Four Tips for a Better Buyer Experience

When we think about what enterprise vendor’s should do, a big part of this is that they want to make it easier for customers to buy and also easier for the enterprise channels to sell. So there is a few things that come to mind for me and we touched on some of them already.

But the first thing is, be transparent about your qualification. It’s very rare that your product is a perfect fit for every company of every size and every industry, although we hear that a lot from technology vendors.

Take the time to do segmentation to identify what companies and what situation, both in terms of company demographics, but also personalities. Does IT control things, does the business control things, what’s the size, how big is the IT department, what are the challenges that they have. Focus first on that.

The second thing is to tell is great stories, and stories are really not about you, it’s about the value and the outcomes that you can provide for your customers. When we think about storytelling, think of the technology industry that we’ve always been pretty good at describing the situation without us and then the resolution that we had. But that format misses two key things in today’s world.

First is you have to open with outcomes because you have got to catch people’s attention. So you can’t just say that you have a great search engine, or you’re at a website and too many people abandon without buying. You need to give them context. That might be something like, increase the percentage of customers that visit your website that actually buy by 15% with our cool search technology.

Then you can describe the situation without, customers abandoning without having success, but very important I don’t just describe this situation, I also described the impact that that situation has because that’s the reason why people have to spend money today. Then I can describe the resolution and resolve it. So tell great stories.

The third thing that you have to do is that you have got to learn the customers buying process and it’s interesting, and we’ve passed buyers and they say 75% of them say that they are willing to share details of their buying process, 25% is going as far as telling them who’s responsible for these subdivisions that’s within it. So ask that question, and start to tailor your marketing and sales activities to what are the most consistent patterns of the buying within the organisation.

And then teach your sales reps to be adaptive to that situation. And then finally remember that you are not in control of the buyer journey. So your job as an organisation, whether you are in marketing or in sales is you are a guide and you’re trying to enhance that experience. So you are going to help them find information that builds their confidence and trust. You’re going to take them deeper than the information that they can find on their own. You’re going to help them clarify areas where they have questions. You’re not forcing the conversation but you are guiding them towards a successful conclusion.