Listen – I get it. Telling people they’re not good at something is uncomfortable and a very bold move if you’re talking to a room of 20 people. I’ve done it, and it hurts… but only for a moment. The dawning realisation of the audience that you’re actually there to help, not just to sell software is enlightening, refreshing and memorable. A pleasant goal for any engagement that’s for sure.
But presales folk help buyers through the Need, Learn, Buy, Value stages every single day, whereas buyers may do it once or twice in their career. Even if they’ve done it countless times, they certainly haven’t done it with your software at their current company. These changes they’re desperate to affect will need advice and guidance if they’re to achieve assured success. So it’s your job to help them.
This is what happened to me:
“When I last bought software for my global enterprise organisation, the hardest thing was getting sales, sales ops, sales enablement, various VPs, my boss, my colleagues, marketing, IT/security, the corporate strategy team and the rest of presales onboard with what I knew was the right change to make.
Being ably supported at the time by the vendor made the whole experience easier because they knew how to help me connect with the needs of those stakeholders.”
As you see from my experience above, there’s often so many stakeholders involved that your buyer champion has to get them all on-board with their change. We’re seeing up to 16 stakeholders for enterprise software change, and that number is trending upwards as people become more able to join meetings virtually.
So imagine my joy when I read that someone was working on solving this problem: Garin Hess, Founder & CEO of Consensus brought his DEEP-C framework to the world via Selling is Hard. Buying is Harder. (Amazon), and the task of helping move these buyers through the buying stages became a whole lot easier.
As time goes on, I’m getting better at applying these concepts to my daily life.
Where I would have sent an email with our usual pitch or presented my ‘favourite slides’ because I knew them well, now I’m more interested in what stage each participant of the meeting is in.
Let’s take a quick look at them:
A champion is someone at your buyer’s organization willing to stake their own success on actioning change using your software or services. It’s your champion that will ultimately create the successful change in their organization, so help make buying software easy, pleasant and fast for them.
Watch out for fans though! – they’ll sing your praises but never actually get anything done… so work out how to help them see personal success by coaching and being supportive – be surprisingly helpful at every turn.
Discover your champion, and through them Engage the other stakeholders in the business using viral stakeholder discovery. Equip them with the tools needed to help Personalize content for each stakeholder using tools like Intelligent Demo Automation. Then Coach them through each buying step using your experience, and a wealth of helpful content.
This new approach to buying is applied in similar ways to selling, but now the entire success rests on the person most wanting to achieve that success – the buyer. I’ve seen it be used to dramatically great effect and even made massive changes within my own organization by adopting #buyerenablement.
So now you’re teaching your buyer to ring the bell, what next?
