Buyer engagement is most successful when sellers deliver personalized and interactive experiences — but most sales reps are in the dark when it comes to accurately capturing and driving buyer engagement. In fact, Gartner research found that sales reps have roughly just 5% of a customer’s time during their B2B buying journey, and Showpad’s “2022 Ghosting Survey” found that 92% of sellers get ghosted by buyers for no apparent reason. When it comes to engagement, sellers need to create more interactive, impactful and inspiring experiences for buyers.
Challenges Sellers Face With Buyer Engagement
During the Covid-19 pandemic, sellers faced new challenges reaching buyers. As the world shifted to digital-first approaches, the number of video calls soon outpaced in-person meetings, leading to “Zoom fatigue.” As a result, buyers started switching their cameras off in sales meetings, too, making it difficult to gauge buyer engagement.
This makes it especially important for sellers to leverage a sales enablement platform to provide context around engagement. With sales enablement tools, sellers can gain key insights into what assets are resonating with buyers. Today, many sellers still share content with prospects via email attachments, which can be an issue if the email system is not embedded into the CRM or enablement platform. As a result, salespeople don’t know if the buyer even opened the atta
chment or how they interacted with it. With an enablement platform, buyers can create a shared space where they can collaborate with selling teams, share content and engage with each other.
Understand Buyers’ Interest Level & Engagement
Buyers expect to engage with sellers. As such, it’s critical that the customer journey is buyer-led. When sellers and buyers can engage using a single, centralized location, conversion rates are greatly improved. Sellers can also stand out from competition with a fully brandable, secure microsite. With detailed content in an easy-to-navigate environment, sellers can also provide more supporting assets or video explainers for content that may need additional context.
Internally, a shared space is also beneficial. When teams across different departments have access to marketing-approved content in one shared platform, sales reps can customize and build tailored, creative, go-to content to delight buyers. Internal advocates can also streamline handoffs and ensure new parties and buying teams get up to speed quickly.
Salespeople can also leverage sales technology to keep a pulse on buyer’s interest levels and receive insights into buyer behavior. When engagement in a sales presentation is low, sellers can access tools to be alerted and act accordingly. For example, if a buyer accesses a rate chart multiple times, it may be a good time for the seller to touch base and ask if they need clarity on rates or express how the company is willing to negotiate.
A personalized sales pitch based on buyers’ needs that articulates the unique value a seller’s solution provides is key to driving deal closures. By working with an enablement platform, buyers and sellers can better collaborate with each other. Analytics also provide value when it comes to honing the messages and improving content. Having access to data-led insights throughout seller and buyer journeys turns engagement learnings into better content strategies. Sellers can share more relevant, captivating content that leads to greater ROI.
Differentiate The Buyer Experience
Buyers are tired of traditional presentations. Instead, sellers must transform their approach and bring conversations to life by delivering a personalized, interactive experience. Sellers can benefit from guiding buyers through each sales cycle with immersive content, delivered through tailored, high-impact experiences. Sellers can also consider how augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can heighten the interaction.
For the first time, buyer preferences indicate that businesses must embrace the metaverse, AR and VR to future-proof the B2B sales experience. The rise of the metaverse signifies a shift toward a digital world equivalent to the one we are used to interacting in. In fact, 59% of buyers said they committed to a purchase after seeing a demo in the metaverse or with AR.
With modern selling, salespeople can utilize pre-recorded, personalized videos to enhance the buyer experience. Buyers can review the videos on their own time, allowing them to gain a better understanding of the sales content in a more holistic way at their own convenience. Sales video content can also help to eliminate the hassle of attempting to schedule multiple sales meetings with busy buyers. Instead, buyers can have sales content right at their disposal when they can be better engaged to view it.
Selling today involves communicating and collaborating with today’s buyers on their terms, through compelling and proven methods of true buyer engagement. To close deals, sellers must deliver differentiated, modern experiences that prove a solution’s business value to multiple buyer stakeholders. Providing custom, measurable and impactful engagement to buyers at every stage of their journey will improve win rates and deal velocity for organizations.
Hendrik Isebaert is the CEO of Showpad, a sales enablement platform.
