Decision-Making & Analytics
W hen we conducted our first State of Sales Survey, we discovered there was one topic, above all others, that sales leaders wanted to know more about. That was how to deal with evolving customer needs and changing buyer behaviour. It is easy to see why. The rules of business-to-business (B2B) sales are continuously being rewritten. Gone are the days when salespeople were the primary gatekeepers of product and pricing information about complex products. Today’s buyers are armed with virtually unlimited access to information. They complete 60 to 70 per cent of the customer journey before they even engage with a sales rep. By the time they enter the negotiation, they already hold your pricing data, competitor comparisons, detailed product specifications, and sometimes even your cost structure. This is more akin to business- to-consumer (B2C) sales, where product and pricing information is freely available – and even advertised – for individual customers to compare. The change poses a threat for sales leaders, compromising their ability to shape and optimise the customer journey. However, it also presents an opportunity – provided they are willing to fundamentally rethink their approach. After all, B2C sales have traditionally made it easy for individual customers to compare product and price information. Here are five key lessons that you can immediately start to employ in your business to help you navigate
today’s evolving B2B landscape. These insights have been distilled from three of our favourite academic articles of the last five years, each of which was published in the world’s top marketing journals. 1 . Turn transparency into a weapon. Let’s be brutally honest, many sales leaders still operate with an outdated ‘information asymmetry’ mindset. But in today’s competitive climate, they are wasting time and energy trying to protect pricing and cost information that customers can probably find anyway. It may also be counterproductive, as revealed in the paper, Open negotiation: The back-end benefits of salespeople’s transparency in the front end . Using data, it showed that proactive transparency, particularly early in the relationship, actually drives better commercial outcomes. They found that early cost disclosure led to approximately $1,400 more in backend profits per customer. Why is that the case? Because verifiable transparency builds trust, and trust drives profit. The sooner you share that information, the better. Reactive or late disclosure of your pricing structure does not yield the same benefits. That means it’s time to stop playing defence when it comes to information and start playing offence.
TO THE CORE..
1. Business-to-business (B2B) sales has changed rapidly – buyers now complete 60–70 per cent of the customer journey before they engage a sales rep. 2. Sales leaders must be transparent about products and prices, share that information early, and make it easy to verify. 3. Help customers to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information online. 4. Profit increasingly lies in backend revenue such as services,
maintenance, and product add-ons. This relies heavily on the trust you build during the initial sale, so train teams to capture that value and reward them for doing so.
2 . Reinvent your sales role. As we have already hinted, if your salespeople are still primarily functioning as ‘information providers’, they are increasingly irrelevant. Research shows that 94 per cent of buyers now extensively research products and prices online before they begin
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