Putting the buyer first: how top sales professionals succeed

How can sales intelligence tools and a new approach help build trust with B2B customers in a virtual setting?

IN B2B sales, not unlike in other business areas, the shift to virtual lasted too long and proved too successful to expect any quick rebound to pre-Covid practices. As recent surveys have found, currently only 17 per cent of buyers’ time is spent meeting with potential suppliers in person, and 57 per cent of them are happy to buy from a salesperson they’ve never met face-to-face.

Although acutely aware of this new trend, sales professionals are often oblivious to the new approaches, at­titudes and digital tools they need to adopt to thrive in this new medium.

How can information from on­line professional networks oil the wheels of virtual selling?

The traditional image of the glib salesman flogging ice to Eskimos is already a thing of the past. Today, there are more sophisticated data-driven ways of exceeding sales quotas. Being equipped with and understand­ing accurate, topical or real-time information ahead of reaching out to or engaging with customers now proves a much more effective way of building rapport.

Corporate decision makers nowa­days tend to trust sales professionals who keep their buyers’ and their or­ganisation’s needs in mind throughout the whole customer journey and follow up the deal into the implementation and project evaluation phase. They will gravitate to salespeople who are knowledgeable about the strengths, as well as the limitations, of their offerings, and are ready to walk away from the deal and point the customer to a product of a different provider if they know that it’ll deliver a better solution to their problem.

But it’s not only the client’s com­pany and alternative solutions across the market that the salespeople of the future will need to be conversant with, but also the handful of individu­als who typically make up the client’s buying committee and are responsible for the different stages of procurement decision-making.

Buying committees comprise of individuals with different concerns and biases, therefore, it’s essential for the sales professional to collect relevant data about their background to offer tailor-made content or perti­nent insights for them. Background searches on a prospect on professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn can also turn cold messaging. This is a popular tactic although it often fails because it skips the neces­sary steps needed to build buyer-first relationships.

Buyer first selling – a practice, as well as a philosophy

Data collected and analysed by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, with 774 million members globally, seems to bear out these new trends, with 63 per cent of UK salespeople reporting using LinkedIn as a source of sales intelligence. But the platform has undertaken not only to describe how the shift to effective virtual selling is taking place but also how to spearhead it. In order to turn “buyer first” into an established practice, the company has highlighted the gaping disconnect between buyer expectations and sellers’ presumptions about them. As a recent LinkedIn survey pointed out, while buyers regard active listening as the attribute they value most from salespeople, this quality doesn’t even rank in the top five hiring criteria among recruiters. There is a similar discrepancy in how the two sides see the buyer-first principle prevail. Almost half of the sales professionals participating claimed that they put the needs of their clients’ organisations first. However, only 12 per cent of buyers agreed that this was actually the case. Having identified these gaps, LinkedIn has developed sales solutions tools that enable salespeople to become the kind of informed challengers buyers value most, who can challenge their thinking and come up with ideas that they couldn’t have arrived at themselves – the type that currently only a meagre 10 per cent say they encounter in their professional lives regularly.

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