New B2B Buying – In fact the Gartner study found that

In fact, the Gartner study found that customers who found the information they received from salespeople useful in promoting their purchases 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. Bottom line: while the pipeline view, for example, shows a preponderance of stalled opportunities in Stage 5 of the sale, there’s no way to know this through a linear, seller-centric sales funnel where buyers are really struggling to move forward with a particular deal. To win in this business-to-business buying environment, salespeople must focus on providing customers with information specifically designed to help them meet their buying objectives. The traditional linear business process model of moving from marketing to sales will not work for today’s complex B2B buying environment. We call it “buying power,” i.e., providing information to customers in a way that enables them to complete important buying tasks. Thus, in today’s B2B purchasing 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, salespeople are not the only channel for the customer, but only one channel, and alignment between face-to-face and digital channels is key to helping the customer understand how they actually buy. Most sales and marketing teams are organized sequentially: marketing generates and drives demand through digital channels before conveying the most qualified sales opportunities that can be handled in person. A typical buyer group for a complex B2B solution consists of 6 to 10 decision makers, each with four or five pieces of information gathered independently that need to be compared with 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.