What is Buyer Enablement really about?

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We have been talking a lot about all the trends contributing to the consumerization of the B2B business world. Ultimately, the biggest influence on how B2B sellers must now behave is the expectation of how B2B buyers want to buy.

Yep, you’ve heard it before, our self-service consumer purchasing experiences have forever changed our expectations of what purchasing should look like; even at work. Buyers don’t want to sit on long-winded demos that don’t let them test-drive a product. There is a new generation of consumers who have "grown up" being in the driver's seat of their purchasing decisions and expect the same in the professional world.

In fact, according to a survey by Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers said that their latest purchase was very complex or difficult! It’s time for a new approach that is buyer-first.

The days of the seller being the gatekeeper to product information started to decline due to the explosion of inbound and content marketing. Inside sales also made it easier for both buyers and sellers to meet more efficiently and start to engage asynchronously.

Today, remote work, product-led growth, and self-service B2B SaaS experiences have changed everything putting the buyer in the driver's seat. This is leaving sellers needing to adapt quickly.

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What does a buyer-first experience look like?

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This new world is all about “Buyer Enablement”, and it’s not just one variable.

This is not just about having a freemium product or a free trial alone. This is not just about having a chatbot on your website that answers questions on demand or offering an interactive product demo. It’s about potentially offering all of these experiences based on how your buyer chooses to engage with your brand.

Every touchpoint that a buyer has with you, must put them first, and deliver the experience that is best suited to where they are at in the buying process. If they want to speak to a human salesperson, give it to them in the fastest, easiest way possible. In these instances, you must arm your salespeople with as much pre-meeting information and context as possible.

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Asynchronous Selling and Multi-Threading

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You must enable your sales reps to send prospects interactive content and product experiences before and after meetings. Sending assets before a call allows prospects to self-educate and gives sellers insights on what a buyer might be more interested in. Data from freemium products and free trials also give sales reps these insights.

While giving a “live demo” on a call, salespeople should leverage the pre-call insights and intent data that they have already gathered to tailor their demo to be as relevant and focused as possible.

There are many approaches that a sales rep can take to personalize these sales calls and demos. Some variables that they should consider when preparing for a call/meeting include:

• What does the prospect already know about us and our product?
• Has the prospect experienced our product already through a freemium version, free trial, product tour/video, or another product-led channel? And if so, where did they spend the most time?
• What content have they consumed and how?
• Do they follow us on social media and engage actively?
• Do they have an opinion on the category we operate within?
  
  Uncovering these insights and data will likely take support from a revenue operations team however there are plenty of tools that can help. Finding the right balance of these tools can be tricky and is definitely an iterative process. It’s not about just purchasing a bunch of tools and mandating that they are used.
  
  Sales enablement and revenue operations leaders must build onboarding and ongoing training programs that allow the sales rep to harness the power that these tools deliver, without slowing them down with more processes.
  
  To get advice on revenue operations, we recommend following Rosalyn Santa Elena, Founder at The RevOps Collective.
  
  After a meeting, it’s critical to update and further personalize any content that you have already delivered to the prospect. This is where sales microsites or digital sales rooms can be quite powerful.
  
  The amount of asynchronous communication and distributed teams has skyrocketed. Technologies like Slack have further enabled these trends and sellers must now deliver sales assets that are friendly to these new work environments.
  
  Being able to share content that is easily shared amongst teams while making these experiences contextually relevant to the persona that is viewing the content is key. Sellers must not only create these experiences but also empower their champions to effectively multi-thread. ​​
  
  These experiences include arming your champion with demo videos, case studies, and competitive comparison docs to help sell their team internally. Then including pricing information, a mutual action plan, and an FAQ so they can sell their boss, or an ROI calculator and business case so they can sell their CFO.
  
  Lastly, making all this information easily sharable and packaging it all within a microsite or digital sales room so everything is accessible in one place.
  
  Even though these assets will be accessed and reviewed asynchronously, the sales rep must be on standby when the prospect raises their hand and is ready for human interaction.
  
  This asynchronous selling is not just product-led, it’s not just content-led; it’s a hybrid approach that requires a human touch. It’s a delicate dance between using the efficiency of technology, while not forgetting the impact of human emotion and relationship building.
  
  How are you approaching buyer enablement and what does it mean for your go-to-market strategy?