What Today’s Buyers Want—and How Sellers Can Provide It
If sellers want to connect with today’s buyers, their interactions with them must be hyper-personalized. If they aren’t, forget about any kind of deal.
That’s one of the key points Mary Shea, Global Innovation Evangelist at Outreach, stressed during a conversation I had with her during an episode of The Adapter’s Advantage podcast. Shea is responsible for thought-provoking research on the future of B2B buying and selling. She also helps the market understand the increasingly important role new technology plays in enabling better experiences for both buyers and sellers.
In her research into today’s buyers, Shea has uncovered that they are sophisticated, self-sufficient, and accustomed to consumer-facing marketplaces. This new generation of buyers—millennials—aren’t “just surfacing the lists and making buying recommendations. They are C-suite execs who are signing contracts,” she said.
They hold a lot of power, and they don’t have time to waste. But they do want input from sales reps once their journey on the self-discovery road comes to a stand-still, Shea said.
“In an enterprise business purchase, buyers very much want to value that rep,” she told me. “But they’re not going to put up with it if they’re not having personalized interactions—if they’re not deriving value from that experience.”
How to Have Hyper-Personalized Conversations with Buyers
To have hyper-personalized conversations with buyers, sales reps need very strong industry expertise, and they must be able to have conversations about total cost of ownership (TCO) or return on investment (ROI) in real time, Shea told me. They also must be able to extract insights from how the customer is utilizing their platform or tool and offer rich recommendations.
Companies can help sales reps with this by gathering and analyzing prospect and customer data and creating a view of the customer. This goes much further than looking at email open rates. What’s their job title? What’s their area of expertise? What are their typical challenges? And you must do this for every buyer type involved in a sale, which can be as many as 22 people, she said.
Doing that manually is next to impossible, which is where technology comes in. Intelligence tools can extract all of this human behavioral data, use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze it, and provide insights that go into the sales organization’s CRM or other system sellers can access.
“That data then feeds tremendous insights that every member of a revenue team can benefit from as they go to market,” Shea said.
3 Ways to Use Conversation Intelligence to Get Data-Driven Insights
Today, B2B companies use Conversation Intelligence to get insight sales managers and sales enablement teams need to help sales reps overcome their unique challenges and improve overall team performance.
With the data-driven insights provided by Conversation Intelligence, sales enablement managers can identify skill gaps, prescribe training to fix the specific behaviors that lose deals, extract best practices for their entire team, and help sellers have better—and personalized—conversations with buyers.
Companies can leverage Conversation Intelligence tools in three specific areas:
- Sales coaching: With Conversation Intelligence, sales managers can observe how sellers interact with buyers, the language they use, how they describe the company’s value proposition, how they handle objections, and more. The tool can also provide personalized, AI-powered sales coaching recommendations, exercises, quizzes, and remedial learning content to help individuals improve.
- Sales learning: The data derived from Conversation Intelligence enables sales enablement managers and trainers to spotlight top performers’ best practices, identify trends, and improve forecasting. They can also see how reps deliver messaging and product information.
- Sales content creation: Conversation Intelligence can identify how sellers use content and which content is most effective. The tool can also detect sales conversation topics, then you can automate content recommendations for different selling scenarios. Plus, it can identify successful content for each pipeline stage and buyer type.
As you can see, the data derived from intelligence tools is powerful. And as Shea said during our conversation: “If you’re not leveraging data, you’re putting your whole organization at a competitive disadvantage.”
Learn More:
Listen to Mary Shea’s interview on The Adapter’s Advantage podcast to learn more about how new technology will deliver hyper-personalized buying experiences.
Subscribe to The Adapter’s Advantage Podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and TuneIn.
