There’s a fascinating article in HBR this month, A Better Way To Link Sales And Marketing. There’s a lot “right” about this article. It offers very good insights about how we engage our customers very effectively, consistently, and efficiently. It talks about how we integrate our communications strategies effectively across all parts of the organization–marketing, sales, service, and so forth. It talks about how we can manage our interactions to focus on the concerns customers express in their buying effort.
The concept is what they call, the Digital Customer Hub (DCH). It’s not a new concept, Digital Buying Rooms have existed for years, and I’ve seen very powerful implementations of these. As a side note, I wonder why they aren’t as pervasive as they might be—and perhaps that’s the problem that I’ve found with this article and much of our thinking around our GTM strategies.
But for a moment, imagine a world in which every supplier has implemented their version of a digital buying room. Buyers get to engage with these suppliers in a variety of ways. They can engage digitally, perhaps ask for a bot to help them answer questions, perhaps even have a conversation with a human being.
As suppliers, we see what they are looking at and the issues they are exploring. Being helpful, we make suggestions, offering different content, perhaps injecting ideas, offering a reference. Maybe we offer tools to help them build the business case for our solutions, we provide everything they need to consider our solutions and answer their questions.
From a selling point of view, we understand the issues they are concerned about, we can focus on responding to those issues. Since our systems have the complete history of all these buyer journey, we can leverage that experience as customers interact on our Digital Buying Room.
Sound blissful…… We are focusing on what they want, we are tailoring and tuning our messages….. What could be better?
In this ideal world where every vendor is engaging their customers in their own Digital Buying Rooms, the key question is, “Are we making buying easier?”
When you think about it, the resounding answer is, “No! We are actually making it much more difficult for them!”
Here’s what it looks like from a buyer perspective. If the buying team is considering 4 suppliers, the team has to get engaged in 4 different buying rooms. They have to learn how to use each buying room, they interact with each vendor and each other through each of those 4 buying rooms. Often, they are going through the very same things with each vendor, but in very different ways, but they have to learn and figure out how to use each buying room.
Then there are those times when the buying team sits back to say, “What are we learning, what should we do, where should we go, are we doing the right things?” They have to figure out how to integrate what’s happening across all these different buying experiences.
I can imagine a conversation the buying team has, “Well vendor A has this point of view, vendor B has this, vendor C…., vendor D…. What does this mean, how do we put it together to make sense? What should we be looking at next?” And as they decide what to do next and each buyer has there assignment, they go back the the 4 digital buying rooms…… and this cycle goes on and on and on.
How are we helping our customers buy? We know they struggle with their buying process. We know they don’t know how to buy, we know they struggle with change initiatives, we know they struggle within their own organizations, shift, change, wander. And we know the majority of the time they fail.
Our Digital Buying Experience helps us engage our customers in more meaningful ways when they are talking to us, but we aren’t making buying easier for the customer! And isn’t this what customers want? Isn’t this where we create the greatest value for with our customers?
We always seem to be asking ourselves the wrong question. We focus on “Getting buyers to buy the way we want to sell to them,” rather than posing the question, “How do we sell responding to the way buyers want to buy?”
There is so much data supporting the results of this approach. We see higher value creation, higher trust, higher win rates, fewer no decisions made, shorter buying/selling cycles.. We see higher retention and higher appetites to do more business with the sellers focusing on making it easier for customers to buy. Yet our GTM strategies continue to focus on how we want to sell.
Let me go back to the concept of a Digital Customer Hub? It’s a nice term to force customers to buy the way we want to sell to them, but what if we looked at it differently. What if someone provided a hub that customers could use when they have a change or buying initiative. And these customer can use this to coordinate what they are trying to do, they could establish a project plan, start putting documents and info they need into that hub, sharing with each other. And at some point they can invite suppliers to join them on that hub—each supplier having their own secure space. Now the buyer has, in one place, everything they are doing to buy.
Of course that’s a silly idea. Why would anyone focus on making it easier to buy. Our real goal is to make it much easier to sell…….
Afterword: Below is the AI generated discussion of this article. It does go a little off the rails in the middle—still struggling to train and focus the models more effectively. But it still brings up interesting points of view. Enjoy!
Leave a Reply