The Myth of the Empowered Buyer

You may have seen this picture before, over 60 years ago, a renowned publisher ran an ad which would become one of the most ads ever.

The ad says:

• I don't know who you are.
• I don't know your company.
• I don't know what your company's product.
• I don't know what your company stands for.
• I don't know your company's customers.
• I don't know your company's record.
• I don't know your company's reputation.
• Now-what was it you wanted to sell me?

Moral; Sales start Before your sales rep calls.

The Myth of the Empowered Buyer

Today, many B2B businesses have come to believe that there is an asymmetric relationship between the company and it's buyers. The perception is that buyers are “in control” and armed with more and higher-quality information than ever before.

We took these stats from a paper written by Robert Rose, from The Content Advisory, a respected consulting and research firm.

So you can see from these numbers that the modern “empowered buyer” has a preference for self-service knowledge. And this I think, should be the centre of every marketing conversation.?

Senior Marketing Leaders and their teams create content to ensure every single customer experience caters to every single question or objection there could exist. Customer facing teams try to differentiate your products and solutions to sell, while the the company is pushing thought leadership, product and service information through website and Ads, where these empowered buyers are going to to do their research.?

And we say, or should I say, YOU say, that you vow to be customer-centric, or buyer’s-journey focussed, and we basically end up dumping a mountain of information to answer the “man in the chair assumption”.??

BUT BUYERS AREN’T EMPOWERED, NOR THEY WANT TO BE.

This research shows that most buyers are self-directed. They don’t want want to take a sales call, they don’t want to be bombarded with unsolicited information. But why are they self-directed??

63% of buyers are now actually likely to be a team of four or more people.

The buyer's journey has become increasingly more complex. The CEB (analyst firm) says that buyers are deeply concerned and deeply stressed. But why??

Research shows that organisations assume that their buyers have ALL the information they need, it’s all readily available. So these buyers are under increasing pressure to self-educate, and become subject matter experts in the thing that they’re buying.?

63% of buyers are now actually likely to be a team of four or more people. And the reason for that is that the buying process has become a lot more complex. It’s a long sales cycle, a long buying process, so they split if up in order to go through all the information.?

In many ways, the single biggest obstacle to purchasing today is a buying problem that has nothing to do with the supplier at all.

Brent Adamson - Principal executive Adviser, Gartner

There are reasons that today’s B2B buyers perform so much online research prior to talking with a salesperson. They usually don’t know what they’re looking for, where to get it, or whom to trust when they do find it.

Is it any wonder that so few buyers want to talk with a sales rep first? They’re already worried that they haven’t gathered enough information and education they can trust. They have no time for someone who will distract them from that task. They’re not ready for that yet.?

Problems

Below are examples of real life problems Marketing teams are facing today:

• Problems marketers face, they don’t know what content is being used across the company
• Too many places where they have to manage content: Sharepoint, desktop, MS teams. Challenge: if you want to update one document and that documents lives in several different repositories, it’s going to take a while to get it updated. Also, if people have downloaded to their desktops, the document can’t be updated?
• If you’re spending budget in creating impactful content, you don’t know if it’s being used, and how it’s being used
• That’s has a knock on effect - other teams like sales think that content doesn’t exist. So they create it?
• Content that is non-compliant. Will this have a negative impact on the business.

What do you need to sell better?

One example of an Empowered buyer was someone I spoke to at a Telecoms company, who didn’t understand what we did or the sales enablement space and they thought Bigtincan was a marketing automation company like Marketo and Hubspot.

So I explained our customers use Bigtincan to enable customer-facing teams to intelligently prepare, engage, measure and continually improve the buying experience for their customers. Through our content management / learning and coaching solution.

How do we help

Bigtincan helps Marketing functions create a better buying experience for their customer-facing teams and more importantly their customers by providing a single source of truth for their content and learning materials.

Here are some things you can expect to see from our Sales Enablement solution:

• Analytics on every document that is used and which documents aren't used
• One place for content and training
• Tie content to opportunities to help others close deals faster
• Ability to search for content in the moment of need
• Update once to all documents to keep the latest and greatest

Don't take our word for it;

ThermoFisher is the world leader in serving science through the products they sell here is their story

This is just one example of many more, but I want you to know you can do this and help your customer-facing teams get past the myth of the "Empowered Buyer".

Final Thoughts

My final thoughts as a sales person to you reading this article.

This isn’t just about marketing enabling customer-facing teams with better content and assets that demonstrates thought leadership.

It's more about connecting them with an experience which is truly enabling and valuable and gives sales the tools to become trusted facilitator in the buying process.?

So, the moral of the story is, empower your people to tell your story better!?

Thank you for reading

If you would like to learn more please head over to www.bigtincan.com

Alternatively please reach out to me directly