Dramatic shifts in B2B buying will significantly reorganize B2B trade during the next five years. The top B2B sales organizations will no longer be denominated in sales professionals — or at least not fully — as enhancing individual seller performance demonstrates a weak, mismatched approach to address the oncoming, fundamental transformation in how consumers buy. Instead, CSOs must unavoidably change their perspective from managing teams of individual sellers to managing the much larger organizational selling effort, prioritizing digital pathways to market. The explanation for why and the implications for sales leaders and their strategy are covered in this succinct analysis of the top five client purchasing trends.
Digital and difficulty are two separate but related themes in the story of changing buying dynamics, both of which have significant effects on sales organizations. Customers who are digitally empowered and dealing with far more challenging decisions are mismatched by today's sales model, which egregiously fails to provide the customer's most important need: the assurance that they are making the greatest possible business decisions.
Digital Trend 1: B2B buyers drastically undervalue the sellers' estimated value.
Prior research has shown that B2B buyers consistently rely on digital channels during the purchasing journey (such as supplier websites, third-party websites, and social media). We have tracked the gradual trend in client preferences away from face-to-face sales contacts and toward digital methods. In a recent survey of customer stakeholders, it was discovered that for the majority of buying tasks, suppliers' websites are used almost equally by sales representatives.
In a related vein, B2B buyers claim to have very little time with sales representatives.
These encounters only account for 17% of the entire purchasing experience. Given that the typical contract comprises several suppliers, a sales representative only has access to about 5% of a customer's overall buying time. Sales executives regret the decline in consumer access, but this shouldn't be surprising given the higher caliber and volume of information now available via more objective digital channels. Customers don't see much distinguishing value (beyond their own learning) in contact with sales representatives, thus just essential access is offered.
What's most concerning is a noticeable generational shift in the cynicism of sales representatives. According to our research, millennial business clients are more dubious than baby boomers, and 44% of millennials would rather not deal with a sales representative while making a B2B purchase. A digital-first purchasing attitude will become the norm as baby boomers retire and millennials—the first generation born into the digital age—mature into significant decision-making roles. Furthermore, we anticipate that the sudden increase in digital purchases during the COVID-19 epidemic will have a long-lasting impact on consumer comfort with digital learning and purchasing.
Is this the first sign of the impending "death of the sales rep"? No. Definitely not in the following five years (and beyond, for many sectors requiring detailed customer collaboration and co-created solutions). However, it does indicate a significant shift in the seller's role. The day when sales representatives were the channel is coming to an end, and they are now only a channel to customers. Competitors who give considerable value through digital- and omnichannel sales models and engage customers in richly interactive digital learning and discovery will surpass sales leaders who are unwilling to recognise customers' proclivity for digital-first behavior. Sales representatives and specialists will play a more significant role in guiding self-learning clients toward more assured selections, which will help but is by no means entirely dependent upon, this.
Regardless of channel, CSOs must adopt a new identity and organizational culture, moving from being the "leader of sellers" to the "leader of selling." All levels of sales leadership urgently need to make this mental adjustment, but it must begin with the CSO. The finest work in digital selling is being done in marketing, not in sales divisions. From specification papers and product summaries, forward-thinking marketers have moved on to digitally sophisticated buyer enablement. They assist clients in navigating the ramifications for their business while navigating the complexities of an end-to-end purchasing choice. The tiny number of companies that have purposefully combined their customer success management and support, sales, and marketing capabilities have adopted a more seamless digital go-to-market model with far more intelligent and harmonized touchpoints. Compared to companies who are hesitant to adopt a digital-first sales paradigm, these firms are prepared to increase sales performance.
Digital Trend 2: Consumers appreciate rich virtual shopping experiences.
B2B companies have lagged considerably behind B2C businesses in terms of seamless, straightforward, and informative digital platforms (granted, with far simpler products). Comparisons to technologically advanced online retail, travel, and media enterprises are inevitable as more company customer learning and purchasing activity migrate online. The justification "We're different because we're B2B" is no longer valid. If CSOs don't adapt, they risk being dangerously exposed to disruptive competitors that can start from scratch and design digital-first consumer experiences.
Although it might seem like a far-off problem, the groundwork is being laid for breakaway differentiation. Such radical transformation takes time, particularly for huge firms that are battling to get rid of antiquated in-person sales techniques. Traditional B2B firms must spend years rewiring old structures, procedures, functional silos, and leadership mindsets in order to make this work, unlike digitally native disruptors. Now is the time to begin that task.
