More Good Advice From BtoB Technology Buyers to Increase Sales Productivity

Throughout each year, our Sales and CMO Advisory Practice teams collect valuable insight from BtoB technology buyers through focused studies, surveys, in-depth interviews and panel sessions. Why?  Because that is the source of some of the greatest ideas for improving our sales and marketing success. . . from small improvements to big, groundbreaking ideas. This past summer I reviewed the results of our 2011 Buyer Experience Study where we learned that buyers want to reduce their buying cycle by 40% and how to do that. 

I'd like to share some more recent insights from a buyer panel that we just held in October to refresh our connection with the buyer and their feedback about their interaction with our own sales teams and marketing outreach efforts.  The quotes represent what our CIO panelists had to say:

• Buyers still like to buy from trusted people: "Just as vendors will follow good buyers from account to account, we (buyers) will follow good sales reps from vendor to vendor."
• Just in case you've missed this piece of advice before. . . "Trusted advisors don't sell products, they solve problems."
• Marketers and inside sales teams, watch out for the quality of your lists!. . ""Apparently I got on a mailing list as someone that's investigating a cloud solution. I got at least 20 calls yesterday from cloud consultants I never heard of!"
• Sales team, watch your pricing strategies! . . .. "After going through an entire RFP selection process, we called the losing vendor with the bad news. They said they would match the winning bid, which meant they were willing to substantially cut fees in the face of competition instead of giving a real bid up-front. This did not please me!"
• What's your strategy for shifting accounts into different sales models across your organization? "A vendor switched our account rep midstream and moved us to an enterprise-class account. The result was a doubling of their price. One week later, after several phone calls to set the record straight, the price was back to the original model. Needless to say, we did not do business with them again."
• CIOs and IT are striving to become trusted advisors for their internal LOB customers; and as technology vendors we need to help them achieve this status: "There is growing awareness and ability for LOB to go directly to the cloud and implement low-cost solutions and then request integration, security services, and so on from us, the CIOs; and we need to better connect with our internal customers earlier on in the process in an intelligent way."
• And if you think that means you need to go around the CIO as part of your sales process, watch out!. . . . "As CIO I want to trust vendors not to go around us and sell directly to LOB and exacerbate the rogue IT problem."
• And finally. . Here's another reason why IDC research indicates that over 1/2 of sales reps show up to their first prospect visit unprepared: "We will take the time to educate account managers on our business but don't want to do the same for every product line rep that wants to sell." (refer to Bldg. the Intelligent Sales & Mktg. Org.)

Any of this sound familiar?  Have your own stories to share?  Please feel free to comment below, or contact our team directly to learn about strategic, operational and tactical solutions for these challenges. (mgerard@idc.com or izvagelsky@idc.com or gmurray@idc.com) Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service should contact us directly for additional details about the above meeting.