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The Convenience Economy PodcastAuthor: Greg Dickinson
Welcome to The Convenience Economy Podcast, where we discuss how the buyer's journey has changed the way B2B software is acquired and how B2B companies are adopting or getting left behind! Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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The Four Major Hurdles in the Buying Process
Episode 27
Monday, 11 July, 2022
You can contact Sarah directly on her website and visit Omedym for more webinars, blogs, podcasts and content to help your business succeed. TranscriptGreg Dickinson: My name is Greg Dickinson were the sponsor of this webinar with with Stair Hall introduced in the second but why we're so darn excited about this is I think you know, making this statistic up 99.999% of all companies today think about their internal research and what's important to them and their process and they never stopped to say what are we doing and how does our buyers think about that? Right. And that's where Sarah Mackinnon is very unique in what she does and we're excited to have her on the webinar day because she has done the research the legwork for her customers when she does an engagement. The first thing she wants to do is go okay I'm gonna go out to your buying community some some prospect suspect customers that you've talked to that you pitch that you and find out from them. What do they think of your process? Because let's be real Right. We all kind of have, we're all married to these processes. We need to break down big time. So that's why we've invited Sarah on today to talk to us about the four common B2B buying hurdles and I'm gonna venture to say that the majority of you on this webinar today. Don't know these are hurdles these are someone I saw her research. I was some of them are unexpected, some of them I did not. So without further ado please use the chat. If you have any questions I'll be monitoring that and I'll jump in with Sarah any questions but um quick webinar today about 20 minutes. That's the time we have as we want to keep your attention there on that Sarah, go ahead and do yourself real quick and then get started on these four common B2B buying hurdles awesome. Sarah Mackinnon: Well thank you so much Greg. That was that was a great intro. Um Yeah before we get started I actually wanted to say this presentation is really for marketing and sales leaders and and for big thinkers who work in in B2B sass and for whom the buying process feels like a bit of a black box. So maybe it didn't always feel like a black box for you. Um you know, maybe during covid your market changed or you're selling to a different audience or maybe you have a new products but it isn't really like flying off the shelves as as much as you thought it would. So maybe it's really getting hard to find quality leads and and your sales cycle could be getting a little more convoluted. Um you might also be procrastinating on, on setting marketing and sales priorities. Um just because you aren't confident on what to prioritize to make the biggest impact. So if that sounds like if that sounds like if it resonates with you, you you are in the right place, so I will now introduce myself. So a little bit about why I care so much about this stuff. I started my career in marketing about nine years ago writing content um and doing content production at a B two B agency and I've always been really interested in the buyer journey. I've had some time at Toronto startups and and also in luxury travel. And looking back that phase of my career was kind of about understanding what marketing and sales wanted the bio journey to be and um it's usually this kind of thing, this this final thing that we all know, you know, awareness consideration and purchase, but since I started working independently doing bio research and bio enablement content strategy, I have had the chance to really dig into what the buyer journey actually is according to buyers as as Greg alluded to rather than depending on sort of vendor centric frameworks like this. And so we are all very familiar with this start at this for if we're in sales and marketing. Um but it was a bit of a bomb that Gardner dropped a few years ago with their with the research that like three out of four buyers find the buying process to be really difficult and this is really key for for B2B companies who have been investing in content marketing over the last few years um you know, trying to support a more digitally enabled buyer journey. Um, you know, I've seen a lot of tech companies make bigger and bigger investments in content marketing mostly about leadership and like on one side we have like those that think they're the new york times blog and it's like, you know, really elite and amazing writing. And on the other side we have some that are outsourcing their, their SEO content writing and really the only people reading, I think our search engines for what I can tell. So where does that leave you in terms of results? Well, sometimes this results in website traffic and um, you know, even leads at times, but often lead quality is an issue. Um, and you know, some companies will arrest cars at the lead quality problem, but sales cycles just keep getting longer. So it occurred to me and it kind of stopped me in my tracks what if this tsunami of traditional content marketing that we've been creating isn't actually helping buyers what if all this content is actually adding complexity to the purchase process. And we know we know that buyers are spending less time with sales people and more time on their own research and like many buyers do get overwhelmed by this, you know, crazy amount of content. They have to navigate in order to make this high pressure gas purchase and so seeing all these symptoms, you know, in the companies, I'm really interested in what was going on with fires because that is often the perspective that we're missing when we're brainstorming like content ideas and content strategy. So I started asking buyers a few questions, fires, you know, why is buying getting harder? What parts of this process are the hardest to complete for you? Um how do you feel about the quality of the material you get from vendors or the quality of the sales attraction? What kind of buying support would you