The Modern B2B Customer (buying) Journey

I was recently asked to map PartnerTap’s capabilities to the B2B customer journey. When I got off the phone, I realized I should have asked “Which one? The old B2B customer journey or the modern one?”?

For the past 20 years the customer journey has started with a Google search

I’ve been a business buyer of technology solutions. And I’ve spent way too many hours reading through marketing content for all the solutions that come up on the first 2 – 3 pages of Google’s search results. I did this research to identify the initial list of solutions and companies I should evaluate. I’d then set up calls with each vendor, have too-many-to-count conversations with sales reps, eventually see the product demos, and narrow down the list of solutions to socialize with other internal stakeholders.

The modern B2B customer buying journey starts with your partners

Every buyer out there is already working with someone else. They’ve worked with other technology vendors, other consultants, purchased some solutions through resellers, and already have a myriad of solutions they use in house.

If you’re lucky, your company is already partnering with many of these companies.

The modern buyer has already built relationships with some of your partners, and already have people they trust as experts. This means your buyer doesn’t have to start a new buying process with a Google search. Instead, they can cut through the noise and quickly get to a short list of products they should consider and companies with good reputations by asking your partners.?

The modern B2B buying journey includes partners at every step of the process

The end-to-end buying journey starts with evaluating what they already have and thinking through how a new solution will be adopted within the current set of solutions. Your partners are most likely aware of and influencing your buyer’s purchase decision before you even know there’s an opportunity,.?

5-steps modern B2B buyers go through to buy a new solution:

1. Clarify their needs, context, and current gaps. Buyers recognize that anything new they buy must work with their current solutions – many of which are from your partners.
2. Identify the best options by asking experts they trust for recommendations. This includes the consultants and vendors they already work with and trust. Many of these are your existing partners.
3. Evaluate and validate that solutions will work in their environment with product specialists. Modern buyers put less stock in what sales reps say and more value in what trusted partners say.
4. Purchase new solutions through existing suppliers, marketplaces, or direct from a new vendor. Buyers may prefer to purchase through an existing supplier or service partner who will ultimately be responsible for their long-term success.
5. Adopt the new solutions leveraging expertise and support from the SIs, VARs, MSPs, etc. who support them.?

Buyers ask your partners for advice about which solutions to look at – these are the exact moments that your sales team needs to know about. But there’s no easy way for your partners to reach the sales rep on this account to share this valuable intelligence.?

The BEST INTENTIONED partners will try to do their best to try to get this timely information to your reps, but the slow-motion game of telephone rarely makes it to the stage where your seller and the partner get on the phone and brainstorm the best way to get your solution into this account.

The reason it’s so hard is CRM systems were never designed to let reps collaborate with sellers outside of your company. CRM systems are incredibly secure – as they should be!?

But supporting the modern B2B buyer journey requires that sales reps find and collaborate with the sales reps already engaged at their accounts.

So account executives try their hardest. They get on the phone with partners to see if they have any shared accounts. They email around lists of target accounts to try to find partners that already have relationships there. And they spend hours manually scanning through customer spreadsheets trying to find any matches between their territory and each partner.

Sales reps do everything they can to figure out which partners are engaged in each of their accounts – by emailing around account lists in Excel. But this doesn’t scale, and it misses a lot of expansion and new logo opportunities your sales teams could be going after with each partner.?

We call this valiant effort “Random Acts of Co-Selling”, and since we’ve already written a lot about it, I won’t repeat it here. Read: Go Beyond Random Acts of Co-Selling

Co-selling transformation is the key to faster growth and aligns perfectly with the modern B2B buyer journey.?

Supporting the modern B2B buyer with a co-selling motion requires an account-centric approach. An account-centric, or buyer-centric, approach requires that you first have:

1. An ecosystem-wide view of all partners engaged at each account
2. Real-time alignment of your sales reps with partners also engaged at each account
3. An easy way to activate your sales reps and partners around high-propensity-to-buy accounts so they can quickly get on the phone for a pre-opportunity brainstorming conversation
4. Attribution and reporting to make sure you can track all the new pipeline sourced and accelerated with each partner and each co-sell sales play

The reason so many vendors are coming to us this year is because co-selling transformation is now an imperative. My CEO just got off stage talking about co-selling at Channel Partners Expo in Las Vegas. Since walking off stage she’s been approached every few feet by vendors who are ready and eager to talk about co-selling with PartnerTap's platform because this is so important for their new GTM strategy.

For anyone reading this that doesn’t already know I’m the Chief Product Officer at PartnerTap, and love everything about our market, our customers, and our product, here’s a quick overview of what PartnerTap’s co-selling software does:

Scaling up a high-performing co-selling motion with your best partners requires the right expertise, data, and automation. That’s why I’m so happy that this year we are offering Co-Sell Concierge Services, along with our enterprise-leading co-selling software, to help our customers jumpstart their co-sell programs and show new sourced pipeline within the first quarter.

Co-selling expertise is required to support the modern B2B buyer journey

When our customers keep their customers and buyers’ success as their north star we all win. That’s why I love working with customer-centric organizations who just need to expand the radius around their customers and buyers to include all their best partners already engaged with each account.?

It also requires getting some real partner data and real co-selling metrics for your business case. Once a change agent is committed to co-selling transformation, the first thing they need is some real-life examples and results around which to model the impact of a full-scale strategy and program rollout.

That’s why we always recommend a crawl → walk→ run strategy for co-selling transformation.

Looking forward to talking with all the co-sell eager vendors from Channel Partners Expo in the next few weeks!?