Are We Forgetting About The Buyer As We Go Down The Sales Funnel?

Sales operations leaders are looking at three metrics in their deal cycles:

1. Volume: Are there enough deals happening? Are there enough deals in the pipeline? In the forecast? Are there enough proposals being sent out? Contracts sent out every week, month, quarter in order to hit the targets?
2. Conversions: Are the conversion rates where they need to be at each inflection point?
3. Time: How long does it take from stage to stage in order to get stuff through the sales cycle?

And when we look at these metrics, it doesn't really show one key aspect of building out a sales process.

The buyer experience at every single moment that matters.

Let me show you (PS. it looks pretty messy - I apologize for my poor handwriting)

Essentially what I have here is a bow tie funnel. We look at going from prospect to MQL to SQL to close and then having CS onboard and expand the revenue.

When we look at this funnel, you can see all the different moments that matter and inflection points you would want to measure.

The shaded area is the effort we put into the buyer experience as they go through the sales funnel.

It's really, really high at the front. Marketing spends a lot of time focusing on the buyer experience. They have awesome websites, awesome content, awesome ways for the prospects to get into the funnel.

As we push a prospect through our sales cycles, we start to forget about their experience.

Instead, we're starting to focus more on whether or not our reps are being efficient at pushing people through the funnel.

How are we getting to close as fast as we can?

But we're forgetting about how do we keep that buyer experience consistent throughout.

And when you're in a highly competitive market, the biggest opportunity you have to differentiate and close more deals against your competitors is to try to fill this gap in your sales funnel where you have little effort happening from a buyers' experience standpoint.

If you can keep it steady throughout the sales cycle, then you have a way better chance of closing those deals, especially in a competitive or commodified market.

Marketers have nailed this. That's why they focus so much on brand.

Sales often forgets about it.

There's a lot of research out there that shows we don't actually spend a lot of time enabling the bottom of the funnel.

At many companies, you can tell marketing and sales are often misaligned. Marketing does a ton of good stuff to generate top-funnel leads and awareness. But they don't have a lot of marketing support in mid- and bottom-funnel.

That's why sales enablement exists - they're trying to bridge that gap.

The research also shows, from a tech perspective, we don't spend a lot on enabling the bottom of the funnel. The Bridge Group has an AE SaaS metric report that shows where companies are spending money on enabling AEs.

On average they're spending about $477 a month on technology to enable the AE. Some companies spend up to $1,000 a month per AE.

When you look at where the money is being spent, a lot of it is at the top of the funnel. Email tools, data enrichment tools, ways to figure out how to personalize prospecting.

You might have a few coaching tools like Conversation Intelligence and others that helps throughout the cycle.

But there's very little being spent once you get halfway through.

Basically, once you're done demoing your prospects, there's very little being spent on how do you get the deal across the finish line.

In marketing agencies, they have teams pulling together to build proposals for their prospects, right?

They'll put their best designers on a big proposal to get that buyer experience up because they know how important it is to close their business.

But a lot of times when we're talking about other industries, or specifically for us, in SaaS, there's very little effort being put at this stage of the cycle.

Once you get that proposal out, even within creating the proposal, there's not a lot of personalization. It's pretty templated.

Sometimes you're copy-pasting stuff from different proposals. The formatting's off because you're using word or PowerPoint and everybody knows a sales rep is not a designer. So your reps are just trying to scrape stuff together and send it out as fast as they can.

It doesn't look good.

It doesn't put your best foot forward and looks bad on the company. Unfortunately, that process follows through up until close.

You have long contracts with a lot of legal jargon.

There's very little personalization in there. There's very little for the prospect. They can't interact with the experience at this point.

And if you're using proposals as a way to get in front of decision-makers, and you have to send it out to your champion, they're forwarding that out to other people.

Every little advantage you have from a buyer experience standpoint will set you apart from your competition.

So, how much effort are you putting into extending that buyer experience throughout the sales cycle?

What are you doing to make sure it's consistent, that buyer experience is not just a marketing function to get leads in the door? Or a BDR's function for prospecting?

Is there a consistent and exceptional buyer experience at every single moment that matters from acquiring a lead to closing a deal, and then expanding that deal later on?

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