We all need to come to terms with the fact that the traditional sales pitch is dead. Yep, dead as a doornail. The power dynamic has changed significantly and today’s B2B buyers are holding the cards. Sales teams must adapt and modernize their approach to create a buyer experience that values buyers as partners.
It’s all about control. B2B buyers now prefer a self-directed digital approach to the purchase process, spending only 17% of the buying journey meeting with sales vendors. They’ve taken online research to a new level, moving 57% through the buyer’s journey before even engaging with a sales rep. Millennials take it a step further, with 44% preferring no sales rep interaction at all!
When 60% of B2B buyers prefer not to interact with a sales rep as their primary source of information and 62% say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list based solely on digital content, your sales pitch has to evolve—or those deals will slip through your fingers.
Given that you now have less and less opportunity to influence customer decisions, the winning approach is to embrace digital sales models, creating an engaging buyer experience that provides personalized, informational content to help guide and support prospects.
Buyers want to know that you’ve got a solid understanding of their business and industry landscape. They gravitate toward vendors that make a concerted effort to understand their goals throughout the buyer’s journey. One B2B survey found that 86% of respondents would be more likely to place an order if a sales rep could demonstrate that they took the time to research and understand the needs of the company.
So how do you demonstrate this understanding through a digital interface? The trick is to curate digital sales content that aligns with the buyer’s journey. By providing relevant, high-quality content to potential buyers at key stages of the buying journey, your sales team can help guide the prospect to a confident decision.
Customers today have a complicated, fragmented, and non-linear path to purchase which makes it that much more challenging for sellers to connect with buyers—and why the right content at the right time makes all the difference.
Gartner describes the stages of the B2B buyer journey as:
Many of the six buying stages or ‘jobs’ will be visited repeatedly throughout the buyer’s journey as the prospect bounces around from one job to another in a non-linear fashion. Due to the complexity of the journey, buyers value suppliers that make it easier for them to navigate the purchase process.
Your job? Support buyers with relevant and engaging content, resources, and tools at each stage of the buyer’s journey to simplify the decision-making process. Whether they’re seeking an industry-focused whitepaper, product demo, or RFP response, today’s buyers move fast and you want to make sure you can provide the value-added, personalized insights they expect when they need it.
“Access to up-to-date and approved content is crucial for sales teams to deliver real value to customers. Through the partnership of QorusDocs and Highspot, we support our shared customers’ ability to quickly identify and leverage effective content for developing responses to RFPs and addressing buyer inquiries.”
Jake Braly, VP of Strategic Alliances, Highspot
By combining the sales enablement power of Highspot with business-critical document generation from QorusDocs, you can quickly and easily create and manage content for your customer-facing teams AND seamlessly complete the sales cycle—from creation to close—with personalized and data-driven proposals and RFP responses:
To learn more about you can use tailored content across the buyer’s journey to master the modern sales pitch (with a little help from QorusDocs and Highspot), download our ebook: The Modern Sales Pitch: How to Use Content to Drive Sales.