Freeing Time For The “Human Touch” In Selling

We revel in leveraging our technologies for buyer engagement–and, apparently, buyers revel in these as well. Buyers are spending less time with sellers–partly because it’s more effective for them. And if we are being honest with ourselves, too often we drive them away.

I think, however, we misunderstand digital engagement, leveraging AI, and the automation of the buying/selling process.

There are some transactional buying processes that should be fully automated. This is not a surprise, we’ve seen this in consumer buying and many types of B2B buying for decades (How long has EDI existed?) For those buying processes where there is very high buyer knowledge and experience, and low risk, we and buyers should seek to automate as much as possible–both on the buying and selling side.

There are, 10’s of thousands of selling jobs, being used in these transactional buying processes, and most of those will disappear in the coming years. From a selling point of view, this frees up huge numbers of resources to focus on those parts of buying and selling that demand human touch.

In complex B2B buying, we will want to optimize the customer buying experience–and our selling experience by looking thoughtfully at how we design human and automated interventions in the process.

And I think this is where we go wrong in thinking about technology and automation. We try to automate as much as possible. We automate to help seller efficiency, but not thinking of buyer impact. We substitute automated interventions, where human touch is both more efficient and effective.

There are things, in the buying/selling process, where automation is both more effective and efficient for everyone. The transference of information and data is probably one of those errors. Sellers can’t be deeply knowledgeable on every aspect of the solutions. Even if they are specialists in the solutions. Or they can’t provide the information and answers in the most impactful or timely ways. And they may not be able to share it in the most impactful for each person involved in the buying process.

Here digital buying tools, coupled with AI, can be far more impactful than humans.

And this is so powerful for buyers and sellers. As we look at the time buyers spend with sellers, we may look, with alarm that it has fallen to 17%. But the reality is this isn’t necessarily bad, so much of the time sellers spend with buyers was simply as ineffective purveyors of information.

The most important aspect of time sellers spend with buyers is focusing on those things that demand a “human touch.”

We know, through so much research and experience, that buyers struggle. They struggle in so many ways:

• Making sense of the high volume, high quality, yet conflicting information they are inundated with.
• Recognizing the need to change, realizing there is an opportunity to improve. Until they do this, they don’t begin their search process, they don’t initiate a change and buying process.
• Understanding the questions they should be asking, the things they should be thinking about, what they need to learn.
• Understanding who should be involved in the buying process, aligning agendas, aligning priorities, establishing and committing to a project plan.
• Developing and maintaining consensus from the start through the implementation of a solution.
• Then dealing with the deeply personal aspects of change and buying. The fear of making a mistake, of messing up. The uncertainty around whether they are making the right decision. We’ve long known that we tend to make decisions based on how we feel about them, rationalizing them with the data.

As long as people are involved in business, the human feelings will be both what drives innovation, growth, and impact, and what drives uncertainty, fear, and inability to change. Human feelings and the interaction of these between humans is both what enables us to create amazing new possibilities, that drive us to change, grow, improve, that drive us to achieve. At the same time, it is those feelings that cause us to miss opportunities, change, improve.

The future of selling, the greatest value we co-create is through these human interactions and helping our customers, and each other, grow, change, and move forward.

Unfortunately, we focus too often, on the information curation and delivery through our sellers. As a result, we fail to address those things that stand in the way of our and our customers’ success. Though this, we fail to develop the skills most critical to working with our customers.

The critical “human touch” skills include curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, empathy, active listening, collaborative conversations. The ability to understand our customers and what they face includes understanding them and their business–so business and financial acumen become critical to our abilities to connect in relevant, impactful ways with customers.

We should be very optimistic as we look at this, while we may need to spend less time with customers, we can focus that time on the things that are most impactful and important to their ability to make a decision in which they feel confident and move forward. And it is those deeply human aspects of the buying process that only sellers can address.