New blueprint for customer acquisition How to shift from in-person to holistic validated convergence

How CEO’s can shift in B2B market from in-person towards holistic validated convergence. Part 6

The business to business (B2B) marketplace experienced seismic shifts, before the pandemic, as businesses redefined what is most important to business operating model and what would accelerate their business growth. Organizations created initiatives to improve their strategies to ensure purchasing decisions better aligned with the enterprise strategies. This transformation required greater Senior Executive involvement, more departments becoming integrated, and a deeper understanding of the impact of purchasing decisions.

Many incorporated these changes into digital transformation initiatives as the organization sought to streamline and simplify applications, improve the customer experience touch-points, and create improvement in their technology platforms. These initiatives increased the number of people, departments and organizations that have to participate in the evaluation process to make a purchasing decision. All of these changes have significantly increased complexity of the B2B buying process and lengthened the evaluation process. The Pandemic has further moved the B2B market down this paradigm to an even larger group decision and complex purchasing process.

Historically, the B2B marketplace relied on sales professionals as their primary source for information coupled with customized in-person presentations designed to evaluate and vet the final solutions providers. The pandemic removed most of these face to face meetings and thereby continued to shift the solution discovery, investigation and application learning from the vendor sales teams over to the purchasing company’s team members. Understanding the vendor solution and application validation relied on users’ self-discovery of information found on self-service option on the vendors website, industry trade publications, think tanks, use cases and white papers. The buying decision is no longer a simple linear journey from lead to discovery to proposal to contract. We discussed this in detail in an earlier blog found here (Navigating the Seismic Shift in B2B Sales).

This shift requires B2B organizations to take a holistic view of the end-to-end customer purchasing journey to come to a final decision. One that requires and relies on trackable analytics for acquiring new customers. Does this mean the sales teams are no longer a key part of the customer journey? Will sales professionals become obsolete and expendable? No. Clearly that is not what is happening as people buy from people they trust and like. Rather the sales teams must have better tools to help their prospects become customers and better tracking to know when self-discovery and self-serve validation has been initiated. Here are a few recommendations we are suggesting to CEO’s, Chief Sales Officers or Head of Sales:

1. Improve Content: Invest in content and detailed product information on your website, industry trade publications, think tanks, use cases and white papers for your prospects to engage in self-discovery and self-learning of content.

2. Increase Digital Presence: Invest in website, industry trade publications, think tanks, use cases and white papers for self-discovery and self-learning options that lead prospects to making decisions.

3. Invest in Industry Experts for Knowledge transfer: Deliver improved understanding with proven experience to provide guidance, minimize uncertainty and deliver buyer confidence. Invest in team resources to assist customers on their journey.

4. Invest in tracking ecosystems: To understand the customer journey at a deeper more meaningful and replicable metrics. What are the key buying metrics for each of your products and what are nice to know.

By implementing these strategies and holistic initiatives, this gives your customer a better opportunity and easier experience to find information and then to make decisions. The best CEO’s and companies know their customer journey has changed and continues to change and they are taking action and focusing on their customer and their buying journey.

If you want to know how to implement these strategies, let’s talk to create your customized plan that we have designed and implemented in other organizations.

Note:

These elements that are incorporated into the post:

· Real World Experiences: Lessons learned from my experiences are always bolded and blue.

· Critical Competencies: These are tangible proven skills sets that I have developed over my career. These should give insight into my competency and are highlighted in yellow.