Sales Enablement For A Hybrid Selling World

 

The world we live in has been altered in so many ways by the Covid-19 health crisis — and enterprise buying is no exception. Many buying and selling teams are working almost completely remotely now, and they are operating in a virtual world where almost all of the information a buyer will ever require is available online. On top of that, large sections of the B2B buying process are now automated and require no buyer-seller interaction at all.

A Gartner study from 2019 shows this point and demonstrates that this shift to digital has actually been underway for some time. The study found that B2B buyers can spend as little as 5% of their time actually meeting with any given potential supplier when considering making a purchase.

And more recent studies shows that the shift has been accelerated and compounded by the pandemic. Data from McKinsey & Company, for example, found that eight in 10 B2B leaders say that omnichannel is as or more effective than traditional methods. This is an idea that has gained popularity over the last year, starting at 54% in April 2020 and rising to 83% in February 2021. Additionally, the study found that 83% of B2B leaders believe omnichannel selling is a more successful way to prospect and secure new business than traditional, “face-to-face only” sales approaches.

This creates two main problems for enterprise organizations. First, it has become increasingly hard to differentiate your offering in a digital world of hybrid selling, where both you and your competitors use the same digital selling techniques of web, chatbots and other digitally automated processes. And, second, it shows the window of opportunity for sellers to make an impact to the buying process has narrowed considerably.

However, there is a solution to both of these problems, and it lies in sales enablement. In my company’s work consulting blue-chip organizations on sales and marketing strategies that maximize revenue growth, I am finding that those organizations that invest time and resources to the following three sales enablement strategies are best able to navigate this new world of enterprise buying.

Hybrid selling requires hybrid teams.

Multiple routes to market require collaboration between previously siloed teams. Put the support of the entire organization behind the sales team, including product and marketing teams, implementation partners and leaders across the business. Everyone should be ready to join customer conversations, with sales enablement positioned as the glue that holds these various teams together. Creating multi-faceted, hybrid teams will help you differentiate and focus on the buyers’ requirements.

My best advice here is to create a sales enablement function that can serve as a facilitator, able to understand the buying process and which people from within your organization can make an impact at each point in that journey. For example, if the buyer-seller conversation is in the early stages and you need to demonstrate your understanding of the customer’s business, then the sales enablement team is on hand to parachute in your industry subject matter experts. However, if the conversation has progressed to the point of discussing the merits of your product over a competitor’s, then the sales enablement team could facilitate solution architects or product specialists to join key meetings instead. As Liz Harrison with McKinsey & Company said on my podcast, “ensuring that the right individuals and the right channels are used, with the right value proposition and insights, along each step in the journey” are important for making this process successful.

Better insight can lead to better relationships.

While sales enablement can be defined as providing the tools sellers need to produce their best results, what underpins it all is insight. Organizations must have the capability to provide their sellers with the insight that brings a true understanding of the needs, challenges and aspirations of key accounts. That goes beyond firmographics and inbound intent data — both of which are crucial — to include competitor analysis, executive profiling and qualitative research into account drivers.

Present all the information these tactics generate in a way that is both usable and useful to your customer-facing teams. Less is more here, and it is best to summarize the key findings up front before providing further detail in an appendix to your sales enablement documents.

I would advise that sales enablement leaders should look at providing customer-facing teams with a combination of first-party data to establish what works and what doesn’t and externally sourced data to give an external view of mega-trends occuring in a particular industry, the drivers impacting a particular organization, and so on.

Add human value to differentiate your value proposition.

The B2B buying process is all about dealing with risk — what is the risk to my business model from making this purchase? — and providing reassurance to buyers is where sellers can add human value to automated processes.

In a world of digital selling, it is the personal relationships that will become a differentiator. As a seller you must be able to add human value to the sales process as and when it is needed, and I believe knowing when that moment of human interaction is needed is the real job of sales enablement teams as we move into the world of hybrid selling. This means using insights and data to understand what reassurance buyers need and then providing that information when they need it.

The sales enablement teams that are rooted in insight work to understand their customers and their buying process, facilitate cross-functional participation in the sales process, and know when and where human interaction in that buying process is required are the ones I see winning in a world of hybrid selling. In order to do this, there must be a recognition from senior leadership that the customer is key and that the way those customers buy has changed for good — put this at the heart of your analysis into your sales process, and you, too, can bring the transformation required to power your organization’s growth in this new world of digital selling.

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This article is written by Forbes and originally published here.

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