Stop Selling, Start Helping

People asked me if there was one piece of advice I could give salespeople who went through the Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective training. What would that be? Is there one particular skill that needs to be improved, for example, enhancing business acumen, overcoming hidden competitors, understanding the customer’s buying process, or insight selling, storytelling? What is it? Well, sure, improving these skills and getting good enabling coaching would certainly help you Sell with the Buyer’s Perspective and close more deals.

The one thing only that would help everyone is actually a mindset thing:

Stop Selling, Start Helping

Helping with what would you ask? Think about the stakeholders you met last week. Go back to the conversations you had with them. Have you ever thought about what their job tasks are and how you can enable them to do their job better?

What every company wants

The first thing to acknowledge, and what will change your mindset, is that every company in the world, big or small, wants to grow their business. You would say, yes, of course – I know that. And I believe you. But how customers go about that can take multiple different forms. What are they busy with?

Typical Buying Jobs

Through interviews with hundreds of B2B buyers, Gartner identified six buying jobs:

• Problem identification. “We need to do something.”
• Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
• Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
• Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?”
• Validation. “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
• Consensus creation. “We need to get everyone on board.”

The first three are the most challenging, and many buyers get stuck there. Customers delay—or cancel—buying efforts when they are not convinced of the need to change. Why? After doing their research, new priorities are funnelling down to be the most likely success strategy. But budgets are limited. And what if they have overlooked something? The buying room is often overwhelmed and confused. Many companies decide to do nothing big until they are really certain that they get a solid return on their investment. The status quo is still the most favourite buying process stage, and this may surprise you.

How hard is B2B buying?

If you ask all your contacts in your portfolio that question, 77% of them would rate their purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult. Why?

The typical buying group involves six to 10 stakeholders, each of whom has consulted four to five sources of information that they must then deconflict together. What’s more, most of them revisit decisions at least once as new information emerges.

The complexity of making a purchase decision can be largely attributed to the abundance of high-quality information available to buyers. Buyers do not want to make a major decision based on something they heard or seen; they need evidence. Don’t believe me? Instead, watch this YouTube Reel from Brent Adamson, who discusses why salespeople need to build customers’ confidence so they will move forward in their buying process and influence others.

Building Customer’s Confidence

When, for example, board members or senior management teams are looking at their latest flat top-line performance, there is consensus on “we need to do something “. This is a typical Why Change? situation. The customer may be comfortable with their status quo, but the growth adrenaline pushes them to take action. Here is my advice:

Building customer confidence starts with sharing 3rd party research articles.

What is so powerful about that? Why would your stakeholder feel more confident when you share an article, a white paper, or a story about another customer you have helped? The reason is simple: It’s not you, the (biased) salesperson, saying that they should consider this specific information and share that with the bigger buying room. No, it’s someone else who is credible and has done the homework for them.

Stop Selling, Start Helping

This means changing your mindset about your opportunities. Avoid talking about your solutions until you have helped your customers with what they are busy with. “To grow our business, we need to do something.” You have a business idea for them to explore. That idea starts to percolate in their head as a great one when it is backed up by credible third-party research. Try it, it works.

Feel free to share this blog with your sales colleagues.