With B2B purchasing becoming more complex than ever before, success comes from making it easy for customers to buy.
B2B sellers tend to attribute great powers to their customers. With a deep understanding of their need and information at their command, customers must be truly in the driver’s seat. This probably inhibits engaging with suppliers until late in the process and when the purchase decision is already made. What’s alarming is that this isn’t really true. The plight of today’s customers is more acute than ever. With the deluge of information and a plethora of choices, customers appear to be more overwhelmed and less empowered than we customarily think. Buying the most appropriate ERP software or the manufacturing equipment has never been busy, but many a deal is stumbling or getting stalled for the wrong reasons. Often, more information begets more irrelevant unproductive searches, drowning the unsuspecting customer. This vicious circle cannot be avoided and deters simplified decision-making.
The number of B2B solutions purchases has increased the world over, and involves people in diverse roles, functions, and geographies. The ever-widening array of personal and organizational priorities is therefore making it difficult for buying groups to pin down purchase criteria beyond the generic “avoiding risk”, “saving cost”, “ease of use”. This is referred to as “lowest common denominator purchasing”. Greater choice, not necessarily a good thing, also causes more time- consuming deliberations – with stakeholders bickering over the trade-offs and deliberately finding aspects of a consciously rejected option particularly appealing. To top it all, there is the post- purchase anxiety, “Did we choose right?”
It comes as a surprise to suppliers that customers actually struggle to buy. Interestingly, what makes the process painful has little to do with suppliers, but with customers themselves. The solution seems simple – make buying easy. Suppliers are pretty much doing that in their bid to guide customers in the decision-making, providing data, cases, testimonials, adjusting offers as customer tastes and preferences evolve. This approach seems in keeping with suppliers’ pushing themselves harder to be more customer-centric. Unfortunately, research with 600 B2B buyers reveals it drives an 18% decrease in purchase ease.
While the responsive approach on part of suppliers considerably lowers purchase ease, a proactive prescriptive approach with unambiguous and rational recommendations reduces buying hardships by 86%. What’s more, customers tend to rate ‘prescriptive’ salespersons higher, as they tend to anticipate and eliminate their obstacles. Customers are also likely to regret their purchase less, and indulge in repeat purchases.
So, what does an organization that practices prescriptive sales typically do? Learning from the purchase processes and challenges of a handful of customers, the effective prescriptive sellers replicate and appropriate the same experience to a wider range of similar customers, across a segment, offering, or product line, scaling their scope and capability. Prescriptive selling, to be more impactful, is deployed pan-organization – across channels, in sales conversations, and marketing literature.
The prescriptive journey is comprises four stages.
- Map the Journey: A conventional sales journey is characterized by awareness, consideration,preference and This is essentially a ‘purchase from us’ journey, pivoting around the supplier’s process. On the other hand, a supplier-agnostic journey spans three phases. The first phase sees customers identifying a problem that merits attention. Second, various approaches to addressing the highest-priority problems are brought to the fore. This may include brainstorming about build-versus-buy options, technology-versus-people solutions, or even whether integrating various solutions with existing systems would lead to better outcomes. In the third and final phase, the customer who has pinned down his best-fit solution engages a sales representative. In most organizations marketing personnel are involved in creating journey maps, typically approaching the job from the supplier’s perspective. However, it is essentially a sales function as any high-performing sales force has greater insight into the customers’ processes. Suppliers can gather information by conducting interviews, focus groups, or surveys to ask straightforward questions about a past purchase.
- Identify Barriers: Though mapping is considerably distinct from identification of obstacles topurchase, the two tend to This is especially true when customer interviews are part of the journey and discussions about pain-points surface. However, it is not just about being aware of the problems customers encounter in dealing with one organization/supplier, instead laying open the struggles they would have with any supplier. Considering a range of customer responses and looking for patterns ill reveal some higher-order obstacles. The typical challenges customers encounter are threefold. In the early stages, they struggle with information-based issues as they engage in learning and research. A major hurdle is drawing conclusions from conflicting or confusing data or recommendations. Communication issues generally crop up in the next stage, as more stakeholders get involved with their respective perspectives and agenda. Decision-makers’ competing priorities or inscrutable leadership directives add to the tension. In the final stages, customers get bogged down in selecting a singular solution with its course of action.
- Design Prescriptions: Prescriptive approaches are of various types, and may be delivered through diverse means – distributing marketing content, conducting workshops by specialists and executives, or engaging in live customer conversations. However delivered, they should provide customers with a manageable set of true unbiased considerations and concrete meaningful Besides, they must reduce indecision, and also, without explicitly promoting the supplier’s solutions, get customers to say, “Wow, you just made my life easy!’
- Track Customer Progress: Knowing where potential customers stand in the journey helps asupplier to gauge where the problem lies, thereby determining the interventions at certain points to eliminate buying difficulties. IT suppliers often use a structured approach, where, in close collaboration with the customer stakeholders, a document is developed specifying each step advancing the buying process along with dates. To serve customer interest, there are opportunities for customers to exit the agreement too at predetermined
Organizations that don’t just sell but help customers in buying stand to gain profoundly. Here lies the fundamental shift. Without singularly promoting their own fare for customers buy from them, they focus on promoting the right purchase and purchase ease of customers. To ensure customers stay the course and complete their purchase journey, such companies proactively align and empower their workforce to close their own sales and gain customer loyalty.
