What if you could meet your prospects at every step of their buying journey, provide them with personalized experiences, and accelerate their purchasing decision? Buyer enablement can make this easier than ever. In this post, we explore the importance of buyer enablement to discover how it can transform the path from prospecting to closed deals, all the way through to customer renewals. You’ll find use cases and real-world examples to showcase the possibilities. All to empower you to better align teams, communicate with buyers and leverage digital tools to drive growth.
What is buyer enablement?
Buyer enablement focuses on providing buyers with the necessary information and tools to move forward in their purchasing journey. Having a buyer enablement strategy empowers your team to provide valuable content in a timely manner, from educating prospects to understanding their experiences when they become successful customers.
The industry shift to digital
The global pandemic fueled a shift from in-person selling to remote, digital selling. This was already underway pre-COVID, but the restrictions imposed by the pandemic gave it an unexpected boost. Interestingly, more than 75% of decision-makers have grown to prefer digital buying even post-pandemic. Still, most teams aren’t harnessing technology to its full potential during the sales cycle. That isn’t the only problem with digital though. Another big reason why companies are not performing as well as they want to is that teams aren’t aligned. There are so many channels and pieces of content to keep track of. It can be overwhelming and that creates a confusing experience for potential buyers. Often, the information on a vendor’s website conflicts with information shared by the sales team. Misalignment isn’t something that organizations can afford to ignore, as B2B buyers who encountered consistent information from the vendor website and sales reps were 2.8 times more likely to buy. This data shows a clear need to optimize the way sellers interact with buyers, but what’s the best way to do that?
Buyer enablement: Importance by role
To understand why the shift toward digital buyer enablement is so crucial, let’s look at how it can impact roles throughout your revenue organization.
1. Sales
The power of buyer enablement and digital sales room provides a platform that enables sales professionals to move away from one-size-fits-all solutions and towards personalized experiences that genuinely resonate. Sales people are outperforming the competition and winning more deals with buyer enablement.
2. Customer Success
For customer success teams, buyer enablement provides a mechanism to deliver stellar customer service reducing gross churn and increasing retention. With these digital tools, customer success professionals can streamline everything from onboarding to adoption to ongoing support.
3. Marketing
Better marketing and sales performance go hand in hand. Buyer enablement helps marketers create more targeted and effective content and campaign strategies, increasing the return on their efforts in collaboration with sales.
4. Product Success
Product teams face a unique set of challenges. They need to keep customers informed about product enhancements and understand how customers interact with those products. Buyer enablement makes both of these possible in one place also contributing to creating happier and loyal customers for life.
5. Leadership
For leadership, buyer enablement offers an efficient way to address the challenge of visibility into the marketing and sales process. Executive stakeholders make more informed decisions by tracking engagement, customer behavior, and efficiency.
A closer look: Specific buyer enablement use cases
When we dig into specific use cases, the transformative power of digital buyer enablement truly shines. Here are some of the tasks and stages throughout the buying process where you’ll see the most impact.
Prospecting
Sales development representatives elevate their strategies and educate prospects using personalized buyer sites. Here, they embed customized videos and generate tailored content. By extending a personalized touch in their outreach, SDRs better capture prospects’ interest and nurture them through the sales pipeline resulting in faster pipeline progression.
Pre-meeting
Buyer sites act as a dedicated online environment for each potential deal. Prior to a meeting, these rooms serve as interactive digital portfolios where salespeople can set the stage for their discussions. They populate these spaces with information, product demos, and resources for prospects to explore. That enables more in-depth, value-driven conversations.
Post-meeting
After a conversation, these sites transform into spaces for sharing and evaluating follow-up materials while maintaining a dialogue. As the buyer’s journey progresses, these digital sales rooms are used to share detailed proposals and pricing information to keep everything organized in one accessible location.
Customer success
Digital buyer enablement tools provide an invaluable avenue for onboarding and nurturing relationships. Customer success teams share essential onboarding resources, product walkthroughs, and best practice guides. This improves the customer experience and fosters a sense of engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.
Feedback collection
Digital buyer enablement platforms also serve as an efficient way to gather customer feedback. By leveraging surveys, feedback buttons, or discussion forums, it’s possible to tap into customers’ sentiments in real time. That way, you can address customer needs faster.
Analytics
By tracking user behavior, interactions, and responses on these digital platforms, businesses gain detailed insights into buyer behavior and preferences. These insights inform everything from product development to marketing strategies, allowing businesses to target their efforts and maximize ROI.
Case study: DataEndure and SalesHood for digital buyer enablement
DataEndure, a data management company, found immediate value when they began using SalesHood for buyer enablement. They began building personalized buyer sites and they were thrilled to track prospect engagement in real time. These unique client sites are sent out post-meeting. DataEndure personalized these sites with content relevant to the conversation they had with the potential customer. The DataEndure team can also continue adding content relevant content, and give their clients a space to share this information with colleagues. The result? A measurable improvement in their sales process. They saw a remarkable 60% conversion rate on opportunities, as well as enhanced visibility into the pipeline. All thanks to SalesHood.
Bottom line: Modern sales, buyer enablement, and your organization
Buyer expectations will only continue to grow, and companies across industries need to meet them to thrive. The key is to provide buyers with the right information, at the right time, and in the right format. When you accomplish that, you can reduce friction in the buying process and drive better outcomes. The SalesHood platform is designed to equip your team with everything they need to engage buyers effectively and close deals faster. Request a demo here.
