Are traditional B2B sales and marketing becoming obsolete?
Most B2B sales and marketing teams typically work in a “serial” or linear fashion.
Marketing engages potential buyers early in the buying journey, which qualifies and suits them to engage salespeople through digital ‘content sponsorship’. Once these leads are designated as “marketable eligible,” individual sellers take over and follow up on those leads through in-person or virtual interactions. In the middle is “delivery,” where marketing moves the job to sales and online customer engagement gives way to personal customer engagement.
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Even in the most advanced “account-based marketing approaches”, that linear “physics” remains largely unchallenged. First marketing, then sales. Or more accurately, digital engagement was scaled up first, followed by target seller interaction. And the decades-old pursuit of tighter “sales and marketing integration” focused on advancing deals along that journey as “smoothly” as possible, eliminating “friction” and aligning metrics, data and sometimes incentives and reporting structures to ensure delivery from digital to more human selling as efficiently as possible.
The rise of digital buying between businesses
However, over the years, B2B buying has dramatically evolved into a digitally dominant buying behaviour, making much of this business model not only outdated but almost outdated.
Consider the following data from Gartner research: In a pre-pandemic survey of 750 B2B customer stakeholders involved in purchasing complex “solutions” within their organisation, customers reported spending only 17 per cent of total purchasing time in direct interaction with supplier sales teams. Instead, a significant portion of the purchasing activity involved independent online learning (27 per cent), independent offline learning (18 per cent, and consensus building across a wide range of internal stakeholders and partners (22 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively).
Despite its small size, 17 per cent of the purchasing activity devoted to supplier interaction (both virtual and in-person) represents all suppliers not every supplier. So, if three suppliers are vying for the same opportunity, one can assume that customers split that time roughly evenly across all three, leaving any given sales team with a vanishingly small chance of interacting directly with that customer.
For many sales leaders, this very small window for direct interaction represents the biggest challenge their sales teams face today, and a general lack of access—and thus a lack of opportunities—to materially influence purchasing deliberations and discourage customers’ preference toward their company’s unique offering.
As one head of sales put it, “We have very few ‘bats’ to actually influence the buying behaviour of customers.” In other words, today’s typical B2B buying journey leaves supplier sales teams very little “space” for actual selling.
Multi-channel purchase
Instead, today’s B2B buyers rely heavily on digital information to support progress across their entire purchasing journey. In a survey of more than 1,000 B2B buyers involved in a complex purchasing process, respondents reported using digital channels—particularly a supplier’s website—with almost identical frequency to supplier salespeople to gather information needed to complete a set of purchasing ‘jobs’, for example, problem identification Explore solutions, build requirements, and select suppliers. Ultimately, customers become largely neutral as to where to find the information needed to proceed with their purchasing deliberations.
In this sense, for sales leaders seeking to “reclaim customer access,” it turns out that customers never wanted to reach the seller in the first place. Instead, they pursued sales conversations not for the sake of the conversation itself, but as a practical means of obtaining the information needed to complete a specific set of job purchases. Now that a lot of this information is available online, salespeople are no longer the channel for customers, but a channel for clients. And customers “vote with their feet,” leaving many salespeople struggling to provide value unique enough to merit the extra time and effort for in-person sales interactions.
Preference for a rep-free experience
When asked, many buyers of complex B2B solutions express a strong preference for a buying experience that is completely free of salesperson interactions. In a survey of nearly 1,000 B2B buyers, 43 per cent of survey respondents agreed that they would prefer a repeat-free buying experience. When discounting by generations, 29 per cent of newborns preferred to buy solutions without the participation of delegates, while more than half of millennials, 54 per cent expressed the same sentiment. It’s clear that both practical experience and data-driven evidence point to a potentially dramatic generational shift in customer engagement preferences over the next five to 10 years.
Indeed, if taken to the extreme, one can conclude that the “sales death” is close. This interpretation of the data, however, seems unrealistic. On the other hand, business leaders argue that many complex solutions require some level of collaborative customisation that requires human interaction, effectively making salespeople “core workers” in B2B procurement. At the same time, most also agree that current B2B buying experiences are nowhere near robust, accurate, or advanced enough to support customers who prefer buying on their own.
Customers may seek input from the salesperson early in the transaction to explore solutions but return to digital to build requirements. Later, when additional stakeholders get involved, they may reconsider—and perhaps even rethink—their initial problem entirely, leading them to re-evaluate, or even reconsider, potential solutions, all with or without the salesperson’s involvement along the way. .
In a world like this, simply “aligning” sales with marketing to ensure a smooth “delivery” as the deal “progresses” along a linear “purchasing process” is a wholly inadequate solution to a radically new buying reality (similar to a taxi driver hanging air freshener in the back from their cab hoping that they will somehow “fix” a deeply flawed rider experience).
Customer success
Customer successes that can be captured and shared with other prospective customers. So in other words, customer advocacy. Whatever form that takes (online stories, case studies or webinars with customers) it needs to be super authentic and succinct. Having the mechanism behind this requires a customer success and marketing operation driving these things.
Customer success itself as an organisation, profession and operation is very much geared to ensuring renewals and drive upsells and cross sells from existing customers. So my suggestion would be to focus on getting this right and a huge customer base that already exists would be properly leveraged and protected against churn.- hbr.org