rather receive from vendors? And so that leads us to today where we're going to talk about a few buying hurdles that are some of the most common that I've seen in my qualitative research with, with B 2B saas fires. And so why do these matter while understanding these types of hurdles as a foundation for content strategy is a totally different approach than just kind of blindly creating content for um, you know, top of funnel and the funnel, bottom of the funnel, the thinking about these buying obstacles before you create content. Um, and really as you consider like sales touch points as well, um, it means that your marketing and um, your sales will actually be designed to help buyers navigate the chaos and make the best purchase decision rather than like overwhelmed women fluff and confuse them. So for vendors, this actually leads to better lead quality and and increased velocity if those are things that you care about, which you should, which you probably do don't let us get into it. Um, this is the first hurdle hurdle. Number one buyers feel slowed down by SDR calls or qualifying calls and why do they feel slow down? Well because buyers tend to feel that these calls offer little value to them and are just kind of another hoop to jump through before they can get their hands on the information they need to qualify, just think about that for a second. They want to qualify you. So it actually, this actually gets worse if they're, if they're really in a hurry trying to make an urgent, urgent purchase and they need to speak to a sales person pronto and instead they get this like gatekeeper who just further delays the process and then, you know, sometimes they have to wait for a call or like chase each other by email to book a call and it's just, it doesn't even end up being the sales. So I want to identify if you have this problem if you're the vendor, so you might actually be getting lots of leads. Maybe if your content, maybe if you like your pricing call to action or form fills on your site. Um, but leads are ghosting before the scr call or maybe, you know, you're getting a lot of leads, they do sign up for the str call, but lead quality isn't great. So you end up with like a lot of data and calls. So overall you, you may be getting a significant number of em que ele, but at the other end very few demos and conversion. So the big question um to think right here is how could you help prospects, better self qualify or disqualify before they become a lead and end up wasting their time and your resources having calls and conversations, they're really not serious or interested or, or a good fit. So I'm gonna tell you a little story just based on something that happens one of my clients because I think it will bring up this point a little bit. So I worked with a virtual event tech company right in the middle of the pandemic, we're getting a wild amount of leads because it was a pandemic and everyone was selling or doing virtual events but they were seeing a huge drop off in the number of demos booked, So like 50% of their demo and pricing form filled leads, ghosted, never went up in a demo and they had no idea what was going on. So I ended up speaking to their buyers and I realized what was happening in their minds. So buyers were in this process where they had two pieces of information in order to, to run their event that they needed to know from a vendor, they needed to know the lead time and they needed to know the price of, of the platform because at this point, no one really knew how to budget for this. So everyone had a pretty pretty for a budget. The fires were actively comparing a bunch of platforms looking for pricing and lead time estimate and this is really how they were vetting or disqualified vendors because you know, events had firm dates but it's kind of range. Um, so in, in their website traffic in the company's website traffic, we saw buyers bouncing from the homepage, the pricing page and then immediately to contact us. So then they reach out and become a lead because it was really their only option to get their hands on pricing or lieutenant focus that wasn't available anywhere on the site. But they themselves, when I spoke to them, they expressed that they hardly knew enough to know if they should be a lead. Like in all it means to be a lead, you know, you will be chased, it will be assumed they are interested in products like try and hide will keep finding with our emails that that kind of feeling of lead. So imagine a buyer super interested in getting their hands on pricing and lead time ASAP so they can either know if it makes sense to keep investing in line with this vendor or you know carry on their merry way and then an SDR reaches out to them and they're very friendly but they don't give them pricing right away and then instead they play email tag to book a call and like some of these buyers were moving so fast, they wouldn't even bother, like they didn't have time for this and they just want to speak to another vendor. And so for those who did end up on the call um later when I spoke to them, they told me that they kind of felt like it was a bit of a bait and switch because they were they were given lead time estimates, but they still weren't giving pricing until, until they actually, you know, had that later sales call and of course the scr would use this time to ask them qualifying questions. But since the buyer themselves didn't get access to the information, they needed to disqualify the vendor, I just felt like a waste of time. So like, you know, buyers will continue to speak with sales in this case for lack of other options, but you kind of see how it like slows down momentum for the buyer and adds a lot more frustrating the process. So the big question at this point is who is really qualified who here? So as the vendor, we often feel like we need to prioritize disqualifying buyers out of our funnel, but the reality is that they're often the ones disqualifying us um as they get closer to a purchase decision and the sooner we can help them with this, the better yes GD: Sarah, this is this is Greg, you know, I think this is an interesting point because I think a lot of organizations today fundamentally think about them themselves, right? We have M Qs we have to get, we have targets for that. So let's go drive em que ele or heck if we get