“Listen more than you speak, and always be learning about your customer’s business landscape.”
The quote holds true today more than it ever did before. Understanding B2B buyers was more complex than B2C consumers. And the digital disruption has further complicated the task. With more digital interactions, advanced tools, and the emergence of technologies like AI, NLP, and so on forth, the behavior of a modern B2B buyer has evolved into something we never imagined.
Today, buyers are yearning for more control over their purchases. They demand a digital, data-driven, and collaborative approach. They are actively searching for their queries online, expecting hyper-personalized experiences, and demanding more transparency from the sellers. The key changes in their buying behavior are:
- Digital-first research, where they rely on the online information to search about the product they want to buy. They find out the required literature before actually interacting with the sales rep.
65% of B2B purchase influencers initiate the buying process through self-guided search. – Forrester
- There are more buying groups and decision-makers that affect the final decision of purchase. Today, complex B2B purchases involve at least 6-10 stakeholders and may go up to 20.
- Increased transparency, where buyers demand more transparency from sellers in terms of pricing, product/service information, and detailed terms and conditions.
- Self-service purchasing, where buyers demand B2B e-commerce platforms to order their items and complete the purchase through digital methods without the involvement of any sales rep or company executive.
- Personalized experiences. B2B buyers demand hyper-personalized recommendations for content and offers based on their specific needs and buying journey. As the attention span of a B2B buyer has reduced to just 8 seconds, their expectations out of the branded content have risen.
Such changes in the buying behavior pose challenges for sales and marketing teams to cope with the growing demands of consumers. However, a well-thought-out strategy and adapting your sales enablement with the changing demands will help you gain an edge over others.
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What should your new sales enablement strategies include?
Share the right sales stories to bolster learning, content, and conversations.
Before you create content for your audience, it is time to outline knowledgeable content for your internal teams. It is time to encourage your teams to share their experience and knowledge with their peers. Sellers turn into experienced teachers when they set an example in front of others. They share the best practices they followed, the wins, objective handling techniques, and so on.
Such content should be added in a framework, and it will help you drive learning across the teams and ensure that your sales teams are engaging with your prospects and buyers.
Align revenue and buying teams through modern collaboration techniques.
Modern sales enablement techniques come with collaboration and feedback tools that help unify data of every buyer-seller interaction. Such data presentation is visible to the entire team, and it helps your team take an overall view of what’s working and what’s not.
Achieve success with integrated AI-powered technology.
Modern sales enablement strategies leverage AI, and it allows you to utilize AI-generated insights and automation in the workflow to drive smart decisions. The ingredient of AI makes it easier for your team to find content, allowing marketers to see what type of content resonates with sellers and buyers.
The power of storytelling in modern sales enablement
Modern sales enablement is brimming with the latest technologies, but the technology works better when boosted with storytelling shots. Because story-based content has a crucial role to play in spreading knowledge and inspiration among B2B buyers.
Humans understand their world through stories. Hence, stories are the medium through which knowledge is shared effectively. And now, with modern sales enablement, you can tap into the stories to communicate with buyers, as it will help sellers engage with buyers at an emotional level. The information becomes memorable, and using the power of narratives, you can make your content relatable and retained for a long time.
Wrapping Up
In modern times, sales enablement is the hero. Adapting to the modern sales enablement strategies, you will help your sellers accomplish any feats that they have asked to perform. These strategies also help you keep your buyers happy by enabling relevant content and messaging tactics that resonates with them deeply and drives more conversions.
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