“Can’t you just show me on my iPhone?”
We all know what buyers want, they want solutions that help them achieve their strategic objectives, and no nonsense. If you can come to a buyer, deliver a solution which provides measurable ROI or achieves objectives, and earn trust, you’ve got a winning proposition for closure.
The issue is that the sales process, one oriented in earning trust and developing relationships, is losing ground to technology that empowers the buyer and fragments the communications market. The art of being conversational and understanding the buyer is lost in the fog of unknown buyer preferences and difficult to reach buyer mediums.
The walking-brochure sales rep is seeing a dramatic, and highly undesirable, reestablishment, not by choice, but by virtue of a tipping balance of buyer-seller power in the conversational relationship.
SUMMARY:
- Becoming a trusted concierge in sales depends on trust, and guiding buyer progression through conversation
- The empowered buyer and fragmented buyer communication mediums are hampering sales effectiveness and tipping power in the hands of the buyer
- The result is buyers who aren’t receiving value-based communication, and their interaction across multiple channels is less than cohesive, and fails to effectively develop decision stages
- CRM systems, though powerful in and of themselves, and broadly implemented, are not adequate solutions to the established challenges
- Adaptive digital content management and an integrated multichannel communications tool is needed to refocus the lens of the buyer-seller relationship to one of a trusted concierge
Understanding the Sales Rep - a Trusted Concierge
The sales rep is more than just a medium through which product information is transferred to the buyer. Today, sales reps are a vendor’s strategic consultants. They are tasked with knowing everything about the buyer, the industry, the challenges and opportunities, and lastly, how to get the buyer to where they want to be using the vendor’s solutions. The conversation is a powerful skill that allows reps to develop this process.
Sales reps have 3 underlying goals with respect to being relevant for the buyer, but getting to the point of being seen as a trusted concierge relies on two foundations, achieving trust, and being conversational.
Achieving Trust is all about knowledge and awareness. Reps take time to understand the buyer and use that awareness to craft strategic solutions to help the buyer achieve their objectives. As the conversation takes place over time, sales reps pair their understanding of the buyer’s specific business situation with various aspects of the vendor’s products and services. The result is a total sales solution.
Being conversational is more of an art than a science, and though it does take two to tango, the seller is responsible for leading the conversation, regardless of who the buyer is or their readiness. Sales reps with a sincere willingness to help the buyer, tend to have more success with the ongoing conversation. On the other hand, reps who bounce around the goal of only making the sale, tend to miss the mark, and buyers can see right through a dishonest effort. The end-goal of being conversational is guiding the buyer through the stages of the buying decision.
What we have here is… failure to communicate,
Failure to communicate value is dragging the down the effectiveness of sales reps. There are two core trends which are significantly impacting the ability of reps to have engaging conversations.
1) The Empowered Buyer
The balance of power is tipping towards the buyer, largely because of the growth of technology, buyers are researching more now than ever before. (Source: Hubspot) Researching is resulting a loss of seller power, and buyers are meeting the sales rep as much as 70% into the typical sales process. (Source: Zambito, T.)
The new buyer is giving sales reps new challenges: (Source: Brainshark)
- Asks much more complex questions
- Requests custom assessments, thus making a longer buying cycle
- Demands more custom information about a solution
- Makes more collaborative purchases which involve many actors, reps may never actually meet the final decision maker
Perhaps the most experienced reps are able to weather this kind of front, but generally, reps are falling back to their knowledge base, which in many cases is exactly the same information the buyer found online.
The result is a sales rep that is reverting back to the era of a walking product brochure, and as far as the buyer is concerned, there is no real value add.
2) The Fragmented Buying Marketing
The second impact to sales comes from the same source, technology. This time it has to do with the fragmentation of communications mediums. What does this mean? It means that it’s not just about email and voice calling anymore.
The buyer can operate on four or more different types of mobile operating systems, two or more computing operating systems, dozens of applications within those programs, in person anywhere, and often at times which are outside regular business hours and locale, depending on the buyer.
The result: (Source: Brainshark)
- 55% of reps have difficulty actually reaching the buyer
- 49% don’t even know who the decision maker is
- 38% say their ‘key contact’ isn’t the decision maker at all
- 22% can’t tell if their audience is engaged
Even with all kinds of digital sales aids and CRM software, the sales presentation is getting less conversational. The decision maker shies away from communicating directly with buyers, knowing full well that they can self-educate about buying criteria. Reps remain in the dark, and the conversation is becoming more of an obvious fact-finding mission, and not consultative selling.
The Buyer’s Perspective
Buyer’s aren’t oblivious to these problems, in fact, they are very much aware of the problems and are likely hungry for change. Every buyer wants someone who they can call to for a solution, sales are missing the mark by failing to delight the buyer, and failing to facilitate effective communication through the buyer’s desired channel in order to guide the buying process.
Failing to delight the buyer with value added conversations is a primary threat to sales reps.
- Only 62% of reps were deemed knowledgeable by buyers about their own products
- Only 24% of reps were classified as knowledgeable about the buyers specific business situation
- Only 22% of sellers understand the buyers issues, and are able to see and position where they can help (Source: The Sales Way)
These stats absolutely shatter the trustworthiness of a sales rep, especially if that rep is seen as not knowing their own product. Without that trust, sales are going to inevitably fail at being conversational and guiding the buyer’s decisions.
Failure to Connect with the buyer and guide the sales process is a major hurdle being faced by today’s sales reps., partly because the buyer is less trusting, but also because many reps lack the capability to develop the buyer’s decision journey through multiple channels.
