Economic uncertainty, inflation, continually changing global disruption – when turmoil persists, companies, like people, tend to keep a tight grip on their pocketbooks. And, while you may know your product is the next best bit of stellar tech, if you can’t get your unique and valuable benefits in front of your client, your sale is likely dead in the water.
This is where a buyer enablement approach can make all the difference. While your sales and presales teams are your product ambassadors, market experts, and objection solvers, they often don’t have enough time to guide buyers through each stage of the process, especially with buyer groups for medium- and enterprise-size purchases reaching an average of 11 stakeholders. No matter the size of your presales team, buyers are demanding personalized, relevant content on their schedules not yours.
Tools like the Consensus buyer enablement platform can help scale your presales process with automated demos and in-depth and real-time discovery data collection without adding high costs or overtaxing your team with unqualified demos. But that’s just one example of a buyer enablement tool. As the concept catches on, there are many solutions you can use to shorten your sales cycle and close more deals.
So when is the right time for your sales team to introduce these tools? The following five signs indicate your business may be ready for a presales upgrade:
1. Bottlenecks are bogging down your team.
An increasing number of B2B clients want customized information on your product, and they wanted it yesterday. Yet, in a recent survey, more than two-thirds of sales engineers reported that it takes them at least five days to get an “intro demo” to the client. Meanwhile, roughly a quarter of SEs spend up to five hours creating each demo, and more than half said it takes at least three demos to close a deal.
That’s a lot of work to generate sales demos that, at least 30% of the time, end up as unqualified leads. There are more effective ways to use your resources. Using a buyer enablement platform to automate repetitive intro demos and deliver customized content to each client, you can put your SEs back to work nurturing the sales process and winning business.
2. You can’t follow client engagement.
If you’re only able to track clicks and receipts, your team is losing out on critical client engagement information. Taking a closer look at the recipient view rate, for example, will tell you which stakeholders received the demo and who viewed it. Average view time will let you know if your clients are ending the demo after a few seconds or watching it through to the end, giving you valuable insight into any problems or issues with the video.
Intelligent demo automation software has embedded data collection tools that will give you a clear picture of your client’s preferences and what stakeholders are getting involved in the deal. You’ll also discover who’s rising to the top as your internal champion – the person enthusiastically sharing your interactive video demo with others in the company.
3. You can’t identify your ‘buyer community’.
As mentioned above, automated information lets you know who your stakeholders are. However, your data gathering can’t stop with a name and title. You need to know how each person is motivated, their goals and frustrations, and how they deal with change. Having a good grasp of this data will help you ascertain the decision-makers of the group and anticipate objections.
If you’re not consistently following up with those in the buyer group, generating content to address issues as they arise, and coaching your internal champion on effective sharing strategies, you risk losing their interest. This is where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can improve your buyer enablement strategy to keep track of your contacts and better manage your sales funnel.
4. Your team isn’t customizing content in a scaled way.
If your presales team can’t deliver a demo that addresses solutions for specific customer pain points in the first round, consider yourself knocked out of that sale. Buyers want your product to solve their problem, pure and simple. They also want your demo to reflect a knowledge of their market and business and provide quantifiable evidence on how you can improve their bottom line.
Automated demos allow your SEs to draw from a ready reservoir of client and marketing information to customize their pitch quickly and efficiently. As a result, they can shorten the overall sales cycle and increase your win rate.
5. You want to hire more Sales Engineers.
SEs are a unique breed. They are subject matter experts who solve complex problems, work closely with both the account executives on their team and the prospective client, and have a keen understanding of the market and the different pain points in the industry. On average, it can take between six months and two years to successfully onboard and train a new sales engineer depending on the complexity of your solution.
You should consider automated onboarding software as part of your buyer enablement plan if you want to add new SEs. Automation helps reduce duplicated efforts from one department to another and makes the onboarding process simple and seamless. Using online training software can also reduce the time it takes for the employee to ramp fully without taking critical time away from established SEs, other than for on-the-job mentoring.
There are many benefits to using a dedicated buyer enablement platform to accelerate the effectiveness of your presales team. To learn more about demo automation and other buyer enablement tools, hit the “Watch a Demo” link on our website.
