Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder.

How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle

Garin Hess

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781632992949
• eBook ISBN:
  9781632992956
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Enable Your Buyers for Faster B2B Sales

​What drives B2B sales most effectively—focusing on what you do as a salesperson or on what your champion and the buying group does behind the scenes? The latest research makes it clear that the B2B buying process has become too complex and difficult and buyers today crave companies and experienced guides who make the process easier. Focus on making buying easier and your prospects will buy from you faster and more often.

Sales teams can shorten the sales cycle by as much as 68% when they learn to equip their champion—the people promoting their solution inside the target account—using the DEEP-C™ buyer enablement framework: Discover, Engage, Equip, Personalize, and Coach. This book guides sales leaders and professionals through the process of moving from a sales-focused approach to a buyer enablement model that reduces buying friction and accelerates the purchase.

PART I

CUSTOMER FOCUS AND BUYER EMPATHY: LEAVE YOUR WORLD BEHIND AND GET BETTER RESULTS

CHAPTER 1

DEVELOPING BUYER EMPATHY

“Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.”

—DANIEL LUBETZKY¹

In Celeste Headlee’s now famous TED Talk, “10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation,” she says, “Most of us don’t listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.”²

Doesn’t this epitomize an ineffective salesperson or sales engineer? How many demos have you attended (as a buyer) where the solution consultant wasn’t consulting at all but rather going through the same demo they do over and over, almost entirely disregarding your specific interests or needs? How many sales conversations have you had (as a buyer) where you didn’t feel listened to?

As sales professionals, we’ve all fallen into this trap ourselves from time to time. We think more about ourselves than our customer. That mentality has to change if we are to become more customer focused, which is a prerequisite for successfully enacting buyer enablement.

It’s Not About Us

If we peel back the layers of ineffectiveness in B2B sales, we’ll almost always see one principle at the root of this problem: As sellers, we are too self-centered.

We are, as Ms. Headlee describes, “listening with the intent to reply” rather than to understand. What are we thinking about while we’re supposed to be listening? We are thinking about how we’re behind on our numbers, about the next conversation two hours from now with a higher-profile prospect, about what our next move is, about how we can handle that objection the client is bringing up, or about any number of things that could help us close the deal.

What we aren’t thinking about is them—the buyer—and what they are thinking and feeling. About their journey. About what they are risking to even consider our solution. We unwittingly think that selling is about what we do rather than what the buyer does. And the irony is that selling isn’t about us; it’s about them—you need to understand your buyer more deeply.

The Power of Buyer Empathy

In Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s book Killer Instinct, a law enforcement profiler remarks, “Maybe, to do what you and I do, we have to have a little bit of the monster in us.”³ This profiler wants to anticipate the next move of the criminal by understanding how they think. They do that by putting themselves in the shoes of someone else, by trying to look at the world the same way that person does. That is empathy. And for a profiler, the “someone else” is the criminal.

When you practice this skill at the workplace, it becomes business empathy, which can be a valuable asset. Great business leaders have the ability to intuitively imagine the thoughts and feelings of their employees. It helps them make better decisions. Great employees have the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of their leaders, helping them deliver better collaboration and results.

To become better at selling, you have to pursue a particular type of business empathy that I call buyer empathy. That means understanding how buyers view the world: what they think, what they want, how they behave, what influences their decisions. Buyers aren’t criminals, of course (except when they talk you down to a 40% discount), but what I’m suggesting is that as sellers, do what profilers do and tap into “the buyer in us.” Doing so can help us anticipate what they need, what their next move will be.

In other words, to know what you need to do, you need to first understand how buyers think, what they want, and how they behave. Then you’ll know exactly how to enable them and close more sales.

A Buyer’s View of the Universe

There are a lot of things that buyers think about. By and large, you, the seller, are not one of them (see Figure 4). Take a minute to think about what that means to you as a salesperson. To be successful, every time you make contact with a prospect, you need to be offering them something that helps them be successful in one or more of these spheres that concern them.

Figure 4: To me, this Gartner graphic is representative of “How Buyers See the Universe”: You, the seller, are barely on the radar of a buyer initially. You have to raise their awareness and their recognition that making a change to your solution can improve their universe.

As Gartner puts it, “Think of your audience as the center of a universe that you need to navigate. If you talk too much about yourself and your products, prospects will disengage almost immediately since that information is not relevant to them.”⁴

The first step on the journey to buyer enablement is to keep the prospect’s universe in your head.

