The buyer experience. It’s a current phenomenon buzzing around the B2B space these days, and to stay competitive, your sellers (and marketers) need to deliver the best in order to stay ahead of the rest. But when you’re thinking about how to improve the buyer experience, are you thinking about how you can achieve that by way of improving the seller experience?
Look at it like this: your goal is to increase sales and achieve higher conversation rates. To do that, you need to make sure you are delighting your prospects at every engagement. That doesn’t mean creating jazzy campaigns or call blitzes that generate a bunch of leads and pipeline (this is seller efficiency, which is great, but not enough). That means actually converting those leads into revenue and recurring customers (this is seller effectiveness — what you really need to have any sort of impact on the buyer experience).
This is where the seller experience comes in. Your sellers aren’t just as good as the number on their back. They’re the folks interfacing with prospects and customers every day who are developing, nurturing and maintaining that connection, or “buyer experience” (because the experience doesn’t just start and stop with the sale). Your sellers literally embody all that is your organization.
So, ensuring that your sellers can be agile and engage prospects with relevant and impactful resources throughout the buyer’s journey is key.
451 Research recently conducted a study to identify what impacts seller effectiveness and ultimately the buyer experience. They found that there are just three things your sellers need to deliver a killer buyer experience, every single time.
- Contextual Content – Content does not just mean static assets. Contextual content refers to assets combined with situational guidance and prescriptive insights on how to use the content with each unique buyer and buying stage. So this means that your sellers need adaptive content that is relevant to the context of whatever buying situation they are in front of.
- Intelligent Automation – This is where you can scale the seller experience by combining human expertise with unbiased machine intelligence. However, this by itself is not a solution. While it provides sellers access to relevant content resources, tying it back to contextually relevant content that is adaptive to the buyer situation is where you’ll see improved performance effectiveness. But don’t just stop there! You need one more thing…
- Prescriptive Insight – In other words, intelligent automation will reveal how your sellers are using contextual content, and you can leverage these insights to then guide your sellers to the right resources at the right time in the sales cycle.
To give you a visual of how this all ties together, check out this Venn Diagram (everyone loves a good Venn, right?!):
Taken together, these three components have a powerful effect on the seller experience, which ultimately translates to the buyer experience. When looking to optimize your buyer experience, start with optimizing your seller experience. Provide reps with contextual content, intelligent automation, and prescriptive insight. Because when you swirl them all together, that is where the sales effectiveness magic happens and your leads actually convert to revenue and company advocates.
Remember, efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.
