How has B2B sales changed after the global pandemic?
Putting the customer first has always been the key to any great B2B sales strategy. Since the pandemic this has meant having greater flexibility and understanding of how your customers are choosing to work. With home working now far more commonplace, we need to accept that central meet-ups with all the key stakeholders of a customer in a room at one time are now unlikely to happen. With this in mind, businesses need to be able to adapt and have patience. Instead of one meeting with fifteen people in, selling businesses need to be prepared to have three separate meetings with five people in, as an example. This shows the customer that you are understanding of how personal lives and professional lives crossover with one another, but most importantly shows that you are serious about their business and supporting them as a partner.
Will human engagement become redundant in B2B buying journeys?
For complex B2B sales, human engagement remains a vital part of the buying journey for a customer. Whilst low-value, commodity based sales such as ink-jet printers are now predominantly sold through digital channels with little human interaction, anything more complex or bespoke still requires human engagement to be successful. Understanding the complexity and reading the nuances in what a customer is saying simply cannot be performed by AI or other technology just yet. It goes without saying that if you cannot understand the needs and challenges of a customer, then you cannot properly serve them with the right solution. So until technology develops to understand the subtle and often hidden communication cues of human beings, which perhaps it could do one day, then human beings are still critical within complex B2B sales.
Until technology develops to understand the subtle and often hidden communication cues of human beings, which perhaps it could do one day, then human beings are still critical within complex B2B sales.
Whatever balance you take between a digital-led or human-led sales approach, the most important thing you can do is to make sure that you are targeting the right people.
How can selling businesses find the right balance between human-led sales approaches and digital technology-led approaches?
Digital sales technology is becoming increasingly advanced and capable of doing some amazing things. It can be easy to get carried away with implementing new technologies, which is why it’s crucially important to consider how much of a customer’s buying journey you want to be served by digital technology and how much of it you want to be based around human engagement. Having digital technologies play more of an important role in the early stages of a buying journey is often sensible because of how easily the technology is to scale. Unlike scaling up your human sales efforts which may require extra staff or training, scaling up digital sales journeys can be done in just a few clicks, helping you to reach more relevant prospects that your physical sales team can then qualify and sell to accordingly.
Whatever balance you take between a digital-led or human-led sales approach, the most important thing you can do is to make sure that you are targeting the right people. If your sales activity reaches the wrong people then it can cause harm to your brand further down the line. Think about it this way - if you can get the right person on the phone at a good time, then you know your early sales and marketing activities are working well for you. This success comes down to research of both the company and individual you are selling to. Human connection is an amazing tool here. A prospect once had the same breed of dog that I do, so I sent him a picture of my dog in the very first introduction!
Aeris is a leading global IoT solutions provider with a proven history of helping companies unlock the value of IoT. For decades, they have powered critical projects for some of the most complex customers of IoT services. Aeris strives to fundamentally improve businesses by dramatically reducing costs, accelerating time-to-market, and enabling new revenue streams.