the str to have a call, I just experienced this on Monday, 15 minute call and you know, nice. But then here's the five questions. Right, Are you the decision maker? When are you going to do it? What is your budget? How are you, what else, who else are you looking at? And you know, what is your, what is your timeframe? Right. I mean at the end of the day I had some specific questions as well. Those were not answered. So either a go look at another vendor or be wait the two weeks now that they said, hey, the sales person will talk to you now in two weeks. Um, and guess what in their mind, they're, they're qualified in my mind, they're not right from the buyer's perspective. And then in two weeks if I don't get the answers I want, their time is wasted. And so was mine. But I think what you're bringing to the table is Stop 1st, just one second and think about the fact that today the buyer has a lot more power and control and a lot more avenues for for information. So how can you as a sales organization use what Gartner to coin this, I use it every day, it's now a world of digital and human, you need to provide them with digital answers and supplement that guide them with the human approach. It's not a digital to go to your website and then it's a sales process. They need to mix those two together. So I think your research very powerful here and very enlightening around the idea what the buyer thinks of you as a seller totally. SM: Yeah. And that's a great example. I I would actually like, I think there's a lot of really informed buyers right now to that they know they're being qualified and like did that feel good to you? Like doesn't like it feels like anyway, it doesn't feel good. Feel good. Oh yeah, Okay. All right. So we're gonna move on to the next hurdle and this is also pertaining to a sales touch point. The buyers are slowed down when sales is the demo gatekeeper and really what process this is slowing down is the process of self education from the buyer like them getting a handle on what the tool actually does and the potential impact on their business and they often want to do this as early as possible in the research process to be honest. Um That said lots of times when I'm speaking with buyers, they do tell me all sorts of reasons why the demo wasn't actually that useful to them. So they'll say things like, um, you know, we'd love to event attend events where we can see the product in action during the buying process instead of just watching demos because in demos they're only really showing you the most expensive option, interesting. Um someone else said just to see some of the features in action is probably more insightful than sitting on demos with the sales route. Excuse me. Um someone else said you know, if you're gonna talk to me about your pricing options, I might not understand it yet because I haven't seen your demo or your platform and interacted with it and it's difficult to make a comparison across platforms and understand how that pricing relates to someone else. So this is a case where you know, pricing was public but the demo is gated and so they were trying to compare, you know, different pricing packages but it was really hard to visualize it without having seen the data go. There is obviously nothing wrong with the idea of seeing software like that is not what we're talking about here. In fact like that is that is really helpful to people. Um It is usually the part of the experience actually that buyers where they get a real feel for whether this is going to help solve their challenges or not, but it is the way we have structured interactions with the demo that can be problematic. So a few problems um one it's gated so they have to feel serious enough to give their email address and you know, consider taking up the time of another human being to walk me through it do it can be long and that means that it's not always customized to their specific needs three. what's on the demo is not always a fair representation of the actual product, like one of those quotes alluded to. So overall, you know, keeping the demo in the hands of sales means that buyers don't get to watch it until they are really ready for the sales type of conversation. And yet, you know what I hear from buyers is that they actually want to educate themselves as much as possible in their own, like, you know, self directed way and actually like if, if there's a way for them to see your products in the wild, Let me tell you that that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna find users, they're going to like ask their friends, they're going to try to see it, you know, without a sales person involved in order to feel like they've had a real experience and can, you know, make an actual objective assessment and so really like it's in your best interests to enable this self directed learning as much as possible because it not only saves you time, but it will improve the quality for you by eliminating prospects as early as possible, who, you know, maybe based on their experience with the product, Maybe it turned out to be not exactly what they thought it was. They realize that it's gonna get fit and then they move on. So the big question here is what are we gaining by getting demos and um, you know, really the obvious answer is leads. That's why we all do it. Um, but if we were to redesign this process to align better with the virus, desire to self educated about the product, we actually might consider, I'm getting demos and you know, in doing so we then have an opportunity to change the purpose of sales calls to become more of a strategic catch point where buyers can bring like, you know, bigger questions that may not have been clarified just in their exploring of the product. So maybe, you know, they'd come wanting to talk about our ally or like implementation planning or many other like huge important topics which really can't be navigated without the help of another human being, which actually relates to the next hurdle. But I will stop here to see if there's any questions. GD: Yeah, that one came through on, on chat. And I think I'll go ahead and answer this. But the question was we hear you loud and clear more buyers want 10 most early in the sales cycle, but we can't, we can't scale to that kind of volume if you will. So we're thinking about using our sdrs or ability are inside sales people or the most junior solution engine, um what do you think of that and, and fundamentally that we could spend all day on this topic in my demo spelled backwards is all about automating the demos, right? So we can talk about that. But I'm not, but what I am going to say is our research shows that that's not a good idea because SDR BDR s, you didn't hire them to give presentations and demos, You hired them to qualify and talk to people quickly. 