New B2B Buying – In fact the Gartner study found that

In fact, the Gartner study found that buyers who found the information they received from salespeople helpful in making purchase decisions were 2.8 times more likely to get a high level of purchase promotion, and three times more likely to make a larger purchase with fewer regrets. The bottom line is that if the pipeline assessment shows, for example, that opportunity blocking prevails in Stage 5 of the sale, it is not possible to use a linear, seller-centric sales funnel to pinpoint where buyers are really struggling to move forward with a particular deal. In order to win in this business acquisition process, salespeople must focus on providing customers with information specifically designed to help them meet their acquisition objectives. The traditional linear business process model, with the shift from marketing to sales, will not work for today’s complex B2B acquisition. We call it “buying power,” i.e., providing information to customers in a way that enables them to perform important buying tasks. Thus, in today’s B2B buying world, there is no transition from marketing to sales or fromdigital face-to-face. Instead, during a typical B2B purchase, customers go through a “loop,” so to speak, repeating each of these six buying processes at least once. Thus, the salesperson is not the only channel for the customer, but only one, and alignment between face-to-face and digital channels is essential to helping customers make a purchase. Most sales and marketing teams are organized sequentially: marketing generates and drives demand through digital channels before handing over the most qualified sales opportunities to handle them in person. A typical buying group for a complex B2B solution consists of 6-10 decision makers, each with four or five pieces of data that they have collected on their own and need to compare against the group. Because buyers have easy access to quality information through digital channels, it is easier for them to gather information on their own, resulting in salespeople having less access and less ability to influence buyers’ decisions. Sales managers must adjust project management and forecasting to accommodate the nonlinear buying journey of B2B buyers. Instead, they are almost equally likely to use digital and in-person channels to accomplish each buying task more or less simultaneously. More than three-quarters of customers surveyed by Gartner described their buying experience as very difficult or challenging. Sales managers often blame salespeople for their lack of access to customers, which does not give them enough value in typical customer interactions. Most sales organizations organize their activities around a linear pipeline, trying to move opportunities from one stage to the next.