Just as the saying goes, "happy wife, happy life", the same principle can be applied to your customers. A satisfied prospect translates to a streamlined sales process and a loyal customer at your side. Although less catchy, it's undeniable that buyer enablement forms a significant part of offering robust solutions to potential customers and works in synergy with your sales enablement efforts.
What is Buyer Enablement?
The essence of buyer enablement is prioritizing the needs and interests of your prospect. While this may seem obvious, it requires various strategic tools to implement effectively. By viewing the sales process from the perspective of your customer, you can better comprehend how to sell to them effectively, thus making their decision to purchase from you simpler.
A key to happy customers and effective sales
Buyer enablement can be seen as a method of bringing order to the information chaos that often overwhelms buyers. When executed effectively, buyer enablement allows sellers to impact, influence, and educate their buyers. This enables customers to make decisions that not only meet their needs but also favor the seller.
Buyer enablement follows sales enablement
The best way to enable sellers to accomplish that is to equip them with the latest, relevant, and on-brand sales materials. Therefore buyer enablement is the outcome of sales enablement.
The current B2B sales environment is more complex than ever. Buyers are overwhelmed with choices, discounts, terms and conditions, incentives, differing opinions, and the ripple effects of their final selection on every relevant department. Sifting through all these variables feels less like browsing and more like a daunting problem-solving exercise.
Navigating the Complex B2B Sales Landscape with Buyer Enablement
The current B2B sales environment is more complex than ever. Buyers are overwhelmed with choices, discounts, terms and conditions, incentives, differing opinions, and the ripple effects of their final selection on every relevant department. Sifting through all these variables feels less like browsing and more like a daunting problem-solving exercise.
Research indicates that 77% of B2B customers found their purchase experience highly complex or challenging. But with the power of buyer enablement, we can change this narrative. Buyer enablement puts buyers back in control, presenting them with clear, concise information that fosters understanding rather than creating confusion.
The Key Elements of Buyer Enablement
Here are the four key elements of successful buyer enablement:
1. Understanding your audience
The journey to buyer enablement begins with a deep understanding of your audience. Even buyers within the same Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will have different priorities and personalities.
2. Gathering behavioral data
With the aid of a Digital Sales Room to accumulate behavioral data, you can discern what a buyer leans towards based on their interactions with your content. You might discover they spend more time on statistics or show more interest in use cases and narrative-driven collateral. Such data enables salespeople to tailor their approach, resulting in a more relevant and engaging pitch.
At its core, buyer enablement is about instilling confidence in your prospects.
3. Relevant and personalized content
Regardless of the type of buyer you encounter, the goal is to understand how you can assist them better. One effective method is by analyzing their thought process and the obstacles they face. This requires salespeople to embark on a fact-finding mission to collate a holistic picture of the situation, the problems, and the necessary solutions.
At its core, buyer enablement is about instilling confidence in your prospects. With confidence, they will grasp why your solution is superior, evaluate it through that lens, and finally, reach purchase intent. Presenting and sharing relevant, personalized sales content that targets specific needs, requirements, and pain points will expedite their progress through the sales funnel.
4. Consultative selling
Salespeople should consider redefining their roles to be more like consultants within the B2B buyer's market. This is because not all companies are a good fit for your product and vice versa. By presenting information objectively, B2B buyers are less likely to churn and more likely to close faster with the proper guidance.
Essential Buyer Enablement Tools
It's crucial to note that all content shared with your prospects will likely reach a broader audience within their company. Buyer enablement includes making the sharing of such assets seamless.
All starts from centralized sales collateral
We've seen the issues of dealing with silos, inconsistent onboarding, and unused content by your team. Showell, an award-winning tool, was built to centralize all sales collateral for easier onboarding, presenting with confidence, and ensuring that you will always have updated content. Data to track engagement and activity helps you understand your prospects better, and so much more.
"67% of customers shared that Showell improved their buying experience."
Digital sales rooms
Digital Sales Room (DSR), an essential part of a proper sales enablement platform, is a basic requirement in modern B2B sales. With the DSR, sellers are able to create highly personalized and relevant content packages and share them with their audience. Share content can include everything from PowerPoint presentations, product videos to large, technical files that can be shared with just one click. DSR provides valuable insight for tracking how buyers are viewing the content and what they find interesting.
In fact, 67% of customers shared that Showell improved their buying experience.