15 minute calls, Right. Number one. Number two, they only know if you did train and they're only gonna know a script, they're not going to go left to go right. They're not going to understand, you know, questions and respond to that. 2nd of all, that's not a lot of fires today don't necessarily want to get a demo. What I call in band between nine and five and that's when your SDR and DDR, they may want to do it before nine after six on weekends. So that kind of approach doesn't maybe right. I think you're going to do more harm than good to be honest with you because if the first impression is not your best and brightest representation of your software, they're most likely going to disqualify themselves and move on when they actually could have been a great prospect. It's just that your presentation, your demonstration of your software wasn't what it could have been because you used, right. Someone that was their fault. They weren't trained for that. You know, being a pre sales engineer for a lot of years. I take pride in the fact that it's a tough job and you need to be adequately trained to do it. So I think that's our answer here on that is that it may, you know, it may look like it solves the problem because it's gonna check those boxes of oh, we're getting more people. But I think you, if you did that, you're going to run the metrics, you're going to find out that those are dropping off more and more because you're not able right to showcase your product in a way you could go into Apple and if all the stretched up broken old models were up front then putting their worst foot forward, they may not sell as many phones as guess what Apple does all the shiny stuff. All car lots wash their cars every two or three days. Why they want to put the best foot forward on your impression. Right? Anyway, that's our answer. Sarah keep going. SM: Yeah, I know I'm definitely with you on that. I yeah, I think the piece about having being able to have webinars on demand as well is really, really key just because these decisions are so complicated. Like, you know, people are gonna want to refer back to stuff on the weekends like after hours like it's great to have a recorded video of the demo available for Okay, nice turtle. So this one um, was a really big surprise to me when I, when I started hearing it from fire, so, but it makes sense buyers get confused comparing their old tech stack, you the new platform that they're looking at. So when they are looking for a new tool, many buyers will, will come to you with like an existing MS mash of solutions and you know, they're considering your product and what some of their biggest questions are, like, what functionality is covered by your solution compared to what I used to have, Which platforms can we get rid of or which ones can be downgrade and um to be clear, like I'm not talking about them doing a feature comparison with your competitors, but it's like comparing their old tech stack to your platform. So those are the things like, um you know, we really struggled to understand which features will and won't be covered by the new platform. Um you know, when we switch over, I think I can downgrade my old solution to the basic version and save money, the positive thing. Um, but really this matter of figuring out what their new tech stocks should look like with your solution integrated, um you know, which platforms they can let go of, where they can downgrade. Um it really requires a lot of complex feature analysis on the part of your buyers and they actually don't really have that product knowledge even if they've been through it. So the big question here is who should really be figuring this out? Well buyers usually feel like it's all on their shoulders and to be honest, it's probably, you know, one of the million reasons why you'd be buying is so difficult and yet as you know, the vendor salesperson, you have seen x number of implementations and you are probably the most knowledgeable about, you know, both the product and what you've seen other buyers do. So rather than waiting for buyers to like, you know, painstakingly figure this out on their own, why not ask them about their tech stack preemptively and just like offer your product knowledge to help them make sense of it. Content can also play a role here as well with like comparison, try something. But yeah, the biggest thing I think here to remember is that you aren't really just selling a platform, you're kind of selling a whole new way of working with the current tech stock and like just purely figuring out the technical side of that transition can be a huge hurdle for buyers um yeah, I will stop there before we move on to the next point. Any any questions on this one, nothing came through, keep going. So yeah, that said um there is more to the platform transition that tends to freak people out which brings us to our final hurdle. So buyers are and I chose this word carefully paralyzed by the anticipated fear and confusion of the implementation and you know transition related challenges like working into systems. So I cannot emphasize how huge and scary this is in the mind of SAS fires like and the interesting thing is that they get freaked out about it a lot earlier than you would think um in the buying process particularly also actually when the solution has to connect to um accounting or finance. So buyers often have questions like um what does the implementation look like? How do we manage the accounting transition? How long do we work into systems? Are we ever going to pick a time transition if we never have downtime, they will say things like um you know, what do you need from us to get set up? What do we do, what do you do? Like looking for a lot of project management clarity. Um and you know my biggest hesitation was having the accounting person learned a new system um if I go back to my list of