When did the enterprise buying cycle become so complex?
Long gone are the days of taking the CFO out for dinner and the deal is done. In place of individual sign-offs and a linear process of solving challenge A with solution B, I’m seeing businesses having to justify decision making at every stage of their process and build consensus with key stakeholders along the way. These stages must align perfectly for an enterprise purchase to move forward:
1. A tangible business challenge is identified.
2. Potential solutions are identified.
3. The build requirements of a solution are constructed.
4. Suitable suppliers of the tools to provide the solution are selected.
5. A purchase decision is made.
Understand that each and every one of these steps is a potential stumbling block. Not building consensus or justifying the decision at every stage will leave buying teams trapped in endless cycles of reassessment.
Get your internal functions to connect.
Once you know how customers are buying, it’s now up to you to use that knowledge to secure customers and revenue, and that means orientating your business around these customers.
Marketing teams must step up by communicating value. Product teams must be able to present the relevance of their solution. And sales teams must glean insights from the customer in order to guide them.
Customer insights are the unifying resource that every team can use to synchronize their efforts. Once you have a greater understanding of the way customers buy, you then need to implement this knowledge in order to ensure that your various teams are efficiently working in sync to properly connect with these customers.
Don’t look at martech tools as being the font of all customer knowledge. While they can open up new windows into untapped data streams, such as how contacts are interacting with your content and their activity on your web properties, I find that this data is often handled inefficiently. We’ve seen marketing teams use this data as the panacea — for example, just because a customer has interacted with an email and read something from your website doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. And it only provides a small window into the customer’s own internal processes, with digital behavior only forming a small part of what goes on in their business’s B2B decision-making processes. Their internal processes often also include meetings, internal emails, presentations and water-cooler discussions.
I’d recommend using a core set of tools (as few as possible) to capture data on your customers. And make sure it all consolidates back to a single CRM platform. The more teams in your business that use the same system, the richer the data becomes. Access and review the data you have from your martech tools to get insight into which accounts are engaging with your content. This needs to be viewed in a wider context — for example, combine this data with what’s actually happening in the field — such as the conversations your sales and service team is having with their accounts — to build a more complete picture of what’s going on.
When buying cycles are as complex as they are, the needs of customers can often vary enormously at each stage. Bombarding customers with superfluous information during your interactions won’t do very much to break the cycles of reassessment at every stage.
Be the information connector.
Instead, you should be focused on guiding customers through the nuances of their buying journey and helping them sort through the abundance of information available to them. Position yourself as the “information connector,” where sales and marketing teams partner with their customers by providing them tools to organize and align their thinking. What better way to cultivate relationships than by actually helping them?
This is a reminder of the distinctly human core of an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. Customers may have a predictable list of challenges, but vendors can easily differentiate themselves from their competitors by recognizing that each customer has a different situation, justification and consensus.
The enterprise buyer journey didn’t change overnight. Shifting job roles, competing vendors with very little differentiation and silos across businesses have created ever more complexity.
There is no universal road map for how companies will continue to add value to the buyer journey, but understanding how and why customers are interacting during their purchase process is a great place to start.
