Not surprisingly, making decisions as a group is much harder than making decisions as an individual. And the hardest step is identifying how they’ll solve the problem.

And this is where the dysfunction gap between “me” and “we” is the biggest. The smallest gap is when it comes down to deciding on which supplier to select. This means that the group struggles most when they’re deciding on their strategy not whom they will work with.

Late in the Process

Picking a supplier is actually relatively easy. The biggest issue is that they typically don’t reach out to suppliers until much later in the process. If you can get involved earlier in the process, you can influence the decision about what the problem is and how to solve it. That increases that you can lock in the deal before they speak with any other vendor.

The B2B Marketer’s Obvious Challenge

You can make the greatest impact on the decision earlier in the process. If you can help the customer define the solution, you will help them through the hardest part of the process. Suffice to say, you will also be in a better position to influence the choice of vendor. Duh!

However, you are not brought into it until much later, typically not until buyers are 66 to 90% way through their journey. In fact, 57% of buyers have finished with the purchase process before they reach out to a vendor.

How ABM Can Help

How do you get hold of people much earlier in the process? This is where ABM matters most.

With an effective ABM strategy, you will be focusing your resources on best fit accounts not wasting time on tire kickers, and most importantly…

…You will be able to identify prospects when they are researching and target them with messages that will resonate with them when they are defining the solution.

One of the best ways ABM can help you is to pinpoint whicj accounts are researching the problem you solve using intent data. Then target key personas at the accounts with educational content that will help them in the process. Even if they won't engage with you directly, you have increased the likelihood that they will think of you.

You can learn more about how to use ABM to reach people earlier in the process on my blog.