Alert! Your Customers’ Confidence Level is dropping.

In our world, where we have access to more information and more options, making decisions is more difficult. So, we need additional input from Likes, Reviews and Recommendations. We all do this. Not only in B2C but also your customers in B2B. Although they would like a similar experience, help from Likes, Reviews, and Recommendations is not available as much. Consequently, their confidence level in buying (read: changing suppliers) is dropping. They are looking for help.

The World of More

In addition to more information and options, in B2B, there are also more people to consider. Brent Adamson (The Challenger Sale) calls this “The World of More. Everyone in the buying room has an opinion, and they want to be heard. This results in more delays in buying decisions, which often gravitate to no decision at all. They stay with what they have, a service in place.

More information? More Options?

The logical response would be to give stakeholders more information and more options. Salespeople say: “Maybe you have missed this White Paper. Let me give it to you”. Or, “Didn’t you read this insightful article yet? Here it is”! If provided without a “Why should you read this” context, this is even more overwhelming and confusing, which doesn’t help increase their confidence. So, what does?

Selling is Helping

Stakeholders at the executive and middle management levels have jobs to do. One of them is looking for growth opportunities. So, what kind of help do they need? They need help with exactly that. They need help with making sense of the overwhelming information and options and what specific information means to their business. You need to Sell with the Buyer’s Perspective.

1. Understand

How would you feel when someone you have never met tells you within five minutes that your way of operating has risks and that there are better ways of looking at growth opportunities? Not good! Hence, when selling with the buyer’s perspective, you do this differently. You first need to earn the right to help.

• You SHOW that you have done your homework and understand what they are going through. You can describe their situation and challenges.
• Using emotional intelligence, you empathize and VERIFY whether your understanding is correct. You refer to the overwhelming amount of information and options.
• When initiating a conversation, you ASK a question related to what you want your stakeholders to discover. The questions you ask are strategic.

2. SHARE

Now, you are ready to SHARE what you think may help the stakeholder’s company grow their business. And your stakeholders are more open to receiving information from you. It’s NOT YOU telling the customer what to do. Instead, it is third-party research. Your stakeholders may have accessed the same information. However, they may not have made the connection to the risk of doing nothing. They may not have seen how your information is connected to a growth strategy. Third-party research is your backup as to why your business idea works. It starts to make sense for your stakeholders. This is also the moment where you say: ” I have helped other customers do this”. You have a story ready about how exactly you helped a similar customer and the impact on their top-line growth.

Increase Customers’ Confidence

As we know, influencing one stakeholder is not enough. And we also know that many are struggling to get the attention of their colleagues. So increasing customers’ confidence is all about ENABLING them to influence others. One after the other. They need:

• The URL link to the third-party research
• Your story about how you have helped other companies use that information for their growth strategy
• A business case in which your idea really works. if they make a change, how will that impact their business?
• Customer references how you have helped them.

Most of the buying is done when you are not there. Equip stakeholders with what they need to influence others and increase the company’s confidence to make a change.