Summary
In many ways, B2B selling has become a whole new world. Sellers—who for the most part of human history unilaterally defined the playing field—have found themselves far less relevant in the selling dynamic. Buyers will engage only with transparent, customer-focused advisors, and smooth-talking but snake-oil salespeople focused only on their own numbers will be instantly dismissed. After all, buyers already know quite a bit about your product. What they want to discover is whether they can trust the people behind it and whether the experience in buying and using your product will be worth their while. Ultimately, they need honest, personalized, relevant, and expert advice. Not another sales pitch.
The buyer’s journey is more sophisticated than ever. The Internet not only empowered buyers with greater access to information and alternative solutions to their problems, but it also exponentially expanded the scope of omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel both deeply complicates the sale and offers an exciting opportunity to deliver the most customized and relevant buying experience in human history. Sales is truly at the edge of a sweeping new frontier, ripe for the taking.
Yet even in an ocean of change, you’ll find constants that ground the new landscape. Respect, honesty, humanization, and creativity, for example, will remain relevant unless people cease being, well, human!
In the end, buyer centricity is both the old and new calculus and customer experience is both an emerging ...
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