The COVID-19 pandemic had a far-reaching impact on business, including one that B2B sales professionals are still coming to grips with: a significantly altered buyer and buying process.
This combined with the rise of a new generation—the majority of the workforce will be digital natives by 2025—has fundamentally changed how purchasing decisions are made. Today’s buyer completes most of the buying process independently, without direct vendor engagement, and the trend has intensified in the years since the pandemic.
So how do businesses account for this evolving buyer behavior? For one, they must recognize the increasing independence of digital-native buyers and the critical need to build trust and demonstrate expertise. The goal is to better engage with this new wave of buyers and effectively support their purchasing journey.
To that end, there are five key trends shaping the new era of the B2B sales engineer:
1. Buyers and the Buying Process Have Changed
The stats say it all: Nearly 50% of buyers prefer to avoid interacting with a salesperson. And more than 80% of the buying process happens before engaging a vendor. The message is clear—as buyers change their behavior, sales teams need to change with them.
Today’s buyers demand around-the-clock expertise. As a sales leader, it’s essential to leverage your best sales engineers or solution consultants and make their expertise available 24/7, 365 days a year, across every channel where a buyer might interact. It’s a significant challenge, and one that has led to the development of sales teams’ latest weapon: the digital sales engineer.
Digital sales engineers combine the knowledge and skills of top sales professionals with artificial intelligence. This expertise is then made accessible across all channels, ensuring that buyers receive consistent and informed interactions at all times.
As interactions occur, whether digitally or through direct sellers, a wealth of information is captured. Every configuration, quote generation, and conversion into an order provides valuable data. Leveraging this info allows for more proactive decision-making regarding sales, product, marketing, and supplier strategies. Integrating these insights into a go-to-market strategy helps optimize every aspect of your approach.
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2. Differentiation Strategies Have Shifted
The pandemic fundamentally shifted the landscape of product differentiation. As businesses introduce new products, they quickly become commoditized, making differentiation increasingly challenging. This trend is particularly evident in complex manufacturing, where a noticeable shift has occurred. Businesses are moving away from selling standalone products to offering comprehensive solutions. These solutions could include multiple products bundled with managed services, and they’re designed to achieve specific outcomes for the buyer. This results-focused approach emphasizes what the customer wants to achieve rather than the individual features of the products.
As one example, a fire truck manufacturer in Germany would traditionally engage with city councils to discuss basic specifications such as water capacity, size, seating, engine type, and suspension. Today, those conversations have shifted to gaining a better understanding of the types of fires the area typically faces, whether they’re residential versus commercial fires, and the overall geographic landscape. Based on these outcome-based criteria, the business can design a complete firefighting service, including determining the number of fire trucks needed, their specifications, and providing fleet management services. Referred to as “firefighting as a service,” it’s a significant shift from the traditional product-focused sales strategy and sets this manufacturer apart from its competitors.
3. Consultative Expertise Has Taken Center Stage
Differentiation based on customer or buyer experiences involves creating a highly consultative and trusted relationship with the buyer. The idea is to engage in two-way conversations that go beyond providing basic product specifications online. Companies deliver this experience through direct sales teams, indirect dealers or distributors, and digital channels.
To achieve this, businesses must embed consultative expertise into every interaction. The concept has evolved from the idea of “guided selling” to “guided buying,” where buyers receive the same level of guidance without relying solely on face-to-face interactions with salespeople. This provides a seamless and informed experience throughout the purchasing journey, earning trust and satisfaction along the way.
Ultimately, transitioning from selling products to offering comprehensive solutions and enhancing the customer experience through consultative engagement helps businesses stand out in a crowded market.
4. Loss of Tribal Knowledge Stifles Competitiveness
To deliver these exceptional buyer interactions, you need to ingrain expertise into all interactions—an increasingly challenging task due to the high turnover rates in the manufacturing industry.
Last year, turnover in U.S. manufacturing was 37%, the lowest in three years but still significant. This high rate is driven by factors such as retirement, the Great Resignation, downsizing, restructuring, and outsourcing. With four out of every ten employees leaving each year, it’s on businesses to find innovative ways to preserve product knowledge, configure expertise, and retain sales acumen across teams.
5. Speed Has Become Paramount
The evolution of the sales landscape has placed the focus squarely on go-to-market agility. Specifically, this refers to both the speed at which new products and solutions are brought to market, and also the speed at which sales channels can effectively sell them. Achieving go-to-market agility involves three key components:
- Improved (and more frequent) decision-making: Winning businesses make informed decisions more frequently, not just during formal planning cycles, but monthly, weekly, and even daily, using real-time data.
- Enabling sales channels: All sales channels must have access to expert information and knowledge, meaning teams need the right tools and training to understand and sell new products and solutions effectively.
- Driving adoption: Teams then need to use all of the information at their disposal and execute on it in a way that aligns with the evolving go-to-market strategy..
Understanding and optimizing the various sales channels drives comprehensive market coverage and ensures that expertise is consistently applied across all touchpoints.
Weathering the Perfect Storm
While each of the above trends impacts each organization differently, their combination creates a perfect storm that compels businesses to move beyond traditional approaches and adopt more comprehensive, innovative philosophies. The current landscape demands more than just new tools—companies now require end-to-end platforms that enable them to implement entirely new channel structures and go-to-market strategies.
While “digital transformation” has been a focus for years, the key now is differentiation. It’s not merely about enhancing the buyer’s experience but about truly engaging buyers and advancing them through their purchasing journey. I call this “differentiated buyer engagement,” a concept where companies adopt strategies that emphasize engaging buyers more effectively and moving them forward in the buying process.
Ultimately, by focusing on differentiated buyer engagement, businesses set themselves up to create a more compelling and effective go-to-market strategy, positioning themselves to stand out and achieve greater success.
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