“Sales teams have to bring more insights and become buyer-centric, not product-centric. They have to be able to contextualize the products and solutions into prospects’ industry, unique challenges, and even into their organization.” —KEVIN JOYCE, CMO AND VP OF STRATEGY SERVICES AT THE PEDOWITZ GROUP⁵

Remember Buyers Are People

This may sound simplistic, but too often we think of buyers as being limited to their role as prospects, leads, champions, or future customers instead of thinking about them as people—people like you and me. When we dehumanize buyers into just their roles, we won’t connect on that emotional level that buyers need from us in order to feel confident.

Part of what tempts us to dehumanize buyers is that we’re intimidated by them. We know they hold the keys to something we want, and this influences our thinking. Instead of feeling intimidated, place the focus of your effort on reaching them on a personal level. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Even a small connection goes a long way, but it has to be real, not contrived.

Years ago, I heard Robert Harris, the founder of Chem-Dry, an international leader in carpet cleaning franchises, explain the principle that “people are just people” by sharing an extreme example of how he won over some key distributors from Japan. At the time, Chem-Dry was courting a large Japanese distributor and wanted to do a multimillion-dollar deal. To Chem-Dry it was a very big deal, but from the distributor’s perspective, Chem-Dry was still an unproven small company. The Japanese delegation had come to visit Harris in California, and after a couple of days of meetings, he took them to his personal mountain retreat. Harris was trying to get a verbal commitment from them, but they were balking and delaying.

Harris was an aviation enthusiast and a stunt pilot. He could see they were at an impasse, so he decided to take a break and invite them to ride with him in his private plane. He took them up, and partway through the ride, he did a full loop. His guests all gasped and then laughed. They were nervous but clearly delighted. Harris laughed with them. Laughing, he asked, “Do we have a deal?” No response.

Taking the laughter as a sign that walls were starting to crumble, Harris decided to push the envelope. He put the plane through a barrel roll. Again, more gasping and laughing. Harris laughed again and asked, “So do we have a deal now?” They laughed back, but still no response. Harris pulled the plane straight up until it stalled, the engine going silent. The plane began to streak downward. Moments later, he roared the engine back to life. Laughs of relief and delight came again. “Do we have a deal yet?” Harris asked again. Finally the answer came back as the delegation leader, laughing, said, “Yes, yes, just take us back down to earth!”

Harris found a way to bring laughter, something that connects all of us, into the conversation, immediately bringing down the walls. Few of us could pull this kind of stunt (pun intended) to get a deal done, but Harris’s main point was this: Forget about who you are talking to, forget about how important the deal is to you, and remember that people are people. Don’t be intimidated. Treat them like human beings and make a real connection. Good things follow.

YOU NEED TO ACTUALLY CARE

There is lots of advice out there about how to relate to people, how to ask open-ended questions, how to show people you are listening, and how to make people feel cared about. In my opinion, most of this advice is useless because it’s just a put-on and people see right through it. There is no substitute for actually seeing other people as real people and caring about them. If you do, all else will come naturally.

There Is No Such Thing as a Complex Sale

I’ve heard many sales reps and leaders describe their task as “complex selling.” But I say, “There is no such thing as a ‘complex sale.’”

“What?! Blasphemy!” you cry. “I’ve been through lots of complex sales so believe me, I know.”

I’ll say it again: There is no such thing as a complex sale.

There is only a complex purchase. I’ll say it one more time: There are no complex sales, only complex purchases.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. Thinking that we, as salespeople, can accelerate sales by changing only what we are doing is the height of self-centered sales thinking. We have to get into the minds of the buyers.

A couple of years ago, I backpacked up the highest mountain in the state of Utah in the United States, Kings Peak, with my son’s Venture Scout team. It was awe-inspiring to stand in a range of towering mountains at the summit of the tallest and see that there was nothing higher than we were as far as we could see in any direction.

Our group was led by Ben Booth, an experienced outdoorsman and avid fly fisherman. One day, he was explaining to me what he loves about fly-fishing: “You have to get into the mind of the fish,” he told me. “Where do they want to be? What do they want to eat? What excites them? What bores them?” On that trip, I saw him repeatedly catch fish in a spot where others weren’t catching anything. Why? Because he was in the “mind of the buyer,” so to speak (or “mind of the biter,” if you like dad-joke-level puns).

The same thinking can be applied to B2B sales. If you think about any transaction as a sale, you tend to focus on what the seller has to do. If you think about it as a purchase, you focus on what the buyer has to do. There is a big difference in how you approach the whole process.

The reality is that making a purchase, even an entry-level purchase, has become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Value Proposition of Buyer Enablement
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Taking Charge of Buying
• Part I: Customer Focus and Buyer Empathy: Leave your World Behind and Get Better Results
• Part II: Deep-C™: A Framework for Implementing Customer Focus and Buyer Enablement
• Part III: Getting Started with Buyer Enablement: The Technologies and Methods for Effective Buyer Enablement Implementation
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• About the Author