To win in the current and future B2B sales environment, your prospect’s expectations and preferences need to drive the process from beginning to end.
October 24, 2024
Issue #682
In today’s issue, we share a sales leader’s lessons that are about as meta (small m) as you can get.
But first: If you haven’t already, can you take a few minutes to complete the 2024 Future of Revenue survey? We want your thoughts and strategies to be included in our research, but we’re almost out of time: The survey closes TOMORROW, FRIDAY 10/25!
PRINCIPLES
Make every interaction count
“We’re losing more deals than ever to nothing.” — Catie Ivey, CRO, Walnut
B2B sales is hard, and getting harder. Budgets are in flux and companies are scaling back on tools. Many sales cycles are defined not by who has the better product, but by whether the prospect decides to buy anything at all.
This is no longer an environment where you can throw all your best stuff at your buyers and see what sticks. You have to go into every opportunity and interaction with exactly the right efficient, purposeful, and personalized approach.
You can only do this by gathering as much information about your prospects as possible before making your pitch — which means you have to get your info some other way than asking the buyer to educate you. Because every minute that you take of their time needs to be for their benefit, not yours.
TACTICS
How to put your buyer in the driver’s seat
As we stress often here at the Insider, a game-changing benefit of having an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy is that your partners have data about your prospects that you can’t get anywhere else.
Instead of doing long discovery calls where your buyer spends time giving you basic information about their business and needs, you can qualify opportunities by asking your partners questions that allow you to make an informed, personalized approach to your first call.
This not only gets you closer to making a deal faster, it also makes the buyer’s experience a lot more pleasant, relevant, and streamlined. And for you to win in the current and future B2B sales environment, the prospect’s expectations and preferences need to drive the process from beginning to end.
Walnut’s CRO Catie Ivey is a sales leader who sells software that improves the software sales process.
If you’ve wondered whether there’s a SaaS version of Inception, now you know.
Needless to say, many of her waking (and dreaming?) hours are focused on the B2B buying experience. At Pavilion’s 2024 GTM Summit, Catie led a session on the new-era of buyer-led sales and how to adapt to it.
Buyers want to control the process and optimize their time evaluating a product – but they don’t know what they don’t know, so leaving it entirely in their hands would backfire for everyone and lead to very uninformed decisions.
So along with involving a partner in your own sales research and communications, how can you make sure they trust the best and most accurate sources of information about your solution?
Teach your buyers to fish
Walnut specializes in helping companies create interactive demos that educate and enable buyers on their own time, driven by their own curiosity, needs, and input.
The company’s own inbound sales process provides these dynamic demos and other curated choose-your-own-adventure-style resources to buyers before the first live meeting so that 1) Walnut can use data from the demo to prepare with what they know will be most relevant to the buyer, 2) potential customers can not only engage with the product without the pressure of a rep in the room, but can also play a more active role in the conversation.
In other words, by the time a sales pitch is involved, the seller knows where to focus for the highest impact, and these buyers have a higher trust in the process.
STUFF YOU CAN'T MISS
- TODAY — October 24 — Tech Stack Summit ‘24
Join Justin Zimmerman, Tai Rattigan (Co-founder of Partnership Leaders), Kristen Kelly (Global Technology Alliances Director at Netskope), Greg Portnoy (CEO of Euler), and many more GTM leaders as they help you pick the right people, process, or tools to grow your co-sell, integration, or cloud partnerships. Save your spot here.
- November 11 - 14 — Web Summit 2024
70,000 people will gather in Lisbon, Portugal for one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, featuring speakers from leading companies across nearly every technology vertical. Book your ticket to join them here.
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