Buyer Management Operations (BMO) combines B2B sales, marketing and customer service functions under a unified buyer management function

If you work within a B2B company it is very likely that your organization has 2-3 (maybe more) business units/functions focused on revenue targets. Typically marketing is focused on attracting and generating demand, sales is focused on converting new customers and retaining existing customers, and service comes in post sales to help customer implement and adopt your solutions. This thinking has led to sales methods and forecast models that assume every buyer follows the path laid out by the seller to procure a product or service. While that might have been true 15-20 years ago, today the information economy has changed the process dramatically.

One of the biggest changes is when a buyer engages the seller in solution based conversations, which research tells us is later and later in the buying process. Another is the growing number of buyers involved with making a purchase decision, with some experts claiming greater than 6-10 individuals can make up the buying team.

These factors have created a growing gap between the seller and buyer, which has made B2B purchases more painful for both parties. To address this gap, I created this site as a place for me to publish learning, ideas, and strategies to improve the B2B buying process and help companies achieve better revenue outcomes.

BMO is my own version of what others might call revenue operations. This category of B2B business operations is starting to gain momentum and if done right can become a key competitive advantage for sellers. It is not a new idea, it is the continuation of sales & marketing alignment in B2B that has been going on for over a decade. The B2B buyer continues to change and the faster sellers realize the gap between the buyer and seller is caused by how they operate, the sooner they can differentiate and win. The good news, is with the expansion of 1st and 3rd part data collected through more and more digital communications, the seller has more data to work with then ever before.

Buyers live through many different experiences like phone conversations, live chat, web research, social media, advertising and events. These experience can happen at any point in the buying process and as we mentioned there can be multiple individuals engaging. Too often the seller measures the experience as part of some hard coded buying stage and manages each interaction independently, trying to feed sales with qualified leads. This creates misalignment between the buyer and seller expectation and B2B buyers are constantly measuring value every time there is an interaction whether initiated by them or the seller. It goes back to something my mother used to say “think before you speak.” Sellers need to figure out how to optimize their revenue operations by listening to the buyers and buying teams.