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Posted by Aldwin Neekon

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B2B buying is the new B2B sales

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Executive summary: Groups of people are bad at working together to buy things. This article shows how to shorten your B2B sales cycles by figuring out how to help your customers buy from you. If you’re trying to close sizeable deals by selling to a group of people at another company, then the odds are already stacked against you, and you’re exactly who I wrote this article for.

B2B buying is the new B2B selling

I spend a lot of my time helping clients avoid ineffective B2B marketing programs. I do this with a technique that easily identifies which marketing programs are a waste of time and which are worthy of their resources. My technique is so straightforward that you can start with your own team today. Get your entire team involved in identifying the common obstacles your customers face when they’re trying to buy from you. In other words, improve your B2B selling by improving your customers’ B2B buying skills.

This is not about your lead gen, or sales and marketing alignment, or your sales process. This is all about the customer’s buying journey. It’s about taking an empathetic look at the difficult things groups of people at companies you sell to have to do to get their company to buy from you.

Your typical B2B customer needs to get an average of 6.8 people inside their company to agree to purchase from you. And that’s the easy part. The most difficult thing is to get those 6.8 people to actually agree to do anything at all. The more diverse those teams are, in terms of roles, responsibilities, geography, and so on, the harder this becomes.

The more buyers there are, the less buying there is

If you sell things that one person can put on their credit card without asking anyone else for permission or support, then you have it easier than most. In fact, having only one person involved in a purchase decision makes it 47% more likely that a sale will be made than if two people are involved. The chances of making a sale plummet further if more than five people are involved on the purchasing side.

A B2B buying group is not a buying team

The group of people who work at your customer organization, and who need to agree to a purchase before you can close the deal, are not a team. They don’t have a coach, or a common goal to buy from you, or regular practices where they rehearse the best ways to send you cheques. In other words, they are not a team.

They are individuals who happen to work at the same company. They have their own goals, processes, preferences, headaches, ambitions, and grudges. And there’s absolutely nothing saying they have to even consider buying anything from you. Not only do they not have to play the game with you, they don’t have to play at all. In other words, they’re the opposite of a team. And they don’t have to work together or co-operate. They can save a lot of time by staying with the incumbent vendor, or doing nothing.

Despite all this, your job is to get them all to agree that they have a mutual need for a shared future that can only be achieved, in whole or in part, by purchasing what you’re selling.

It’s your job to turn them into a team whose goals will only be achieved if they buy from you.

What happened to covering your bases?

We’ve known about the group purchase dynamic for a long time. One of the more popular approaches to dealing with this problem, and one I’ve used successfully, is “covering the bases”.

We find out who the influencers and stakeholders are, and make sure we meet with each of them and get them to buy into our company’s vision. We get each of them to agree to buying from us. Each of them has different needs, goals, preferences, and priorities so you’ll need to have a different pitch, a different value proposition, for each of them.

I like this model and I’ve used it for years, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to. The problem is, even when you get a yes from each person individually, the group can decide to say no.

A B2B buying group has a mind of its own

The reason why they say “yes” individually and “no” as a group is because individuals behave differently in groups. A group is different than the sum of its individual parts. Five yeses can equal no, because the group thinks differently than the people who make it up.

There’s a lot of research out there about the way individual behaviour changes in a group setting.

Even more relevant to our goal of accelerating our B2B sales is the finding by CEB that when one decision maker is involved, the purchase likelihood is 81%. By the time we get to the average 6.8 decision makers who are involved in the average B2B sale, the purchase likelihood drops to less than 31%. This doesn’t mean there’s a 31% chance that they’ll buy from you, but that there’s a 31% chance that they’ll buy anything at all.

When we cover the bases by getting individual buy-in from the stakeholders and decision makers, we can make the mistake of dealing with a group sale as if it’s a series of individual sales. With each individual, we can on average set the purchase likelihood to 81%. But this is where the math gets weird. Six people, each with an 81% chance of buying get together and talk themselves down to a B2B buying rate of only 31%.

