Larson gave this presentation at the CRO Summit in September 2021. You can catch the full replay right here.

My name is Larson Stair, I’m the CEO & Co-founder of Gondola.ai, a real-time sales enablement platform that helps to standardize best practices throughout the entire sales cycle in the live conversation.

In this article, I’ll talk about how we create better experiences for our buyers by enabling our sales team, but then also enable our buyers throughout their buying experience.

Here’s our main talking points:

  • The B2B buying experience today
  • How do we improve?
  • Real-time sales enablement
  • Buyer enablement

Let’s go ahead and dive in 👇

The B2B buying experience today

image with the B2B buying journey in graph style

The B2B buying experience is really complex. What we don't see behind the scenes at times is all the additional people that have to be brought into the equation, the information that needs to be digested, and technical pieces that we need to walk through.

So it's become more challenging than ever, especially for larger organizations, to make a purchase, change processes internally, and get all these internal stakeholders brought into the fold and bought in.

Buyers agree. Over 70% say that the B2B buying experience is very challenging and complex.

The even more concerning part is that buyers are now spending less time with sellers than ever before.

About a fifth of their time is spent on sales calls with sales reps. That means they're discussing internally amongst buying committees, they're doing research on their own accord, looking for articles, reviews, and pieces of information to help them sift through this complexity.

All of those decision makers are bringing all this information to the forefront, so they're spending less time with us - and still finding the experience complex.

How do we improve?

The key to creating great buying experiences

The key to creating a great buying experience is focusing on aligning your entire company around the buying experience.

It boils down to two pieces: alignment and context. Keep these two pieces in mind as a central theme.

A graphic with: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, and supplier selection discovery call phases on it. Beside them, "alignment" and "context" is written.
  1. Alignment: Amongst all the internal stakeholders, whether it be SDRs, AEs, solution consultants, executive staff, customer success, we all want to be perfectly aligned around this customer journey.

What pieces of information do we need to gather and deliver to our buyers to make sure that we’re in alignment on the value that our solution provides?

How do we make sure that's perfectly connected in alignment with the needs and pains we’ve uncovered throughout the sales cycle?

  1. Context: We're going through a lot of complex information. There's more decision makers in the room, and not everybody has the full picture or has been there throughout the whole cycle to have a deep understanding of what's going on, what’s being purchased, or what the ins-and-outs of the solution are.

Having the ability to give quick context as new decision makers come into the fold, either internally or externally, is key to creating this buyer experience.

Go-to-market teams are siloed

three circles labelled: 1. marketing 2. sales 3. service

Traditionally, go-to-market teams have been siloed. Great marketing teams are building out incredible assets that you know are supposed to be used by the sales teams.

The renegade sales reps are building out their own piece of information, running disjointed discovery calls or not putting information back into Salesforce, and then sometimes delivering some of that information to the customer service department.

As a former rep, sometimes the sales to service handoff can be a little bit rocky.

All of these different departments (marketing, sales, service) can be operating in silos at times, and not creating good collaboration and alignment between them.

Alignment: marketing, sales, service

The best organizations in the world, and the ones that are going to win in this emerging buyer-centric culture, are the ones that are perfectly in alignment around the customer's buying journey.

These three departments have to work together to guide the buyer throughout the buying experience and make sure it's a really buying process to walk through.

Sales enablement meets buyer enablement

Help sellers sell - sales enablement. Help buyers buy - Buyer enablement

The old, top-down mandates to your individual contributors just don't work quite as effectively as they did in the past.

We need to help sellers sell, and help them to ask the right questions at the right time in the sales cycle.

Only then can you deliver a selling story in perfect unison with the pains and needs you uncovered in discovery calls with the value our solution provides - to do that consistently amongst all internal customer facing people is the goal.

That's where we start, by enabling our sales teams to tell the right stories, gather the right information, and walk through those presentations quickly and easily.

The second piece is helping buyers buy.

Here’s a situation that happens all the time: you have a great conversation with the buyer, perfect unison between what your solution provides and what they need.

Then, they go off into the ether and explain it to their colleagues internally and maybe reps don't deliver information, or they do it late or inconsistently, or it's the wrong information.

That's a problem.

It's our job as sellers to make sure our buyers have the right information at the right point in their journey to make their jobs easier, and make it easier for them to make a purchase.