Welcome to Documill – Ana Rosa
Today we welcome the second fresh marketing specialist of the year: Ana Rosa. She has already kickstarted productivity by writing articles and creating new visuals.
Read moreKimmo Salmela · April 06, 2020 · 3mins
Selling is often perceived as difficult, particularly the sales of solutions to B2B buyers. Failure on the part of sellers to communicate enough value is often considered the main culprit here. But a recent Gartner study tells us bluntly otherwise: it is the difficulty buyers experience when purchasing solutions that poses most of the problems in the process.
As sales have gone increasingly online in B2B, buyers have a lot more information in their hands on solutions to solve their problems.
At the same time, buyers find it attractive to gather information independently. After all, salesmen are still seen as providing potentially biased opinions, so interference from them is often avoided early on.
This comes at the expense of the time buyers have for direct discussions with sellers. Gartner finds that these days, B2B buyers spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers when considering a purchase. When there are multiple suppliers competing‚ the amount of time can drop to only 5% or 6% per supplier.
Depending on the purpose of the solution, there is usually an increasing number of alternatives for buyers to choose from as new technologies, products, suppliers and services emerge. According to Gartner, the buying group for a complex B2B solution now involves typically six to 10 decision-makers (or close to six participants in average, says another study buy G2 and PandaDoc).
Each participant brings on the table personal opinions based on information gathered individually. Reaching consensus can carry a heavy toll: more than three-quarters of the customers Gartner surveyed described their purchase process as very complex or difficult.
The abundance of information online has changed the buying journey radically. Customers do it much less as a linear process.
Instead, customers go through several overlapping tasks or “buying jobs” in the buying process. According to Gartner, these are:
Throughout the entire buying process, customers simultaneously address validation and consensus creation. Even phases through problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building and supplier selection are likely to often overlap, although they may at first look sequential.
For example, requirements building may reveal new needs, which then triggers additional exploration of solutions. Solution exploration, then, can even initiate the need for better identification of the problem.
Indeed, Gartner illustrates the B2B buying journey rather as a search through a maze:
Sales and marketing teams are typically organized in serial fashion around a funnel. Marketing generates demand, then nurtures it with care, usually through digital channels. Finally, the most qualified of opportunities are handed to sales for in-person pursuit.
For customers, however, the linear funnel does not exist. Rather, they use both digital and in-person channels to complete each of the buying jobs simultaneously.
In today’s world of B2B buying, there is no handoff from digital to in-person. A serial process has given way to a few parallel ones.
How to win in this B2B buying environment? Gartner says that the answer is in “buyer enablement” — the provisioning of information to customers in a way that enables them complete each buying job. To do this:
Learn more about solutions to bring your sales approach up to date.
Written by
Kimmo Salmela is a communications manager at Documill. Earlier on, he worked in several industry and solution marketing and communication positions at Nokia. Now Kimmo focuses on online collaboration technologies and their future prospects for businesses.
Today we welcome the second fresh marketing specialist of the year: Ana Rosa. She has already kickstarted productivity by writing articles and creating new visuals.
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