When Yes+Yes+Yes=No

In a company, one group member might lead the rest to a “no” decision for political reasons, or even personal reasons. Or maybe they’re distracted. We each have a finite amount of energy, focus, and willpower. They might be running low or burned out. Or it might be easier for them to say yes to a vendor than to their peers who are more likely to ask pointed questions.

Or maybe they said yes to you, then thought of an objection that hadn’t occurred to them. They share it with the group, and because you’re not there to address it, the entire group flips their votes from yes to no. The point is, there are nearly endless ways for things to go from an individual yes to a group no.

Do we turn a “B2B buying group” into a “B2B buying team”?

So what are we supposed to do about this? We need to find ways to get the B2B buying group to turn into a team, and make it so that team’s goal is to pursue a future that absolutely cannot be arrived at without purchasing what you’re selling.

The best description of how to do this that I’ve seen is in the CEB’s book “The Challenger Customer“. I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so I don’t make any money from you following that link. But I do think you should read it.

I’ll add a summary of their approach in another article. But right now let’s take a step back and look at the B2B buying journey method I use with my clients.

No matter what level of formalization or alignment you have in your sales and marketing processes I guarantee you will learn something new by doing this exercise. In most cases you’ll learn a few things that will help you prioritize what your marketing and product teams could do that will have an immediate impact on your sales team’s success.

Make the common case fast

The whole process is based on the computer architecture rule of optimization. When I was earning my Master’s degree in computer engineering they would tell us to “Make the common case fast.” In computer design we realize that there are tradeoffs to every design decision. You can’t optimize for everything, so you figure out what parts of the system are used most often, and make sure those are fast. That’s how you get the biggest speed increase in your entire system. You don’t spread your bets evenly. You focus everything on the few areas that are going to account for the majority of your work.

In the case of B2B sales acceleration, you focus on the few areas that repeatedly frustrate your customers while they’re trying to buy something from you. Again, this is not about your sales process. It’s about understanding that your customers have a very difficult time getting to “yes” as a group. You have to find out where they’re getting blocked and remove those obstacles. Each obstacle you remove will speed up every single deal of that type. Here’s how to do the B2B Buying Journey exercise.

The B2B Buying Journey Exercise

This is not the same kind of generic buying journey exercise you might have gone through with other consultants. My approach is actionable. It doesn’t spend time defining lots of personas and defining some kind of ideal buying journey. We look at how your customers buy, find out where they get stuck, and remove those obstacles. It moves quickly and gets results immediately.

Preparation

Pick a few recent challenging accounts that ended up in the win column.Why wins? Looking at lost accounts can get people on the defensive. You don’t want to spend time assigning blame. People tend to be more generous with their ideas and recollections when the story has ended well, and that’s what we’ll need. We can analyze losses later. We’ll have to do that. But for now, let’s start with wins.
Make a spreadsheet with multiple tabs, one per account. On each sheet put the following in column A: Their Buying Stage, Our Selling Stage, Their People, Their Goals, Their Obstacles, Our People, Our Goals, Our Tools, Improvements. That’s one per row.
Do some pre-work. Go through your CRM and fill in the spreadsheet, one column for each interaction with the customer. For example, if your first contact with the customer was a cold call to their CTO, that’s what you put in column B. Leave “Their Buying Stage” empty. Put “Cold call” or “Lead Gen” in “Our Selling Stage”. List their people etc. from the notes in the CRM. Don’t show this to anyone. This is just you doing your homework so in the workshop, if things slow down, you can prompt the conversation with some facts.
Book a meeting room (or Skype or Hangout session) for about one hour per account. Try to keep it to less than 3 hours, with a 10-15 minute break per hour. You want people to stay fresh.
Invite as many customer-facing people as you can. Sales, marketing, product management, account management, professional services, delivery and implementation…invite them all.

