Isn’t Buyer Enablement Everyone’s Job?

I read a fascinating discussion on LinkedIn. As with many discussions, there were many aspects I thought were enlightening, some I agreed with, many I disagreed with.

But the post started with statements around “Buyers only engage with sellers after 80% of the buying process is done.” “Buyers don’t want to talk to sellers.”

The ensuing discussion suggested we needed to focus on “Buyer Enablement.” People chimed in with lots of ideas and solutions, “Isn’t marketing’s job buyer enablement,” was the opinion of many. Many, including the author suggested the establishment of a “Buyer Enablement” function. It would become the job of people in this function to focus on buyer enablement. Though it was unclear to me about what sales people do as a result.

The most interesting comment in the discussion about putting Buyer Enablement organizations was the following:

“…..the most important component of the new strategy – the introduction of new job titles and terms! I think I speak for everyone on the internet when I say that we can safely attribute 80% of our future success to the new job titles.”

I couldn’t stop laughing at the comment, recognizing how true it has become.

It seems the way we solve customer engagement problems, the way we address the fact that customers don’t want to talk to sellers, is to invent new functions and organizational structures. Somehow a Buyer Enablement specialist pitching our products/solutions is better than a salesperson doing the same.

Most of the discussion, whether creating a new function within our GTM organizations focused on where to locate the buyer enablement function. What seemed missing from the discussion was anything around, “Isn’t everyone in the organization responsible for buyer enablement? Isn’t everyone involved in helping find, develop, and support customers?”

While decades old, Peter Drucker’s insight continues to resonate, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

Whether it’s developing offerings that resonate with customers, helping them address their business challenges;

Or building high quality offerings and delivering high quality services;

Or supporting and serving the customer through their use of what they’ve bought, creating customers for life;

Or attracting and engaging customers, helping them in their buying experience.

Even support organizations like Finance, HR, Legal, Operations, Supply Chain all play roles in enabling our buyers.

Trying to isolate buyer enablement to a specific function or job titles seems misplaced in the context of what Drucker has taught us. It has the potential of increasing organizational confusion and costs, rather than focusing our buyer enablement execution.

Aligning the entire organization around buyer enablement, helping each function, each person identify how they and their role contribute to that. Assuring that we present a consistent face to the customer, whatever their touch point might be, is critical to building confidence with our customers.

When a customer doesn’t see a certain function contributing to what they are trying to achieve, rather than inventing a new organizational function to support that is wrong. Instead we need to see what we need to change about how the function does its work, to create value with the customer. State more crassly, if customer don’t see sales people creating value in their buying process, rather than making another part of the organization responsible, we should look at how we change what sellers do to create the value customer need, deserve and expect.

Buyer enablement doesn’t sit in a function or a few job titles. It is the job of everyone in the organization.