We’ve all seen the data. Customer would prefer a rep-free buying experience! And when they do have to involve sellers, they want to minimize seller engagement, often not engaging sellers until the final 20% of their buying process.
While there as been a certain amount of hand wringing and “how to we fix this” in the selling community, and with me and many of my peers, I can imagine the majority of sellers quietly cheering!!!
“This is fantastic! It makes our jobs so much easier, the customer does most of the hard work! All we have to do is focus on demonstrating our product is better than the alternatives…… And we can always discount to win!”
I can imagine other quiet conversations among sellers reveling in this dream. “It’s just so messy dealing with customers. We have to find people who have a problem, or we have to incite them to change. Then they waste all this time trying to figure out what they are trying to do, who should be involved. They start/stop, wander all over the place, shift priorities! It’s so much work, it’s really tough! It’s much easier if they deal with that themselves, and just come to us!”
Then the sellers start saying, “Marketing you have to create more inbound! They want to buy digitally, so make sure you serve up the right stuff. Track their digital engagement, turn them over to us once they are really interested in our offerings!”
But sellers still have to do outbound. That outbound is highly “targeted.” Looking at most outbound, it focuses on, “Buy my product! Let me tell you how great our product is, let’s do a demo!” These sellers are very astute. They know the only people who will respond to these outreaches are people who have progressed through their buying process. They are interested in looking at products. Sellers don’t have to waste anytime giving insights, inciting them to change, helping them navigate the buying process. That’s way too difficult and takes too much time. All these sellers want to do is find people who are interested in their products.
And I can imagine the dream of all these sellers is to reduce these product focused conversations to a minimum. Perhaps a few questions about features and functions (we have more than the competition), some discussion on price (of course if you make a decision now, we can discount), and then, when they get started (oops, that’s for CX, we’ll give them the website for them to contact the CX team.) They just want the customer to order. And should they do that, these sellers will give them the link to enter their order or connect them to an order entry person.
We talk about customers not wanting to deal with sellers and wanting to digitize as much of their process as possible. It’s a sellers dream! It makes the job of selling so simple! And, of course, as long as these sellers win 15-20% of the opportunities they compete for, they are happy!
Reality starts intruding. Fewer and fewer sellers are making their numbers. But, these sellers have learned how do deal with this. They make whatever money they can, perhaps have a side gig for some more money. And when things start looking bleak, they go someplace else–maybe more customers are phoning it in at that new company.
And leaders are churning through, as well. They have their playbooks, something that produces sales, probably not much different from others. But they come in, implement their playbook, then as things start slowing down, they go someplace else.
And the sales strategists, sporting their bow ties, say “all of this is perfectly predictable!” Success is less about new customer acquisition, success is really in retention and renewal. And growth comes from the periodic upsell or expansion. And they provide the mathematical equations giving all the answers.
We have created a sellers dream world! Just follow the formulas, just let the customer figure things out until they are almost ready to order. That’s what selling is all about!
And many are waiting for the next Gartner, Forrester, or other research report, declaring, “Customers don’t want to see sellers until they are 95% through their buying process……”
And then there are those anxiously looking toward AI, “How much of the seller job can we offload onto AI?”
Of course, it would be silly of me to talk about the massive opportunity cost to this revelatory mindset.
It would be silly to ask the question, “We are already working on deals, why are we happy with winning 15-20% of them? What if we changed what we were doing and won 30-40%?” When you think about it, it makes sellers lives so much easier. They don’t have to find more opportunities, they just have to find more of those they have already qualified.
And it would be ludicrous to consider, “What about the 60% plus of buyers that wanted to make a change, that never get through their process? What about those that funded a change, but got frustrated and distracted before they ever engaged sellers?” This dwarfs the opportunity that sellers are actually addressing. It enables sellers to create much higher levels of trust and value with those customers. And drives more opportunities in the future. But that’s way too much work!
I now understand why people look at my like I’m a crazy person when I talk about all this growth opportunity and the chance to drive massive increases in revenue and value co-creation. It’s way too much work!
Selling would be so great if it weren’t for those damn customers!
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this article. Pay closer attention at roughly the midway point (4:30). They get into some interesting perspectives, particularly the buyers’ points of view. Enjoy!
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