The Workshop

Open the blank spreadsheet for account #1. Ask this question: “What was our first interaction with them?” Write down what you hear.
Then say “And then what happened?”
Repeat this until you’re caught up to today for that account.
Each column is one interaction with the customer. Review the columns for interactions that got stuck. Look at the “Tools” row in that column. A tool could be anything that would have helped the customer reach their goal in that interaction. Maybe it’s a brochure, or an ROI calculator, or even a single sentence that sums up the answer to the customer’s burning question. What tools were available? What should have been available? For example, say you’re a private company and the customer’s obstacle at one stage was reassuring their CFO that you’d remain financially solvent, and your response was flying your CFO down to their offices, then a tool you could consider for next time might be to have a trusted accounting firm audit your private financials and share them under NDA.
Repeat for other accounts.

Notice the obstacles and deficiencies that keep coming up. Prioritize these and you have your team’s to-do list. These are the things on which you can start running sales experiments. Validate with customers, provide the tool, and start measuring the impact it has on sales velocity.

This is absolutely transformative

First of all, it gets everyone involved. It’s not sales demanding urgent support mid-funnel. It’s your whole company coming together to figure out how to better prepare and enable your sales team to succeed. It gets marketing to shift focus away from top of the funnel activities to revenue generating activity.

This is a huge shift for marketing. How well does this following describe your marketing team?

They work incredibly hard to create qualified leads.
They hand the leads to sales.
Sales hits obstacles with the way the customer wants to buy, and asks urgently for marketing’s help.
Marketing does its best, but nobody does great work at the 11th hour.
The deal stalls. Or the deal fizzles altogether.

The verdict? Sales needs more and better leads from marketing! But this is misleading. Sales doesn’t need more leads as much as it needs the resources to close the leads it already gets.

B2B leads are finite

Great leads are finite. This is specially true in the B2B world. You don’t have millions or billions of consumers to target. You have thousands, maybe even only a few hundred companies in your target market. Because of this, it is worth much more to your bottom line if marketing can help turn the leads you already have into revenues.

Here’s another way to look at it: Leads are potential revenue. Revenue is actually revenue. Which would you prefer? My clients pick actual revenue over potential revenue every time. If you shift your marketing team to contribute more to actual revenue, they will get more respect and be happier. And your whole company will accelerate its success.

Shorter demos and faster pipelines

How does this buying journey exercise work in real life? I’ll publish a follow-up with some client examples, but feel free to call me in the meantime and I’ll tell you. Reach me at 647-479-5856 or contact me here.

Have your customers gone pitch-deaf?

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

There’s a hierarchy of needs that isn’t being acknowledged by a lot of sales people. Your sales team might be making this mistake, and it could be costing you sales.

As sales teams rightly attempt to differentiate their offerings and to challenge the buyer with modern B2B sales strategies they miss out on a biological truth. We can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. And if your audience is pre-occupied by a burning issue, all your vision building, differentiation, and challenger selling will not be heard.

One of my clients had a marketing automation system that was not working for them. They were getting bad results from every campaign, so I decided to run a more targeted campaign. That’s when I realized their marketing automation system didn’t let them grade different prospects differently. For example, whether the prospect was from the finance industry or the legal industry, they both got graded the same way. Whether they were a CFO or an IT professional, they got graded the same way.

We called one of the biggest marketing automation vendors in the world (half of you probably use them) and invited them in to replace the old tool. I told them:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

They assured me they could do that. They flew an account rep and a customer success person in to the meeting at my client’s office. I told them:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

And do you know what they did? They spent the next hour talking about their company’s philosophy of the world, probably describing in great detail their integrated view of how a modern B2B business needs to run, their vision of how marketing and sales will be revolutionized by their technology, and how we were perfectly positioned to be the beneficiaries of all of this progress!

They probably said all those things. But I didn’t hear a single word they said.

Why? Because I was hung up on this:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

They eventually got around to showing us how to do the number one thing I had asked to see. But by then it was too late. I was distracted, annoyed, and frankly thought less of their professional ability to hear our problems and provide good solutions.

Should I have been so hung up on that one feature? Wasn’t it in my best interest to see the broader picture? Weren’t they doing me a favour by helping me see all this? It doesn’t matter. I was surprised that the existing tool didn’t do this, and given the cost of doing a migration, the table stakes for me were to not have a similar surprise with the new tool. I also wanted to show the client team how that one feature could transform the way they ran campaigns. Of course I cared about more than just that one feature. We had a long list of requirements at strategic and tactical levels. But at that moment, I was preoccupied by just one thing. And everything else was a distraction.

