B2B buyers are forcing sellers to rewrite the playbook for sales, marketing, and customer success. Some of the top challenges we all face include:
- Buying teams continue to grow and are more matrixed in how they make decisions
- Everyone is remote, so the selling team needs to be multi-channel and digital savvy in their approach to listening, communicating, documenting, and orchestrating a decision process.
- Researching and evaluating vendors is no longer an indication of purchase intent.
- Engagement across all buyer touch points needs to focus on guiding and helping the decision vs. pushing a decision down a process.
- Sellers are focused on search optimized content that drives Website activity vs. focusing on content that helps buyers make investment-based decisions
- Privacy laws are making the “digital marketing” funnel void of light
However, most organizations are still approaching the problem by building independent go-to-market teams with marketing at the top of the funnel, sales at the bottom of the funnel, and customer support running their own renewal and upsell process. As businesses try to scale, they forget about the one thing that made their early success work and that is the constant alignment between these core business functions. Instead, they branch off with their own budget, and invest in their own technology and headcount.
5 Transformational Steps to better CX
- Throw out the sales and marketing funnel and adopt flywheel buyer frameworks
- Invest more in resources that create and scale engagement – UX/CX designers, Information Architects and a digitally savvy sales enablement/coaches
- Unify technology and data/analytics under one team utilizing DevOps methods and align with IT on security, data privacy, governance and project management
- Turn marketing into a media/event production team
- Turn sales into a consulting and onboarding team
If you are still focused on sales engagement as the primary metric for driving revenue – it probably feels like buyers don’t want to spend time with your brand. However, that is not the whole story, as an increasing portion of the buying process is spent independently researching online.
Another way to think about this, is the buyers are spending 45% of their time learning, evaluating and discussing solutions based on information they gather from social media, vendor websites, industry experts/sites, solutions integrators/consultants, and peer groups.
Adding to this complexity is another 22% of the buying process is spent together as a buying team sorting out independently gathered information to come to an consensus to make a change and agree on a business plan. By the way, the report went on to mention that the B2B buying team has grown to 11-20 decision makers, influencers and users inputting to the process.
The other mistake is trying to measure inward-facing metrics and labeling them as outcome KPIs – MQLs (marketing qualified leads), opportunity attribution models, sales meetings, and close rates to name a few. This approach assumes the B2B seller is still in control of the buying process, but in a digital-first buying process that reality is just about vanished in most markets.
RevOps is about the alignment of people, process, data and technology the the primary goal of using the customer experience as a differentiator. Done right and this process will become a key differentiator for why buyers invest in you vs. your competition.