The way software companies have been marketing and selling for the past 30 years has to change.  CAC costs are rising.  % of no decision deals is increasing.  On average, barely 50% of reps are meeting or exceeding quota.

Why is this happening?  Simply put because the expectations of our buyers and the approach we take as sellers are mismatched.  What is going on?

To start, B2B buyers collect information about software companies from a variety of channels – not just a sales rep anymore.   Today, software companies only get about 17% in total of the software buyers’ time.  If three companies are in consideration that means you only get about 6% of their time!

The reality is buyers no longer accept software companies’ controlling the stages of the sales process and reject the use of gates – consider that abandon rates on request a demo CTAs is over 85%.  And the idea that we really know the buyers’ journey for each customer is unrealistic.  Software buyers have access to multiple channels – websites, social, crowd sourced evaluations.  Therefore, with so many sources of information, engagement with the seller typically starts much later in the buying process and our buyers establish strongly held opinions long before talking to us.

The software seller’s challenge:

• With less time spent with buyers, building relationships and trust with our prospects is harder and harder to establish.
• With more and more buyers across multiple locations involved in the decision process, addressing every person’s requirements is extremely difficult.
• With on-line consumer experiences being so productive, today’s B2B buyers expect to interact digitally and experience our products without us!!!

Clearly the old way of doing things – with the software provider and sales rep controlling every step and disseminating content is not addressing these challenges.  A good example is the product demo.  Software buyers do not want to wait on us to be guided through a long product demo.  So clicking on See a Demo and getting a form is not meeting buyer’s expectations and certainly is not a good way to build trust.  Consider that to build trust, you have to show trust – meaning respecting the independence today’s software buyer craves.

The software seller’s reality:

• The response rate on an email, a phone call, a webinar invite is less than 10%,
• The sales cycle is 25% longer than it was just five years ago. And worst of all, fewer and fewer reps are making quota.  53% in fact.

Are you convinced you might need to try a different approach?  One that stops putting so much emphasis helping marketing and sales sell and starts focusing on helping your buyers buy?  Put yourself in the position of the software buyer.  What is the experience you would want?  What would help you not only learn, but also gain trust.

What we hear and read is loud a clear.  Buyers want a digital-first experience.  They want it to be provided in convenient, self-service manner that allows them to easily find answers to their questions and search out topics.  Paging through resource libraries or YouTube collections is not the answer.  But it is what software companies are making buyers do!

Are you ready to trust your buyer?  Because if they like what they see, if its authentic and they feel your company and solution are a good fit, they won’t just raise their hands, they will wave their hands widely to get your attention!  Stop measuring marketing by form fills and registered leads – it is completely counter to what your buyers want.

The path to buyer enablement begins by:

1. Taking your content
2. Making it searchable
3. Creating an environment that allows your prospects to ask questions or search on topics and have them be taken directly to where the question is answered or the topic is covered across all your content – webinars, recorded demos, company presentations and brochures.

Learn How Buyer Enablement compares to Supplier Enablement

The business case for buyer enablement:

1. Increased engagement from prospects that ultimately leads to increased revenue.
2. More scalability as both pre-sales and sales spend less time with each prospect, but more valuable time.
3. Decreased CAC as the amount of time your team spends in the sales cycle is shorter

And these are quantifiable benefits.

On the engagement side, our customers see longer visits (7+ minutes) and more activity per visit (3.9 watched events).  They also are getting more meetings with executive sponsors and re-engaged on stalled deals.

On the revenue side, we have seen a customer triple the amount of revenue from one quarter to the next resulting in 20X ROI by implementing buyer enablement!

Are you ready?  Learn more here.