Digital marketing is expected to be 76% of the total marketing budget over the next 5 years, (Source: CMO Insights) if that happens, a sales rep without the ability to integrate a seamless buyer progression through several mediums, is likely to see less than stellar results. The concept of the omni-channel experience is essential for a cohesive customer buying experience.
CRM systems are wildly popular among organizations of all sizes with a 15.1% CAGR and an expected CRM industry size of $36 Billion by 2017. The CRM concept has been the logical approach to combating a buying marketing that is ever more fragmented.
Though CRM is highly adopted among many industries, the state of the sales rep is still trapped in the fog of buyer awareness. Worse still, many reps are actually indicating a trend towards avoiding the system altogether, with the majority of reps opting for one that would be just plain easier to use.
Many reps (35%) indicated that they update their system manually, almost half (43%) feel they don’t use large parts of their program, and only 19% indicated some kind of mobile access to the CRM system. (Source: Salesloft)
Due to a fragmented buyer market, and a push to digital content marketing, it’s more important than ever for reps to have full touch point integration with their CRM system, and extensive visibility into the way that contacts in the system interact with the digital content.
Today’s CRM is being pushed backwards by the same trends weighing on the sales rep. Just as reps are reverting back into walking-brochures, the CRM system is being transmuted into a glorified rolodex. It’s devoid of leading indicators, failing to drive buyer decision progression, and lacking in sales enablement.
What about a Real Sales Enablement Solution?
The challenges are real, and the solutions that were heralded as the new age of Sales (Trust based orientation, and, CRM) are not only crumbling, they’re working against the sales rep.
Conceptually speaking, a solution must address the two challenges that are devaluating trust based sales and CRM systems. The empowered buyer must be met with value added solutions, and, the conversational nature of developing buyer progression must be better aligned with the fragmented state of the buying market.
Adaptive Digital Content Management
Challenging the empowered buyer will require an ability to deliver content that is not only a value add, but tailored to the buyer’s needs. What is needed is an adaptive digital content system that both aligns content with buyer personas and empowers a sales rep to have unwavering access to that content.
An adaptive content management system is one that enables a rep in four ways:
1) Forward and backward content management visibility by both marketing and sales for the purpose of creating customer facing and sales rep facing content allows for the development of more effective and buyer-segmented content assets
2) Buyer persona targeted sales playbooks are like pocketbooks of content delivery for sales reps. Reps can focus a tailored playbook of content, rather than sifting through data warehouses of unrelated content.
3) CRM integrated closed loop analytics enable automated content consumption updates for infinite touch point awareness. The end use behaviour of content is perhaps the most valuable insight available to both sales and marketing teams.
4) Content design manipulation is about turning the sales rep into a micro-marketer. Reps should NEVER be CREATING content, only combining and designing content assets into micro-targeted presentations just for that specific buyer.
Through adaptive digital content management, a sales rep can empower the conversation by delivering content that is in line with the buyer’s persona needs. Content consumption insights enable a sales rep to enhance persona awareness, and marketing to enhance the next round of content development.
Its more than just sales rep software, it’s an adaptive tool kit designed specifically to mitigate the empowered buyer.
Multichannel Excellence
Once the empowered buyer is mitigated, conversational buyer progression is again unlocked as a viable strategy, all that is needed is a multichannel integrated communications platform.
An integrated multichannel communications platform delivers:
1) Mobile sales enablement that allows a rep to interact with any buyer, at any time, through any medium, and using any content format. The fragmented nature of communications mediums cannot serve as a barrier to the effective use of content types.
2) On-demand digital sales calls are essential now, and will only grow in the next five years. The first responder to a sales request tends to see the best results, and sales reps need to be able to sell, at any time, on any device, to any device, without any kind of roadblocks like downloads or plugins, and with no impediment to quality of the sales call.
3) Device agnostic analytics allow content behaviour and consumption stats to be tied to the CRM system immediately. Analytics are the way forward, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that analytics show up in both essential sales enabling strategies.
Multichannel excellence isn’t just a nice word, and excellence is just that, EXCELLENCE. The sales rep of tomorrow is grounded in digital connectedness, on any medium, because it doesn’t matter what device you use, it matters what device your buyer uses.
Enabling multichannel functionality is the best way to enhance buyer progression and a consistent buyer experience in the age of the empowered and fragmented buyer market.
The Numbers Say it All.
This kind of solution isn’t actually revolutionary, best in class companies, and some industry average firms, are seeing strong measurable results from having the extensive visibility and CRM integration that comes from an adaptive sales enablement system. (Source: Aberdeen)
- 58% improvements in sales reps appearing more savvy to clients
- 77% improvements in reps delivering a guided selling experience
- 207% improvements in reps having effective communication through digital assets
- 96% improvement in year over year average deal size growth
Fighting Technology with Technology?
If you’re already thinking it, adaptive sales enablement is a technology, and as presented above, the challenges facing sales reps are from the growth of technology. CRM is a technology and it hasn’t made strong headwinds in solving these problems, so why would adaptive sales enablement?
It has to do with focus and orientation. Sales has seen several changes of orientation in the last 150 years, and meeting the sociocultural changes was done with a sociocultural change in sales.
This time, the challenges are grounded in technology, and the solutions must meet the challenges in a focused effort to mitigate the understood issues. Adaptive sales enablement is about creating a sales orientation that not only alleviates the challenges, but finds empowerment through them.
Are you or your teams struggling with the empowered and fragmented buyer? How have you addressed the challenges? If you need a hand, maybe we can help.
