Why we’re in a buyer experience crisis (and how to solve it)
B2B revenue organizations have a problem. The reality we live in has changed: Constant fears of a recession have shrunk or frozen budgets, competition is up across all industries, and buyers are more connected and empowered than ever.
Yet B2B revenue leaders are being held to the same set of goals and targets. In this new market, how can you continue to drive the kind of revenue growth that, either as a publicly-traded company your shareholders expect, or as a privately-owned organization your financial backers want you to have?
At Numentum, we don’t believe the answer is with the status quo.
Right now, too many companies operate with the same outdated playbook to find and convert buyers. The crux of that playbook is to bombard a small, single-threaded group of personas at accounts that someone in Finance deemed as falling within the company’s Total Addressable Market (TAM). It’s a war of attrition to reach revenue goals, and the patience of prospective buyers is collateral damage. The result is that the buyer experience—defined as the way that prospects perceive every interaction with your company when they are in the process of buying something—is in crisis.
A broken approach to buyer experience
Problems with the buying process begin on the front line with sales development representatives (SDRs). Companies hire young, keen graduates and task them with hunting down leads. This generally involves cold calling, voice messages, email spamming, LinkedIn blasting, and generally annoying the people they’re trying to reach.
Born in the Silicon Valley startup world from top-down pressure on Marketing to demonstrate lead generation, the system’s destructive—to the young talent expected to engage successfully with executives and to the recipients of their endless communications. It doesn’t work. Gartner research found that across annual contract value (ACV), no marketing qualified leads (MQLs) converted to sales qualified leads (SQLs) at a rate of more than 27%. The average is 21%.
The tactics used to qualify these leads are also questionable. Buyers are increasingly being worn down by outreach sequences that require 100+ touch points, or the promise of gift cards in exchange for a meeting. We live in a world where technology has made it possible for sellers to send 10x, 100x, or 1000x messages at once. Just because they can, doesn’t mean they should.
The approach is absurd, and it carries a huge amount of risk. In research by Salesforce, 84% of buyers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
When that experience doesn’t live up to expectations, buyers have the power to tell the world through social media and ratings and review sites. They’ll also blacklist your company. Get the buyer experience badly wrong, and the results could set your organization back by years. It could even sound a death knell.
The experience that buyers have is a critical part of every company’s go-to-market strategy, and it needs an overhaul. For executives that want to drive revenue forward, it’s a critical element to get right. As Forrester observes, “Business, marketing, and IT decision-makers we’ve surveyed at customer-obsessed B2B organizations estimate a 10% or higher growth in revenue, profits, and customer retention at a rate three times that of their non-customer-obsessed counterparts.”
Seeing the buyer experience through a human-first lens
Once the potential damage of relentless cold outreach is understood, it’s clear that an alternative is needed. B2B revenue organizations must focus on providing buyers with a positive, enjoyable, and memorable experience at every step of their purchase journey.
“Top sellers are significantly more likely to always perform research on their buyers, compared to their peers.”
The mindset shift is one from outreach quantity to quality. LinkedIn coined the term ‘deep sales’ to describe a way that sellers can work based on comprehensive buyer research, and found it significantly outperformed a shallow, numbers-based approach:
“Since the start of the pandemic, 62% of the highest performing reps said they have ramped up their research on prospects and customers ‘significantly.’ In the United States, top sellers (by a margin of 82% to 49%) are significantly more likely to always perform research on their buyers, compared to their peers.”
High-performing sellers set up conversations with buyers that are well-researched and more meaningful, which makes them more likely to convert.
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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