Here’s How Salespeople Can Survive A Moment Many Have Never Experienced Before.
Finding good statistics on the average age of a B2B seller is tough. But here's something I'm willing to bet on: Many have not seen an economic environment like the one we're in now. Think about it – outside of the extremely short bust that hit in the immediate impact of Covid, the American economy has spent more than a decade powering ahead.
Money has been cheap and demand has been high. Yet we’ve slipped into what looks like the opposite scenario, along with inflation figures that haven't been seen in 40 years.
All things people who sell for a living don't want to hear. And a lot of what people who sell for a living have never experienced themselves.
Circumstances have shifted and that means sellers, especially those who've only been working for a decade or less, need new rules to live by. The most important, by far, is a simple one: find the economic buyer and fast.
As most sellers know by now, the economic buyer is someone who usually appears later in the sales cycle. Before they ever get to the person responsible for allocating capital, a seller might contend with at least three other important people inside of a company in a typical transaction, often more than once apiece: the technical buyer who looks at the merits of the solution, the business buyer who owns the problem or opportunity and the terms-and-conditions buyer responsible for procurement.
The economic buyer has different criteria than all the rest. They are laser focused on ROI. That means you need to be, too.
To be sure, you can't upend the typical sales cycle without some help. Those technical and business buyers who previously would have been your first and potentially only contacts for days, weeks or maybe even months, are still likely to be your first contacts within an organization.
What has to change now is how you work with them. They're not unaware–they too know how the ground has shifted. You'll need their help in bringing in the economic buyer earlier, which makes it essential, from the beginning, to prioritize questions like, "Who allocates funding within the organization?" Yet before you even get to that point, do something else first.
We as sellers have to be crystal clear on how our products or services add economic value. This may seem obvious, but it's work sellers often leave to buyers to calculate. That may work in boom times but it doesn't work now. When an investment is obvious but the return is not, then the "R" in "ROI" will look itty bitty, while the "I" will look enormous.
Only in the past year did many businesses finally get comfortable with new routines forced on them by Covid. Amid growing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, organizations have adjusted how they think about investing their money. Many have gone from bold to conservative. When that happens, products and services can go quite quickly from essential to "We don't need it" or “We can’t afford it,” and the person who decides that is the one you're now scrambling to see.
Think in those terms.
If you relied previously on how your products or services differed from the competition or represented the latest breakthrough in technology, simplify your argument to something more direct and likely to appeal to the economic buyer. Think through how, if your customer was to buy from you, something economically in their business would benefit decisively.
Calculate it for them, and have that information ready from the beginning. Know it inside and out because if you're doing your job right – and doing it in a different way for these different times – you'll be able to deliver it to the person who matters much earlier than before.
