What Buyers Need From Sellers

Just as selling has evolved, buying has evolved–but differently. Too often, there is an alignment challenge between what buyers need and what sellers do. We seem to be on diverging paths, and this creates problems for both buyers and sellers.

What don’t buyers need from sellers? While it’s always dangerous to make generalizations because there are always exceptions, but with that as a disclaimer, let’s focus on what buyers don’t need from sellers.

1. They don’t need a lot of education about our products. We always seem to lead with our products and focus our conversations on those. But they don’t need this. They can learn so much from our websites, the content, papers, and other materials available to them digitally. It’s probably much more efficient for them to learn about our products through those resources. We don’t help them by repeating what they already know.
2. Likewise, they don’t need our “glamour list,” all the great logos and customers. They already know that–again from our websites. More importantly, they have probably done their homework and talked to people they trust, who may have experience with our products.
3. They probably don’t need a demo–at least now, they have more pressing issues to address.
4. They definitely don’t need our current prospecting outreach. But we already know that because of the plummeting responses. They do need to be engaged, but our current engagement approaches are not “engaging.”
5. They don’t need us creating a deadline incentive, “If you buy by the end of the quarter, we can give you a discount.” They have their own deadlines.
6. We focus on selling a product. They are focused on solving a problem. These are different.

I’ll stop here, there’s probably a lot more, but this is sufficient. What’s interesting, as we look at many sales engagement strategies, and most of our training, the focus is on providing the things our customers don’t need, or that are not as urgent as the things they do need.

What do our customers need?

1. Often, our customers don’t know what they don’t know. Like all of us, they are prisoners of their own experiences. So they may not know there may be a better way to do things, or there may be a competitive threat, or that they have a problem and should change. We have explore these business issues with them, helping them think, “Maybe we need to look at changing…”
2. They aren’t experts in the problem they are solving, if they were, they wouldn’t have it in the first place. They may struggle with defining the problem, understanding it’s impact. They may struggle with understanding who in the organization is impacted and needs to be involved in defining and addressing it. They struggle with the issue of, “Do we need to address this now?” They have many other priorities and things they have to get done, if they can ignore or defer it, it makes their lives easier.
3. This is an interruption to their already busy days! They need to understand how they continue doing their jobs, and fit in the effort to define, understand and solve their problem.
4. They need to know they have support for the initiative from their management. They need to know that management prioritizes the initiative and will support them and provide funding for changes–if there is a strong business case. But they may not know how to get that support, or lack confidence in discussing the issues with management.
5. They are worried about what it means to them–as individuals. How will it impact them and their jobs, what if they make a mistake, what if they fail? They need to build confidence that they are doing the right thing.
6. As they start on the change and problem solving initiative, they quickly find themselves overwhelmed. There is a huge amount of information they have to sort through. Much of it conflicts with other information/data they get. They struggle with identifying the information most critical to them and what they need to ignore.
7. As they start the initiative, they struggle with alignment within the group chartered to drive the change issue. Each person has differing priorities and agendas. Each is time poor. So they struggle with aligning the people involved in the project and developing/executing a plan to address it.
8. They struggle with developing and maintaining consensus. We sellers always focus on consensus on the solution, but customers need to develop and maintain consensus through the entire process.
9. Because this is something they layer onto their day jobs, they struggle with maintaining focus, too often getting diverted to other issues and crises. As a result, they may just lose focus, even when it is a critical issue.
10. They’ve probably never done this before. They don’t know how to organize the process, and move through it effectively and efficiently. They tend to wander, start/stop, shift directions and priorities, and get lost. As a result it takes more of their time and attention than it should, and it take more time to identify the change initiative than they want.
11. Once they have identified the issues, they need to look at solutions. But in looking at solutions, they need to bridge the gap between the capabilities of the alternatives and specifically what it means to them. Too often, as sellers, we present the capabilities of our solutions, but we don’t help bridge the gap to what it means specifically to them—both organizationally, as a buying group, and individually. Doing this is critical to maintaining and building their confidence in the process.
12. Their objective is to solve a problem and successfully drive a change initiative. We focus on selling a product which is an element of the solution, but not the total solution. They need help in making sure they are solving the right problem and implementing a change initiative that will succeed.

I’ll stop here, you get the point. The “help” we try to provide our customers isn’t the help they most need. As a result, we tend to be on divergent paths. What’s amazing is that when we start working together, supporting the customer in what they are trying to achieve, then we achieve our goals–and actually much more quickly, than the way we do it now.

It’s such a simple change, it’s amazing so few actually do this. What if we provided the help they most need and value?