The buyer-experience mindset: A powerful shift that’s easier to implement than you think
For CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs who want to orchestrate real and lasting changes to the way in which the company engages with buyers, the impact that frontline sales managers have is huge. This article brings together Numentum’s three best practices that executives should follow to oversee the implementation of the buyer-experience mindset.
Why buyer experience is important
LinkedIn summarized the key tenets of buyer-first—what Numentum terms buyer-experience— emphasizing its focus on getting to know buyers as unique individuals and building long-term relationships:
“Buyer-first selling places the interests and needs of the buyer at the core of the selling experience. It means always acting in service of the buyer’s goals and for the benefit of the long-term relationship between seller and buyer.”
Today’s B2B buyer is a hyper-informed, sophisticated consumer. They have become accustomed to seamless, personalized buying experiences—and lead with their own online research when looking to make new purchases. This means they spend less time with sales reps than ever before. Gartner predicts it to be between 5%-17% of the total buying journey.
A study by LinkedIn found that 81% of top-performing sellers say they always put the buyer first, compared to only 60% of all other sellers. Adopting a buyer-experience mindset will enable sales leaders and their teams to find success in a crowded, competitive market where the seller is just one channel in the total buying experience.
How to coach teams to think buyer-experience
Thinking about the buyer experience requires a mindset shift. Encourage your teams to put themselves in the shoes of the human on the receiving end of their outreach efforts. Doing this will make it far harder to let poor tactics off the hook.
Sales leaders can begin by posing one simple question to their sellers: Would you buy from yourself? For example, would that impersonal, spray-and-pray email work? Encourage sellers to explore the answer by taking a methodical approach that aligns with common steps in today’s digital-first buying journey.
Three ways to activate the buyer-experience mindset
These best practices will help sellers analyze their initial performance from a buyer-experience perspective. The sales leader's role is to aggregate the learnings into a scalable strategy. Sales leaders should use one-on-ones to discuss initial findings and then showcase highlights in a share-back to the whole team in a weekly sales meeting.
1. LinkedIn profile
Ask sellers to look at their own LinkedIn profiles with fresh eyes. Does the profile tell a compelling story about what a potential buyer would gain from a conversation? Ideally, the profile should trigger a thought like: “This will be a good use of my time; I’m going to learn something new and interesting from this person.”
For an idea of what good looks like, see the profile of our Founder & CEO, Dan Swift. It’s a comprehensive multimedia experience with highlights that include:
A corporate background image that links his personal brand with the corporate brand that he represents
A personalized professional headline
An ‘About’ section that gives a summary of his experience, how Numentum can help companies achieve their business objectives, a feel for who he is as a human being outside of the office, and a call to action that encourages buyers to reach out to him directly
A selection of featured content that educates and influences buyers
Numentum testimonials
Professional recommendations
The resume part of the profile is there, but—crucially—it comes after the reader learns about Dan as a person. The narrative leads with individuality and follows up with proof and credentials. A digital-first buying posture is now the norm, but nothing is more important than making a human connection.
Sales leaders can use Dan’s profile (or someone similar from within their own network) and invite sellers to assess their own against it. What’s the same, and what’s different? What would intrigue a buyer to want to find out more?
2. LinkedIn Connection Requests
Sending LinkedIn connection requests is too easy. Sellers simply need to find the name of a decision-maker or influencer in a customer or target company, hit Connect, and wait to see if the person accepts.
Increasingly they won’t, and this chance for a good first impression is wasted. Those 300 characters offered by the platform to make the request personalized are an invaluable way to build an immediate human-to-human connection.
Sales leaders should instruct their teams to think critically about what would make them accept a connection request from someone they don’t know. In our experience with top sales organizations, the winning formula involves being concise and human rather than moving in for the sale.
Sales leaders should instruct their teams to customize all their connection requests—offer a quick introduction and reference a post, blog, or news article that resonated featuring the recipient's company, or simply mention a common relationship and a compelling reason for getting in touch.
3. Email Outreach
LinkedIn found that 90% of executives don’t respond to impersonal sales messages. Quality over quantity has to be the goal; opting for the latter will waste your team's time.
Similar to the process with LinkedIn, sales leaders should have their sellers imagine they are in-market for the company’s product. Looking at their last 3-5 outreach emails: What about the messages would compel them to respond? If there’s nothing, what’s missing?
Relevant and role-specific messaging plays a critical role here. As the owner of information consumed and the digital channel utilized by today’s buyers, marketing has become the primary strategic influence throughout most of the buying process. Sales leaders must work with their marketing counterparts to ensure their teams are leveraging the right messaging in their outreach—unique to the business and compelling to the buyer’s challenges.
Mapping the buyer-experience mindset
Tasking sales teams with an analysis of their own LinkedIn profiles, how they connect with people on LinkedIn, and email outreach activities are simple, practical ways to get them to start thinking about buyer experience. Once familiar with the buyer-experience mindset, sales leaders should instruct sellers to apply that same thinking to every point along the buyer journey.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a B2B enterprise sales training company that integrates social selling into existing sales processes to engage today’s hyper-informed buyers. Our programmatic approach maximizes the utility of brand, marketing assets, and sales technology to generate predictable pipeline and revenue. We partner with forward-thinking brands to bring focus, routine, and accountability to their sales teams. Our customers include SAP, Workday, Vodafone Business, Verizon Business, Broadcom, and RELX.
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