Here’s my advice in 3 steps:

Find out what the number one thing is that your prospect wants to hear about.
Talk about the number one thing that your prospect wants to hear about.
Once you have confirmed that their number one thing has been addressed, re-contextualize that number one thing into your grand vision, and move to your vision from there.

Here’s that same advice in 3 words:

Connect, then redirect

Yes, you have to identify the stakeholders, get in front of them, connect them to one another, and help them arrive at a solution that helps them take their organization into a future whose arrival they all support.

But you have to remember that in their busy, attention-fragmented world, you first have to deal with what they think is their biggest burning issue. You might do this by providing a solution for it, or you might do it by showing them that they actually have much bigger problems than the one they’re thinking of. But you have to deal with it. This doesn’t contradict the research findings about the difficulties involved in sequential sales to multiple influencers. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone about one thing and they have something else on their mind, they won’t hear you.

You have to connect with them on that one issue so they can free up their attention to really hear what you’re saying about the bigger issues. Otherwise they’ll think you’re just trying to lead them to your pitch. That you’re a bad listener, or a bad problem solver. That you’re pushy. That you just don’t get it.

Instead, first connect, then redirect. Try it out in your next prospecting call and see what happens.

Buying from you is not a requirement

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

None of your customers is rewarded for buying things from you

The people you work with, the IT team, the CFO, the lawyers, the marketers, none of them has “buy things” in their quarterly performance goals. The only people who are even remotely incentivized to buy things are purchasing managers or professional buyers. For everyone else, buying is a distraction from their real job.

Their companies expect them to solve problems. They can solve a problem by buying what you sell, but that’s just one option. They could also buy from someone else. Or they could build it themselves. Or they could hire someone to build it, or get out of the line of business that’s experiencing that problem, or take the pain as a fact of life and do nothing but live with the problem.

Buying from you is not a requirement

You on the other hand, are committed to selling, especially if you’re in sales. Your product team is committed to building products that solve problems. Your marketing team is committed to building a brand, communicating your value, and generating leads.

Do you see the asymmetry?

Your team is committed to selling a product. The customer is in no way committed to buying anything. Even calling them a “customer” shows how lopsided our view of the world is.

Buying from you is more complicated than you think.

How do you find out how they buy? It’s not as simple as asking them. Unless they’ve bought something similar recently, they probably don’t even know. Recent research by the CEB published in the Harvard Business Review has found that “typical solutions purchase takes twice as long as
customers expect it will.” and that “65% of customers tell us that they spent as much time as
they’d expected to need for the entire purchase just getting ready to speak with a sales rep.”

We’ve all been in situations as a buyer when we were told by our company that the purchase decision was entirely ours to make. But as we got ready to make the purchase all kinds of other people became involved.

To make a payment above a certain amount, we needed to get a PO approved.
Getting the PO approved meant we had to fill out a form.
Filling out the form required IT to vet the solution.
IT’s involvement triggered an ROI calculation for the office of Finance.
Getting the CFO involved got the lawyer cc’d on the email.
The legal review uncovered the need for a security audit by a third party agency.
The security team needed to see a product demo as the first step of their assessment, which essentially but us back to square one.

Sound familiar? Think back. Which of your existing customers has ever accurately laid out their entire buying process on the first day you spoke with them?

What can you do?

Get beyond your sales process and understand their buying process.
Lead them through their own buying process.

No surprises

Surprises are unpleasant for you, even though you are committed to selling. But your buyer is not committed to buying. Which is why you can’t afford to have a surprise rob them of their appetite to buy.

Imagine that your champion suddenly finds out they have to make a presentation to the C suite convincing them they should buy your product. Maybe they’re busy with the projects they’re working on, or their car just broke down or, lets face it, they’d rather do anything else. The next call you get from them will be “Hi, yeah, you guys are great but we’re gonna put a pin in this decision for a month or so.” And the month becomes forever.