What will the B2B customer experience look like in this new digital-first world? There are hints of innovation. Commercial real estate transactions and other highly complicated interactions that once required live, in-person site inspections are going into virtual reality. Without exchanging a single handshake, customers can demo "fit for purpose" real estate property, virtually test their preferred configurations, and lease floors in a Manhattan building. Manufacturing industries are creating digital innovation hubs where suppliers and customers can tour one other's facilities and collaborate on joint projects. Online project management solutions with integrated buying facilitation are being developed by cloud suppliers for clients to utilize on their own to plan exploration and implementation. Examples are few, but they increase daily as more nimble and smaller suppliers actively try to take market share from bigger companies.
This kind of innovation is the result of a great deal of effort and extensive testing. Companies who ignore this kind of learning today will undoubtedly struggle tomorrow as consumer brands aggressively seek out new opportunities to take advantage of data availability, technological advancement, and customer desire for novel experiences.
For the majority of businesses, the process begins with a careful analysis of how, where, and what customers are learning, as well as the challenging choices they must subsequently make during their purchasing experiences. The objective is to identify areas of friction, informational gaps, and chances to boost client confidence. Although overwhelming, the variety of customer stakeholders involved, resources used, and opinions sought out concurrently underscore the chance suppliers have to significantly influence these decisions in fresh ways. The place to start is the business website, which is frequently overlooked by sales but is nonetheless heavily used by customers. Sales managers who are considering website marketing should pay attention. Even if the sales are rarely the owner of the corporate website, selling is where it belongs as a tool for client involvement. Sales leaders risk alienating clients and losing business if they don't devote a lot of attention, money, and political capital to developing great digital experiences over the next five years.
Digital Trend 3: The digital purchasing habits of consumers enable more effective analytics and coordinated customer involvement.
There are countless chances for sales teams that are analytics- and data-driven due to customers' increased digital purchasing behavior. Customers that interact online inevitably leave traces behind them, much like footprints in the snow. Marketing firms have long used these digital signals, albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness, to more accurately evaluate the depth of customer engagement and purchase readiness, whether it be page views, downloads, shares, or a wide range of other activities.
Progressive sales teams have only recently used customer data in a similar way to evaluate funnel trends, create projections, qualifying offers, and engage customers proactively. There is a lot of work to accomplish. The majority of client data gathered through various customer touchpoints, is transmitted between systems. As a result, only a limited number of businesses have developed the capacity to systematically collect, arrange, clean, and query that data. Organizations are unable to implement even the most basic machine learning or artificial intelligence solutions because of subpar data entry, incompatible technologies, and restricted data access (AI). Effective data analysis must be prioritized as a fundamental growth competency and cannot be seen as a foreign or abstract idea.
As a result of growing digital activity and systems of record, which produce specific customer behavior and product usage patterns, the amount of available customer data is expanding and will do so in the future. High-end analytics will increasingly become standard practice over the course of the next five years, going from being a differentiation. Any organization still bemoaning bad data quality and inexperienced analytics teams will find it difficult to explain why they failed to recognize the value of their consumers' recently established digital footprints.
Leading commercial organizations will work to implement dynamic customer engagement models, powered by data from all customer interactions, including customer service, technical support, customer success, product interactions, sales, and marketing, to inform an enhanced understanding of the customer organization. With the use of AI, these once-dispersed data points will help customers make more informed decisions about the next best course of action and make better use of already purchased products. With levels of consistency previously unheard of, highly customized communications contextualized account-based marketing materials, and timely seller suggestions will assist penetrate vast, heterogeneous client organizations. In this way, digital selling surpasses traditional single-channel sales rep models with highly coordinated multichannel involvement with client accounts.
Difficulty Trend 1: Customers' resistance to change reduces their purchasing power.
The average number of unique stakeholders involved in a complicated B2B acquisition has been steadily increasing for some time, as we have long documented. That number was a little over five-ten years ago; today, it is over 11, occasionally flexing up to nearly twenty. As each stakeholder attempts to accomplish very diverse buying tasks encompassing problem identification, solution research, requirements creation, and supplier selection, we've also recorded the complex, nonlinear route that the majority of B2B purchases follow. B2B purchasing is challenging overall. Without addressing this issue, suppliers who fail to offer assistance (in the form of what we've come to refer to as "Buyer Enablement") are unlikely to regularly or predictably win big agreements.
