To drive a profit in B2B sales, you have to understand the dilemmas your clients are looking to solve and help them understand why your product is the best solution.
With so many options available to the modern customer, properly identifying your buyers’ needs is especially important in today’s B2B SaaS sales environment. On average, B2B SaaS buyers may consider between three to five vendors per deal. A buyer-led approach can help your product break through the crowd and differentiate your benefits from the competition.
Shifting to a buyer-led product sales model encourages your team to truly empathize with your buyers’ needs. Using this deeper understanding, your team can identify your product’s key value drivers and use these to improve their chances of winning more deals, increasing revenue, and bettering the overall customer experience.
What Is Buyer-Led Selling?
Buyer-led selling is a modern sales strategy focused on gaining a deep understanding of buyers’ needs and selling products based on addressing those needs.
Since today’s buyers have more access to information than ever before, the buying process can be overwhelming. According to research by Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers found their last purchase to be “very complex” or “difficult.” Buyer-led selling enables customers and simplifies their sales experience by providing them with personalized, beneficial content they can use to independently inform their buying decision.
Benefits of Buyer-Led Selling
Empowering your buyers with a streamlined decision-making process can also benefit your sales team with:
- A higher win rate: Better identifying and addressing buyers’ needs can improve your team’s chances of success — potentially improving revenue per deal and win rate.
- Stronger long-term customer relationships: Connecting and empathizing with buyers builds trust, which can lead to longer contracts, a sense of long-term loyalty, and a better buyer experience.
- Shorter sales cycles: Empowered buyers may require less time to make a decision. Your sales team will also have a clearer picture of buyer preferences — making it easier to facilitate a more efficient sales process.
- Data-based decision-making: Pivoting your sales process to focus on buyer-led insights helps your team make informed decisions based on real buyer data.
To gain access to these benefits, your team must effectively deploy a buyer-led strategy and cut through some of the major challenges your B2B sales team may be facing.
Overcoming Modern Challenges with Buyer-Led Selling
Your sales team is competing with many other companies to convince buyer groups that they are the best option available. However, as today’s selling environment evolves, your team may run into new challenges. By pivoting to a buyer-led sales strategy, your team can overcome these challenges.
Limited One-on-One Buyer Interaction Time
Gartner found that B2B buyer groups only spend 17% of their sales journey meeting with potential suppliers. In fact, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. This means your team has limited time to interact one-on-one.
By providing buyers with tools to educate themselves, your sales team can skip over low-value intros, identify buyer needs, and extract the most value possible from their sales meetings. Using solutions like AI-powered chatbots and automated demos can also increase the value of any hands-off interactions your customers have with your brand and nurture their interest as they consider meeting with your team.
Increased Stakeholders Per Deal
According to the Consensus 2024 Sales Engineering Compensation & Workload Report, the average number of stakeholders per deal has increased 19% from about 5 to now 6.
With this shift in buyer group size, your team doesn’t just have to win over one key buyer — they have to continue to convince a handful of others. Focusing your product sales strategy on empathizing with each of these buyers can increase your sales team’s ability to win over each member of the buyer group.
Using buyer enablement tools like interactive video demos can reduce the amount of work required to win over each stakeholder. Through the right analytics solutions, your team can better identify the position, needs, and value of each stakeholder to address their pain points.
Extended Sales Cycles
The 2024 SE report found that sales cycles are currently averaging around six months, but 20% of B2B sales take a year or longer. As sales cycles extend, your team must expend more time and resources to close deals — chipping away at your overall profit per sale.
Focus on buyer needs and provide content that can speed up their decision-making process — this can help your team shorten the sales cycle, cut expenses, and boost revenue.
How to Start Buyer-Led Selling
Once your team understands the benefits of buyer-led selling, you can begin to formulate a strategy that will change the way you approach sales.
Prioritize Discovery
SE report respondents believe discovery is the top driver of sales results. During this phase of your sales cycle, presales works to gather information about your buyers’ needs through research, demos, and more — creating the base for your sales strategy.
Teaming up your sales and presales teams to extract valuable insights during discovery can better set your team up for success in a buyer-led sales structure. Using solutions like demo automation streamlines this process and enhances the data your team retrieves, offering a better starting point for your buyer-led sales process.
Facilitate Buyer Enablement
Since B2B buyers spend approximately 45% of the sales cycle doing independent research both online and offline, your team needs to provide them with the tools they need to understand why your product is their best option.
Interactive video demos allow buyers to pinpoint the features and benefits they most resonate with. Offering buyers this level of autonomy leads to a more informed buyer during one-on-one sales interactions.
Leverage Buyer Data
Your team’s greatest asset in buyer-led selling is the data you collect early on in the process. Using Consensus Demolytics, you can organize and analyze the customer data you collect from demos to create a comprehensive picture of your client’s wants and issues.
Through this data, you can then create and distribute targeted sales content aimed at addressing buyer concerns and leading them toward a selection. The more data you gather, the clearer your picture of your buyer will be and the better you can help them reach a favorable decision.
Elevate Your Buyer-Led Selling Strategy with Consensus
Help your sales team gain a better understanding of customer needs and kickstart your buyer-led strategy by providing them with the tools to succeed. Consensus offers powerful analytics, interactive video demos, and streamlining automation that can elevate your strategy and make buyer-led selling easy. Watch our demo or speak with our team to learn more about how Consensus can help you.
