B2B buyer trends and how you can find growth because of them
It’s August, it’s meant to be Summer (from a rather narrow view of just looking at the UK, it seems to be more like Autumn!). I hope wherever you are the season is being kind to you.
It’s also meant to be the period where there’s a fractional easing-off of workloads based on immediate demands, ahead of the push to finish the year strong from September.
True to form, then, whenever we sense there’s a gap where we can build on your thinking to help your people sell and find growth more easily, we are diving in. Here we’re going to share some of the latest research on B2B buyer trends, and how your account and client teams can use them to win more, and more easily.
1. Minimise the lengthening decision-making process
It’s taking longer for your clients to make decisions to buy from agencies, that’s something that all our clients are feeling and desk research bears this out.
Two main drivers of this are increased levels of caution in making decisions, and the still-increasing number of client stakeholders that have to ‘buy-in’ to a project.
To minimise this and maximise your win conversions, focus on the following when it comes to proposals and pitching:
Make your proposal easy for your client contact to share round their business. That means it needs to sell your approach and excite anyone who may come into contact with it, and be easy to understand the benefits of going with you.
For pitching, offer to do one! It’s the perfect opportunity for your client contact to get all their stakeholders together in a single room/virtual meeting, at a single point in time, making it easier to gain buy-in from multiple people. You’ve just saved them, and by extension, you, a whole load of time and bother in the decision-making process.
There are lots of other tactics you can use to shorten lead times, increase your conversion rate and therefore win more, but focusing on these two is a great client-centric approach to begin with.
2. Clients will buy from you but they want value from your teams - Build teams of experts with business smarts
We talked about this point in more detail in the last blog and how it’s fundamental to your business growth. But it’s not going away and as it’s so important to both retaining and winning more clients, we wanted to bring it up again. Although in a much shorter way.
This is all about your team’s commercial knowledge and meeting preparation.
As the basis of the team’s knowledge bank about each client, focus the time they spend on building it by getting them to answer three straightforward questions:
How does the client make money?
How does the client make decisions?
What are their top priorities to answer this year?
If the team can answer these three questions, they will always be in a position to enter commercial conversations with clients with relevance and credibility. Ultimately leading to more opportunities.
The second part, regarding preparation, is to do with working differently so that they have the time to prepare before any interaction they may have with a client.
This means not to work more, but to work smarter. This is the truth: if you want to keep your clients and build growth with them, this should be high priority. Knowledge-building and preparation need to become obvious things to do to become properly client-centric and to max out your chances of retention, cross-selling and scaling your work.
How to work smarter? Lots of time management techniques available, but an easy win is to challenge your team (and yourself) to delegate more. If they can’t, look to the time wasters such as not reading CC emails as soon as they land in their Inbox. This is about taking responsibility for their own time in order to become more commercial.
3. Clients are spoilt for choice. Drive growth through differentiating and distinctiveness, but don’t stop there
If you’ve been reading a lot about these two often-competing viewpoints in the marketing socials recently, you know that whatever stance you take it’s an important part of your position in your market. We’re bothists here, by the way.
However, what we so often see happen in B2B sales and account managment, is that once the work is done to differentiate the solution or company, nobody tells potential clients why they should care about that difference.
Now, you will know far more than us about what differentiates your own company/solutions. But if you want to then use it to stand out and make you more attractive to prospective clients, we recommend that you add two more steps to your thinking, by using this classic framework:
What – your differentiator
So what – what this means for your clients
Now what – what they will be able to do as a result of this differential/distinction
It’s only by spelling out the reason why they should care that potential clients will take notice and build that mental availability for you/your solution.
4. B2B buyer’s experience of supplier interactions has declined – challenge your business to be genuinely client-centric, and more human
This one is from the great new report that Merkle has published ‘The 2023 Superpowers Index’. In it, it states that B2B buyers not only look for suppliers to meet their core business needs anymore. For example, because of the well-known generational shifts happening in business, they are also looking for potential partners who display a more caring and more generally being a good business attitude.
Indeed, it has been clear for some time now that the way clients are changing and choosing who to work with, is leaving some agencies behind. This makes it more difficult to find growth in a space where others have/are adapting.
The way to address this is to reinvigorate sales through your client-centricity. It’s very easy to take a solution-focused or sales-focused approach to finding new work with existing and new clients, especially when the financial heat is on.
But if you start with the attitude that ‘I don’t know anything about my clients’, you’ll quickly realise that some research will be in order to find out what they want. When you have done that, you can start to challenge/check that what you’re doing, at every touchpoint you have with your clients, meets their requirements.
Now, this may result in either some quick wins, or more in-depth work that needs doing. Either way, this needs to happen if you are to get up to speed with your clients’ changing demands and either retain the work you do with them, or win new work.
The human element is something that should evolve naturally over time in any good company. The new generations that come through, the advances in working practices and support for people, the importance of market and global trends…this all means that looking after your people should be a hygiene factor. There are numerous studies that show if you do this, your clients are happier, too.
5. It’s now a prerequisite for your client and account teams to both deliver great work, but also develop new work, i.e. find growth
This has huge implications on your commercial success on a day-to-day basis.
Why? Because it’s the fundamental way in which you are going to find growth. It’s no longer enough to just have a business development team and/or marketing. Your client and expert teams need to now deliver brilliant work, and develop it too.
There’s a big hurdle here though.
They’re not salespeople, so you need to approach the support you give them from a different position. One that doesn’t force them to be what they don’t want to be.
This means starting from what makes them brilliant already and bringing to bear the power of those qualities in developing an ‘always on’ business awareness.
If you want to start re-defining your team’s view of being more commercial and help them feel good about selling, do this:
Define what commercial success is for them
Ask them the question ‘What do you need to be more like, to achieve this success?’
Make a note of all the things they say
Then ask ‘OK, so what do you therefore need to start doing to become more like that?’
The tasks are then much more focused and effective than simply focusing on the doing from the start.Give it a try and follow it through. We guarantee it works 😊.
The old cliché of the only constant is change rings true louder than ever before, because it’s speeding up. These tips will help you move ahead of your rivals whilst also uncovering more opportunities. Good luck!