As I mentioned in Sales Is Broken Part 1, traditional B2B sales is broken. Most sales reps didn’t hit their quota in 2023 and sales leaders were uniformly thrashed for failing to hit their targets. Many companies pointed to the general market conditions in 2023 or noted that buyers were taking longer to make purchasing decisions for their companies. But there’s a more fundamental change causing the quota shortfall: buyers no longer want to talk with sales reps.
Sales reps have less influence over buyers
The modern business buyer has completely changed how they shortlist, evaluate, and buy products and services for their companies. Buyers no longer want to:
- Sift through pages of search results and marketing content to come up with a list of options to consider.
- Talk with a bunch of sales reps from multiple vendors and wade through a morass of marketing-speak about each solution to narrow options down to a shortlist.
- Wait until they’re ‘qualified’ to talk with a product specialist to really evaluate whether a solution could work for them.
And when possible – buyers would love to get out of going through the procurement and new vendor setup processes and get their hands on their new purchases more quickly.
As Maria Chien from Forrester Research, shared at Impartner’s conference last year – “B2B buyers are turning to trusted advisers for advice on the products they should consider and the companies they should work with.” Despite this, most enterprise marketing and sales teams are still running the same playbook they’ve been using for the past 10 years.
Modern buyers turn to trusted advisers, not sales teams
Today’s buyers are turning to experts they trust for advice on which products to buy and which companies to work with. This doesn’t mean there’s no role for direct sales, it just means we’re overdue for a sales transformation that lets buyers engage with your company and sales reps in a new way.
Once buyers have built their shortlist based on advice from people they trust, they want to talk with product and delivery specialists quickly…. without waiting to be qualified through 2 or 3 meetings with your sales rep.
On a recent Co-Sell Journey webinar, Maria Chien from Forrester Research shared one of their 2024 predictions on this topic: Buyers will find personal interactions with product experts more meaningful than all other in-person activities. 40% of Millennial buyers will demand early access to B2B product experts.
Once they’ve validated that your solution meets their needs, they want help from your sales rep to validate all the cross-company factors they need to consider and confirm to move forward. If your sales rep can help them get the answers they need from other companies they’ll start to see your rep as a new trusted adviser in their corner.
Once they’ve made a solution decision, buyers would love to skip over the time-consuming internal procurement and new vendor setup process and instead buy from an existing supplier. This allows them to get their solution from you much faster.
The good news: prospects are talking with your partners
The good news is that many of the trusted advisers that your buyers are turning to are already in your partner network – along with most of the other technology, service providers, and suppliers that are involved in each deal.
Partner and channel leaders have already built up a network of partners around your company that can sell your products, service your customers, expand your footprint, and complement your business. These include ISVs, consultants, systems integrators, marketplace, MSPs, resellers, VARs, TSDs, and global distributors.
The bad news: your reps don’t know the partners talking with their buyers
The bad news is that your sales reps don’t have any way to identify or coordinate with all the partners that influence, and are involved in, each of their accounts. And your partners don’t know which rep owns each account they talk with, so it’s too hard for them to debrief your reps after every conversation with one of your customers or prospects.
Internal team selling isn’t the same as co-selling
Today’s B2B sales reps know how to pull in internal experts to help on a deal. But winning competitive deals in 2024 requires pulling in experts and partners from outside your company. That’s why co-selling is the most important GTM motion to figure out and scale in 2024.
Co-selling is the act of collaborating with sellers at other companies to source, influence, and accelerate sales deals. The “random acts of co-selling” that companies are doing today aren’t enough for sales to connect and collaborate with all the different advisers, experts, consultants, and partner influencers on all their accounts.
How to create a high-performance co-sell motion
Creating a high-performance co-sell motion across your entire partner ecosystem requires the right data, automation, and co-sell software. This is what we do and why PartnerTap is the leading enterprise co-sell solution for publicly traded companies. If you’d like to jumpstart your sales transformation please reach out to talk with an enterprise co-selling expert.