Ah, your buyers. Those folks who need your solution but drag their feet. The ones with roughly 17,237 sidebar questions. The people who ghost you on your meetings. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em, can’t stalk them in the parking lot (ahem).
Purchasing from you—or anyone—is a giant leap of faith for buyers. Their buying team (and bosses and end-users) may not be convinced they need to buy something. Then they have the unenviable task of deciding whether the solution you’re offering—if it’s even the right one for them—justifies the cost and time. It’s no wonder they act slowly and cautiously: their credibility and even careers may depend on making the right choice.
Do buyers trust what you have to say?
Buyers want your guidance to move past concern into confidence. Your sellers must help them see past all the bells, whistles and distractions that prevent them from confidently deciding on the best solution.
While you’re not exactly an impartial advisor, if you deliver value and get past their defenses, you’ll gain insider status. You’ll set the terms of comparison, and buyers will want to buy from you. Because they trust you.
But how on earth do you get to that point?
The new sales equation
The new way to create engaged buyers—is simple: Trust x Value.
Your sellers build trust by listening deeply to buyers. They offer value when they provide relevant guidance at every step of the journey. And the tricky part for most sellers is that they diminish that value when they waste buyers’ time spamming them with irrelevant content and pitches.
When you get the new sales equation right, everything gets easier:
- Buyers share the info your teams need
- The sales process is less combative
- Sales go faster
The old math doesn’t add up
The trust x value model of B2B selling—collaborative instead of adversarial—is the most enjoyable for sellers. They don’t want to chase people. They don’t want to arouse suspicion. And they sure as hell don’t want to force buyers into hiding.
They want to help their buyers. It feels good to help people. Most sellers didn’t get into the game because they hate humans, and it’s frustrating when they’re forced into dehumanizing sales tactics.
But in most sales organizations, only a handful of sellers have the exceptional instincts for building trust and listening deeply to clients’ concerns so they can tailor solutions to match without any help. The majority of sellers need a lot of support to leave behind brute-force sales tactics and scripted interactions.
And no organization can hire their way out of this sticky problem.
While you can’t replicate the alchemy that makes your stars so good at collaborative selling, you can create a sales structure that supports all your sellers with insight, preparation, easy access to the right content, coaching, and feedback loops.
One that helps them learn from each other and become stars themselves.
Technology-assisted selling
At Showpad, we work with well-oiled sales machines, up-and-coming stars and everyone in between. And we have a lot of insight into how they support their salesforce in building trust and delivering value. We deeply believe B2B sales hinge on human connections. But your salesforce needs a powerful infrastructure to offer exactly the right interactions at the right time—spam-free.
It takes a full-stack approach to build an army of sellers who consistently deliver on the trust and value equation. It’s why we’ve moved beyond sales enablement to support scalable coaching, microlearning, intuitive content discovery, trackable interactions and feedback loops. If you’re looking to build that kind of experience, get your copy of our ebook Woo, Don’t Pursue: Make It Easier for Buying Teams to Buy from You.
