Help Buyers Buy
A PMC Conversation on Buyer Enablement
The Product Marketing Community (PMC) it on a mission help Product Marketers be better, smarter, and more effective in their roles. That’s why we exist, and why each year we travel North America hosting events designed precisely to help Product Marketers transform from cost centers to architects of growth. (Learn more about upcoming PMC events here, Austin is up next!)
When we’re not on the road holding events, we’re working to bring our community high-quality digital content. Last week we hosted an expert discussion on buyer enablement. With Michele Buckley (Research Director, Gartner) Tim Riesterer (Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions) and Fred Studer (CMO, FinancialForce) we got to the bottom of what buyer enablement is, why it’s the key to increasing deal conversion and velocity, and how the time is now for Product Marketers to take the lead.
If you’d like to listen to a recording of the webinar, you can right here. Or you can keep reading — below we’re highlighting the top takeaways from the discussion.
Sales Conversion is an Increasing Issue
Gartner set the stage by sharing the results and insights of recent studies. Does it feel like deals are becoming increasingly complex, slow and difficult? Well, they are… for everyone. Michele confirmed that Gartner is seeing sales conversion (or lack thereof) as a growing issue for today’s B2B vendors. Across the board, we are seeing deals taking longer, stalling more often, and getting canceled at the last minute.
This is because buying has become more chaotic than ever before. Buying groups have gotten bigger and more information is brought to the table, often clouding objectives and preventing consensus. This is really hard for vendors to navigate because the buying process is different for every single company. There are no set patterns, stages or milestones. The buyer’s journey is not linear, rather it’s a maze where steps are often revisited and revised.
Here’s one thing we do know — buyers want digital content
Okay okay, this may seem obvious. We all know that modern communication demands digital content. But here’s something to make a note of — the preference for digital content has expanded through the mid and late stages of a buying decision. Buyers don’t just want a great piece of digital content at the discovery phase — they want to relevant and helpful content to usher them through their decision-making process.
Enter Buyer Enablement
Buyer enablement is the provision of information that supports the completion of critical buying jobs. It can take many forms — what’s important is that the information is designed to enable the buyer. Pricing calculators that help buyers estimate and adjust costs, guides to building a business case and support for creating RFPs are all great examples of buyer enablement. They are designed to help buyers complete key tasks and offer helpful and even prescriptive advice to lead the buyer through the decision making process.
A Single Message, a Single Experience
Often there is a gap between the story Marketing is telling the market, and the story Sales is telling the prospect. Marketing has one type of communication and content, and then they pass the leads over the sales team who has an entirely different dialogue. This gap only fuels the confusion and complexity in today’s B2B buying experience. That’s why as we set out to enable the buyer, we can’t forget to focus on the message. The goal is to provide a consistent digital and sales-led experience… one that convinces the buyer of the need to change, and the reasons to change now.
Convincing the Buyer
When we turn our mind to crafting the right messages and creating the right tools it’s useful to first consider the psychology of the buyer. In order to move them from consideration to action, we have to first understand how to think. The bad news is we don’t each have time to run off and get psychology degrees. The good news is we don’t have to. Understanding the basic principles of buyer psychology can be enough to help you make smarter decisions about the types of content you create.
We learned from Tim Riesterer (Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions) that there are many invisible forces at play affecting how a buying decision gets made. In order to be successful, you have to appeal to two distinct decision-making cycles: an emotional cycle and a logical cycle. When you boil it all down you have to convince your buyers of three things:
- Why should I change?
- Why should I do it now?
- Why should I do it with you?
Convincing them of the first (why should I change) is an emotional feat. People don’t like change because change is hard — especially at an organizational level where there are multiple users, stakeholders, and opinions involved. In order to be successful, we have to communicate to the buyer that the status quo is no longer safe, there are costs associated with staying the same, and they need to move to something new and something different.
Only once you’ve convinced your key buyer of this can you start to make a more rational and logical appeal, and provide your buyer with the tools they need to communicate need across the business.
One thing to remember — if you’re on a mission to upsell or even save a current customer the buyer psychology at play becomes fundamentally different. In this scenario, you are actually trying to do the opposite — you need to leverage your incumbent power as the current solution and convince your buyer that the cost of upending the status quo is severe.
The Modern-day Buyer’s Journey
We already established that today’s buyer journey is not linear, it’s actually totally chaotic and unpredictable.
While we don’t know when, why, or how the journey is going to unfold, we do know that there are 6 key “buying jobs” that need to unfold: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, validation, supplier selection, and consensus creation. Knowing these stages helps us to create content that enables the buyer to work through these tasks. While matching content to a specific buyer stage can be a shot in the dark, making content available to ease the friction of completing any one task is a best practice.
When it comes to asset types, there are no hard and fast rules about what works. The content type actually matters surprisingly little. What matters is that you have content that not only convinces the buyer of ‘why you’ but also of ‘why now’. If you can manage to do that upfront, and you are ready to support a buyer as they move through these various key buying tasks… then you are well on your way to enabling the buyer.
Here’s a tip — look across your organization at the already existing content. Look beyond your marketing team at what’s been created by sales, customer success, and maybe even support. Chances are you already have some fantastic prescriptive pieces of content that you can make more widely available.
Product Marketing Can Lead the Charge
Buyer enablement represents an important shift in thinking when it comes to the content we create and the messages it conveys. There’s an opportunity today for Product Marketers to take a strategic lead on buyer enablement because the concept is relatively new and often does not have an obvious organizational home. Because getting the message right is so key to the success of any buyer enablement tactic, Product Marketers should be engaged. So we’ll leave you with one final question — are you up for the challenge?
We learned from Tim Riesterer (Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions) that there are many invisible forces at play affecting how a buying decision gets made. In order to be successful you have to appeal to two distinct decision-making cycles: an emotional cycle and an logical cycle. When you boil it all down you have to convince your buyers of three things:
- Why should I change?
- Why should I do it now?
- Why should I do it with you?
Convincing them of the first (why should I change) is an emotional feat. People don’t like change because change is hard — especially at an organizational level where there are multiple users, stakeholders, and opinions involved. In order to be successful we have to communicate to the buyer that the status quo is no longer safe, there are costs associated with staying the same, and they need to move to something new and something different.
Only once you’ve convinced your key buyer of this can you start to make a more rational and logical appeal, and provide your buyer with the tools they need to communicate need across the business.
One thing to remember — if you’re on a mission to upsell or even save a current customer the buyer psychology at play becomes fundamentally different. In this scenario, you are actually trying to do the opposite — you need to leverage your incumbent power as the current solution and convince your buyer that the cost of upending the status quo is severe.
The Modern-day Buyer’s Journey
We already established that today’s buyer journey is not linear, it’s actually totally chaotic and unpredictable.
Want to hear watch the webinar? It’s available on demand.