why I did it outweighs the risk but I was pretty damn terrified. That is strong language so all that to say like planning the implementation itself can be one of the areas of the buying decision that feels the riskiest and like honestly, you know, having implementation content and training videos is a good start. But there are, there are other ways of decreasing the feeling of risk for buyers. Um Speaking of one of my clients, they um they had a transition involving an accounting and finance and like counting was being a huge wet blanket on the sale and they actually ended up facilitating a discussion between the client CFO and the CFO of the prospective buyer to talk over some of the stickier points of that transition and that actually really helps. Like that's not a scalable solution but um you could do something like that and like base a basic content guide on that kind of like in depth specific knowledge. All right, so I'm gonna stop there today. Um but this really wouldn't be complete without, without quoting Brent Adamson. Um He said the single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling but actually our customers struggle to buy and I would say like if we don't know what that struggle looks like or you know what it feels like to them, how are we going to market and sell properly? So today Yeah, I walked through a few of these key struggles um but I've just really alluded to some of the solutions so far, but obviously these are different for every mind process and the only real way to like diagnose them properly is to do the research company specifically. GD:So a couple of questions came in. So let me but let me just make a comment on this. I think that revelation of the implementation earlier on, I think that you know what we hear a lot is going to talk about this idea. I said it before a digital and human it's not a hey, go to your website and then you'll turn it over to sales. It's digital and human today is a collaborative buying process. It used to be the buyer has a seller had all the information, it was a push. I'll give you this, I'll give you this, we'll do the demo when I'm ready, when you quote unquote, give me all the information you want, we'll talk about implementation when you're ready etcetera. And now the buyer is doing a lot of that work on their own. So a good sales organization need to look at that and say, can I create a digital environment? We call it a portal by the way in which I can collaborate with that buyer by the way, buyers change. New buyers come into the process, buyers leave, they have to do a lot of work internally to get other people to buy into this by. And all that takes a constant exchange of information of asking questions and getting answers. But um, so that's kind of that idea that you have from Brent I think is paramount. Is this idea that it's a living breathing customer journey buyer journey sales journey together. Question for you though is um, how does directly destructive you, how many, how many buyers does a company need to engage with you right. How many is too few or too many was the that's the question is how many buyers do we need to have and I'm assuming the person meant in order to engage you. Yeah that's a good question. So um typically I will use I would like to have 12-15 interviews. That means we probably have to send about three times as many emails um like invite staff people Three. Yeah three times is usually enough. So you know that takes us to like maybe like 40 or 50 buyers. And it's best if those buyers have bought within the last 6 to 12 months and roughly fall into like your ideal buyer profile. Like it helps to identify you know buyers that you want more of versus like maybe low spenders depending on you know the structure of your. Okay and then another one came into, does this approach work for non Saas B2B companies as well? Mm. Yeah so I do have a few um content strategy clients that are nonsense B2B And it's just a little bit different because generally um I have a consulting clients in the U. S. Space and generally just there you know they don't have as many buyers so we can you know we can look at a smaller selection of buyers but we'll do ongoing interviews as they as they get more customers just to kind of like build out the strategy so it can be done um It's just a little bit of a different. Okay, super. That's it. So most informative and you know, as the host Omedym. I mean I think we're we are very much, you know, we like to say we help your buyers by right by providing them with the product experience the product demonstration. And you know, I think what people tend to think about when they hear the word demo automation is the is that it's a product I want and I think today and you emphasize this there is that the buyer wants to be, they need, they need you to demonstrate to them things like scalability, things like security, things like the product, things like hey what will there be other things I can turn off in order to turn on what what process. That's a demonstration. So don't think of the word demo as the solution engineer sits down with you and gives a demo of features and functions. It's it's ultimately the buyer need you to demonstrate to them the things that they need in order to be confident that your solution will meet their needs. And I think that number three you brought up around implementation is another demonstration, demonstrate to me what the implementation looks like. What how many people, how many roles will I need? How long will it take for heaven's sakes. I mean all those right, you ask about price. Price is important but if it's a dollar but it cost $10 million implement that's still budget. So I thank you very much Sarah for for doing the research and and and and jumping on the the webinar with us today. Can you share with the audience how they can reach you? SM: Yeah, for sure. So I do buying process research and content strategy. Um and my website is Sarah Mackinnon Rights dot com. You can also connect with me on linkedin as well. Okay? Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. This is great. Yeah. I had a lot of fun. GD: Thanks everyone for joining today and the replay will be available short time. It will be on the dot com website. Thank you very much. Have a great day, Sarah. Thank you. Great to be with you. It's always by
