Walnut, which makes interactive tech for SaaS sales, has a new ad that asks the question, “What if buying software happened in real life?”

In the ad, a woman spills coffee on her white shirt and needs a quick replacement. She goes into a store, and is put through a litany of questions and unnecessary steps before she can even try on anything they’re selling. Watch:

The ad captures the frustration that many B2B tech buyers have with a process that asks for so much time and information from them before they can even evaluate a product. And in the current environment, this may be enough for people to bail the process entirely.

The buyer-led sales dilemma

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.

“We’re losing more deals than ever to nothing,” said Catie. “We have reps that do all the right thing, go through the process, and win. We got through security, got through legal. We invested a lot of time, and then they decided not to buy from anyone. At the same time, I can certainly resonate with the fact that B2B buying can also be pretty terrible. The process is really complex, and a lot of people don’t have a great experience.”

As a result, a lot of buyers want to self-serve as much as possible, going so far as to say they’d rather do the whole thing without a sales rep. Of course, a great rep who understands a buyer’s pain points and unique situation can educate and support buyers in a way that makes them feel much more knowledgeable and confident about the purchase.

“Sales leaders like myself, we get a little bit nervous around the fact that people don't actually want to talk to us very much anymore, that almost half of buyers prefer to never interact with a salesperson,” said Catie. “But then they're not happy with the decisions that they make after the fact. So it's a really vicious cycle.”

But as a seller, you have to follow your buyer’s lead. This is no longer an environment where you can throw all your best stuff at potential 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.

How to win in the era of buyer-led sales

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 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 strategy, and the one they enable for customers, is an approach to what Catie calls “product-led everything,” where the power of the product plays a big role in the early stages of the sales cycle.

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.

Your approach may be different depending on your product and business model but the idea is this: Find ways to hand buyers the keys to the process early on so the experience is relevant to them and gives you the intel needed to customize the rest of the process.

…and give them an ELG-equipped net

ELG also plays a big part in successful buyer-led sales. 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.