The B2B Buying Journey
About ATTACH
Key Findings
- Rapidly shifting buying dynamics, fueled by digital buying behavior, is reshaping the strategic focus of sales organizations.
- Chief sales officers (CSOs) must engage in a fundamental mindset shift from leader of sellers to leader of selling, embracing digital-first go-to-market.
- Progressive sales organizations will rapidly innovate digital selling models, leveraging the associated analytics advantages to engage customers in a far more coordinated fashion through all routes to market.
Recommendations
- Rapidly build digital sales experiences to support customer self-learning on the array of complex considerations associated with their products, services, and above all else, the customer’s change journey.
- Shift organizational focus from sales professionals as the primary commercial channel toward digital sales channels to invest in developing rich and valuable customer decision support.
- Accelerate beyond foundational analytics capabilities (such as, clean data, integrated data markets) toward AI-powered insights, fueled by customer engagement data to provide next best action and coordinated proactive actions to better retain and grow customer accounts.
- Build ecosystems of support for customer Change Enablement, including guidance on key buying considerations, but also broader project/initiative guidance to help ensure decision complexity is minimized and customer decision confidence is maximized.
- Embrace a Sense Making sales approach among sales professionals, positioning their unique value-add to help guide customers to decision confidence, minimizing uncertainty over competing perspectives and alternate actions.
Introduction
Digital Trend 1: B2B customers radically discount the perceived value of sellers
Digital Trend 2: Customers reward rich virtual buying experiences
Digital Trend 3: Customers’ digital buying behavior allows more productive analytics and coordinated customer engagement
Difficulty Trend 1: Customers’ struggle to change decreases their ability to buy ATTACH
Figure 4. Illustrative Customer Buying Journey
Difficulty Trend 2: Customers become overwhelmed with high-quality information
Conclusion
As B2B buying increasingly moves online, both the substance and the scope of seller behavior will have to adapt in order to stay relevant, focusing increasingly on Sense Making and Change Enablement.