However, our most recent B2B buying study points to a much larger challenge. Ninety-three percent of respondents in a recent survey of more than 1,000 B2B buyer stakeholders said their purchase decision was influenced by a larger organizational initiative, which had disruptive operational barriers, market considerations, and, as nearly 50% of respondents said, implications for organizational structure. To put it another way, the ability of consumers to successfully negotiate challenging institutional transformation is effectively a determining factor in the success of B2B purchase choices. Over 80% of customers expressed doubt in their own capacity to handle such change, and that worry must also be shared by their suppliers.
Such high uncertainty affects a great deal since it reduces customers' capacity to make any kind of purchasing decision by 30% and decreases their likelihood of making a more expensive, higher-quality "high-quality deal" buy by 42%. If for no other reason than a lack of self-confidence, most customers have a natural tendency to retain the status quo.
Successful suppliers will need to figure out how to deal with both the uncertainty that customers feel when making purchases and the uncertainty that comes with change. We refer to this as "Change Enablement" since it involves giving consumers a vision for a shift, a method for identifying the main issues that need to be resolved as part of that change, as well as a framework for ranking competing factors. Change Enablement is fundamentally Buyer Enablement. It addresses the larger breadth of organizational change and goes beyond the explicit purchase dynamics. Because large-scale solutions through complex buying decisions are less likely when customers' change uncertainty is not addressed, the top suppliers will enable larger organizational transformation in addition to purchasing decisions over the next five years.
Difficulty Trend 2: Customers are overloaded with excellent information.
High-quality supplier data no longer allows for the same level of distinct difference as it did only a few years ago. In a recent consumer study on information quality, 89% of respondents said they had recently encountered material that was generally of good quality, pertinent, and supported by evidence. The competition to produce "market-leading thought leadership" has effectively brought suppliers to a standstill. "Really brilliant" supplier viewpoints will deteriorate to "quite ordinary" over the course of the next five years as a result of suppliers' sustained investment in data-backed thought leadership, enhanced research, and extended content dissemination.”
But from the viewpoint of the buyer, this poses an equally difficult task. More than half of the B2B buyers who participated in our poll said they were particularly overwhelmed by the amount of reliable information they came across during the course of their purchase journey. Additionally, almost half believed supplier information was reliable but inconsistent at the same time, leaving buyers confused. According to our research, conflicting information lowers client confidence, which can decrease their propensity to make a large buy by as much as 160%. Due to the influx of thought leadership, B2B purchasing choices are currently at a stop.
The greatest sales companies will give their salespeople the tools they need to engage clients with information quite differently over the next five years. Sellers will change their focus from providing information to assisting customers in making sense of all they learn, regardless of the source. Our data demonstrate that this Sense Making technique significantly outperforms more traditional sales approaches, and we anticipate that as customers continue to engage in more self-learning, this performance difference will grow. Consumers' needs are met via Sense Making, which successfully directs customers' attention to the issues that are most important to their business.
There is no doubt that in-person selling has a place in B2B commerce in the future. Customers most definitely require in-person assistance to make sense of all their self-learning. To guarantee that clients receive value, those in-person interactions must be recalibrated to tackle the most difficult purchasing difficulties rather than make them worse with more or conflicting information. The best sellers will inevitably change substantially as the number of useful information increases, moving from just giving customers more information to aiding them in making sense of it and better business decisions.
Conclusion
Both the substance and the scope of seller conduct will need to change to be relevant as B2B buying shifts more and more online, with an increased emphasis on sense-making and change facilitation.
Sales leaders will also need to completely reevaluate their position. Today, too many sales executives believe they are leading salespeople rather than leading sales. Customers are unquestionably switching firmly from physical channels to digital alternatives. Sales managers shouldn't hand over their extensive knowledge of sales performance to departments that have traditionally controlled these digital channels. Instead, websites and new digital channels need to be specifically designed to boost sales performance, which is supported by the obvious fact that people learn and make purchases online. Selling itself is at the core of sales. Whether or not human involvement in sales reduces with time, selling must still occur in some form; the channel (human vs. digital) is only a means to a goal.
Without a doubt, the way that sales are done will change. The role is about to alter, and sales leaders will become takers rather than makers. However, it doesn't follow that they can't respond by adapting; in fact, the greatest ones have already started.
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