First you have to find out who will get involved on their side, what they have to accomplish at each stage, and what obstacles you need to remove to make buying from you as effortless as possible. Then get everyone to help the sales team get this done. Try a buying journey approach to get all your teams working together to solve this problem.

And keep in mind that despite all this, it’s still a pain to buy anything. Just have some sympathy for your customers. Remember that buying from you is not a requirement, and make it as painless as possible.

Don’t talk about how good you are

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Talk about what they want to be good at.

Think of ways to help them succeed. Talk about what they care about. Let them know you understand how important those things are. Then show them you understand what contributes to their success in those areas. Then, talk about how what you do makes those things happen faster, cheaper, easier, better.

Once they trust you to help them achieve those things, help them share this vision with their peers and bosses. They probably won’t ask for your help here. Nobody wants to say “I don’t have enough influence.” But they probably need your help. Find ways to offer it before they need it.

Are you losing customers to buyer fatigue?

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

B2B purchases that involve more than one person at the buyer’s company usually call for a lot of due diligence and vendor management. That means a lot of questions.

The problem is the more questions your prospects have to ask, the more times they have to contact you, the more meetings they have to set up, the more tired they become. They find themselves losing energy and interest. And they decide the incumbent isn’t so bad after all. Or they decide to put up with their home-grown system for a while longer.

And you lose the deal.

This happens regardless of how promptly you answer their questions or how nice you are. Why? Because it’s not their job to buy from you. Nobody has a job description that includes buying from you as a key performance goal. They have other decisions to make, and if they could avoid making a decision about you, they would. With every extra decision they make they become more tired and more likely to stick with the status quo. You don’t have to take my word for it.

How do you avoid this trap?

Start by having sympathy for the B2B buyer. Then follow these 5 steps:

Identify all the questions that your prospects routinely ask you
Think through your answers to these questions
Define who at your organization should answer these questions
Train your staff on #3
Become pro-active

Here’s an example:

Say you’re a company that routinely out-performs your larger, more well-established competitors. But nine out of ten prospects eventually get around to asking you about your financial viability. They worry that you might not be big enough to sustain their business. They worry that you’re too small not to fail.

The wrong way:

You find yourself facing this question late in the customer’s buying process when their legal, financial, and vendor management teams get involved. By then you’ve spent a lot of time and energy on the prospect. So when you’re faced with this question your team scrambles to re-assure the buyer that although you’re small, you’re mighty. You’re here for the long run. You have other large customers that are all happy with you. You run a tight ship, financially. And so on.

Maybe you fly a couple of your executives to the customer’s office. Maybe your CFO and CEO scramble to get on a call with their counterparts at the buyer’s company. And sometimes it works.

But sometimes it’s just not enough. And the work you’ve done to reassure them is wasted, along with all the work you did to get them to this stage. It would have been nice to know sooner that this would be a deal-breaker.

The right way:

Next time you engage with a large customer, you gather the sales team together and you say

“Look, this prospect fits the profile of companies that tend to worry about our size. Here’s what we do. We bring the size issue up earlier in the sales process. We let them know that a lot of companies their size have this concern about us but that once they learn more about our company they realize that the bigger risk is not going with us.

Once we have an NDA signed, we can send them these documents that include our audited financials and in-depth customer reference videos talking specifically about our size, viability, and ability to support our customers. We then offer to schedule a CFO-to-CFO call to walk them through the numbers.”

Here’s why that’s the better way:

It lets them know that you know enough about their business to anticipate this concern
It shows that you’re confident enough to bring it up instead of hide from it
It avoids them having to ask

That last point is probably the most important one.

The fewer things they have to ask about the better. And the fewer questions they’ve asked by the time they face the tough questions the better.

Don’t wait until they’re exhausted from two weeks of feature comparisons and proof of concept demos before answering a deal-breaker question. Bring it up while they’re fresh, and take the burden of asking the question off their shoulders. It can make a huge difference to your ability to guide the deal in the right direction and close the deal more quickly.

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