What is ‘buyer experience’ all about and how does it relate to revenue enablement?
Glad you asked.
We work with a lot of great sales, marketing, and enablement teams, and all the best ones do something really, really important: they flip their perspective from inside the company—where people talk about ‘sales enablement’ or ‘revenue enablement’—to outside the company, starting with the buyer’s view of things.
When you make that simple-sounding swivel, everything changes.
Instead of thinking about your internal processes, you start thinking about what each buyer—and buying team—needs at each moment of the buying journey.
And instead of worrying about funnels and nurture flows, you start obsessing about actually engaging buyers and giving them real value as they progress in their thinking.
Making this shift in mindset has a pretty profound impact on the way you market and sell (and enable your revenue teams).
Think of it this way: buyer experience is like customer experience but for people who aren’t yet customers.
(Psst: We just published an e-book on this topic called “Woo, Don’t Pursue: Make It Easier For Buying Teams To Buy From You”. It goes deeper than we can in this post, so give it a read (and share it and tweet about it … you know you want to).
Let’s start with great buying experiences
We’ve all been sold and marketed to.
We all know what the spammy, lazy, paint-by-numbers marketing and sales playbook feels like (ick). And we all know how the opposite feels: getting a series of thoughtful content followed by insightful conversations that are actually relevant to doing our job.
It’s as different as night and day:
- Instead of rigid scripts, you feel like you’re in a conversation with a company that gets you and a salesperson who listens.
- Instead of broad, generic content, you get insights about the challenges you’re actually facing right now.
- Instead of the ‘zero-sum’, almost adversarial buyer-seller dynamic, you feel like you’re collaborating to make the right decisions.
Now that’s a great buying experience.
Buyer experience starts with them (not you).
Starting with buyer experience as a focus helps your marketing and sales teams design and deliver better, more relevant, more enjoyable buying journeys—for each individual prospect and for the whole buying team. (In B2B, buying is a team sport, right?)
The purpose is simple: to accelerate buying journeys by adding value at every step.
To do it, you have to do the things a typical sales enablement or revenue enablement platform does. But you also have to go much further, with much more of an emphasis on the individual buyer and what he or she needs.
Here are four important things that define a revenue enablement platform that excels in buyer experience:
1. Engage buyers more deeply
Emails and e-books have their place in any buying journey. But they can’t be the only experiences—and they’re often not your best option for the most important moments.
Instead, you need to be able to create and serve up richer, more personalized experiences like asynchronous video—where the salesperson sends a quick, one-to-one video that follows up on a key point. Or an interactive product map that lets the seller give a guided tour, drilling down into topics that most interest the buyer. Or a ‘virtual deal room’ where the whole buying team (and your selling team) comes together for relevant content and conversations.
2. Arm sellers with the right content and insight
This is where you activate all those great marketing insights about the buyer, the company, and the market—with content and conversations that show you understand your buyers.
Your sellers need to be able to curate the right content for each buyer and each stage of the journey—and to personalize it as much as possible (that might just mean a note that connects the content to an earlier conversation).
3. Improve seller skills and tactics
Great content and insight won’t turn into great buyer experiences if your sellers don’t know how to deploy them. A platform that’s great at buyer experience will create a feedback loop that collects data about what buyers are engaging with most—and when and why.
If you collect that data, you can dramatically improve the way you onboard, ramp-up, train, and coach your salespeople (but if you don’t … you can’t). One example: our MeetingIQ module that analyzes sales calls for rich insights.
4. Get better all the time
When you have deeper, richer engagements with buyers—and you do it in the platform—you get the analytics you need to make future buyer experiences even better.
It’s the flywheel thing: better buyer experiences generate more data and insight, which drive better experiences. Repeat until rich.
How does all this drive growth?
We’re convinced that better buying experiences are the single most important growth driver you can invest in. That’s why we invested so much in developing Showpad around the buyer experience.
It’s all about faster revenue from richer buying experiences—all driven by better informed and trained sales people. So you can engage buying teams earlier and more deeply; progress deals faster; and generate the insight to drive continuous improvement.
Do that well and you improve every step of the buying journey, from top-of-funnel content to first-call and on through negotiation and deal closing.
It’s the coolest thing to happen to B2B go-to-market since sales enablement.
We want to tell you more
So grab a copy of “Woo, Don’t Pursue: Make It Easier For Buying Teams To Buy From You”.
Better still, book a demo. If you’re into accountable revenue generation—whether you’re a sales leader, marketer, or enablement pro—this will blow you away.
