We’ve all seen it and we all love it. The freemium model. Start for free, with options to upgrade to a paid plan. No reps, no fuss, just an easy, frictionless experience.
For B2B, DSR’s (Digital Sales Rooms) are designed to enable software companies to sell licenses at scale. Demo’s are pre-recorded, materials are downloadable and chatbots help buyers navigate questions. A seamless experience, designed for ease and a mode of selling that will only continue to influence the software market.
However, for most software companies there is complexity in how your solution performs and integrates into a tech stack, to how a buyer conducts a vendor evaluation.
Today, buyers have a formula. They’ve created a process that works for them. Often, this is driven by procurement and followed by business leads conducting the evaluation.
As a seller, understanding this process is critical to achieving the outcome of closing a deal.
But what if the seller isn’t aware of this process, or vice versa? This leads to surprises emerging throughout the process, elongating the sales cycle. It takes the art of an expert seller to complement the science of a buying process and to manage buyers to get a deal closed. This leaves the question…
B2B software buyers are used to frictionless, fast digital buying processes. How do you make the buying experience as easy and frictionless as possible whilst building scope, demonstrating value and managing complex buying processes?
We’ve come up with 7 vital sources of value to add to your sales motion:
1. Evaluate your present sales software stack and assess capabilities & gaps based on the future state of B2B buying
B2B buying is more buyer-led than ever. On top of this, buyers are leaning towards a rep-free experience, pointing to the growing importance of a seamless, digital-based buying solution.
Knowing how your tech stack is working together in providing an easy but personal experience for buyers is critical to gaining that edge over your competitors. With such a variety of hyper-specialised and customisable solutions, purchasing decisions are greatly influenced by customer experience, not just solution/product. In most markets, software vendors have 4-5 direct competitors with very little differentiation. With an increasing focus on optimisation and buyer experience, knowing what you have to offer and how your processes align with each other (using your tech stack) is key to knowing what you don’t.
Gaps in your tech stack can fragment the end-user experience, not to mention create inefficiencies in your functional teams and processes. In addition to this, the number of channels used to facilitate the buying process is increasing, more often than not using outsourced software tools; reinforcing the importance of a cohesive tech stack.
In many software companies, the difference between winning and losing is people and process, not solution or price. Hence, making sure your tech stack reflects this value-centric, customer experience throughout your sales motion is vital.
2. Create a process that enables your sales folks to understand where a buyer is on their purchasing journey
Every buying process is different. Different products, solutions, teams, markets, and industries all have their quirks. Every buyer is different. And on top of this, the increasing importance of customisation means buyers need different solutions based on their individual pains. Due to this, sales teams of tomorrow need to be hyper-flexible, managing multiple deals with varying needs and specificity.
Being able to manage this across your sales teams and maintain a painless buying experience for your buyer, will have greater weight as a competitive advantage for the future of B2B software buying.
3. Introduce a two-way buying experience into your sales motion
Understanding your buyer at all stages of the buying process is key to building and maintaining a healthy relationship with your buyer. Understanding their needs and what needs to be done to make sure ‘we’ can deliver, requires frictionless communication.
Being able to facilitate this throughout your buying process will allow your teams to engage with the buyers of each deal, in more detail. This not only streamlines your sales motion but also develops a meaningful relationship with your buyer by engaging with them regularly, inviting them to collaborate on getting the deal done and ultimately meeting the needs of both you and the buyer. It’s a win-win.
4. Identify and document where the gaps are in the buying process
It’s easy to lose sight of task owners and deadlines. But it shouldn’t be. Way too often, enterprise deals are pushed back, delayed or worse, end in no decision, due to uncertainty with the buyer. Being able to know what’s going on at every stage of the sales process also enables you to spot the gaps.
Identifying, monitoring and tracking tasks are critical to evaluating whether deals will get signed on time. Without knowing every decision maker, stakeholder, task owner and all those involved in the buying process, deals can slip and worst of all, no one knows why. In most CRMs, adding notes and data into your pipeline is a given. But tracking and diving deeper into your deals and understanding the likelihood of each deal closing, is a gap not currently filled. A gap that is critical to optimising the sales process AFTER a lead comes through. No one likes missing out on being the vendor of choice, and worse, not knowing why. Doing this well can make the process quicker, easier and more efficient for both you and the buyer.
5. Enable cross-functional teams to easily collaborate throughout the sales cycle
Deals and software solutions need complex integration and customisation, especially for tech-heavy, enterprise deals. With such complex deals, multiple cross-functional teams are required to dip in and out of specific areas of the deal to close. Technical & solution fit with the product; finance for payment; legal for the small print. Finding efficient and smooth ways of integrating all your teams in the areas they’re involved in, can be the difference between a great or poor experience for the buyer. Not to mention, a possibly time-consuming process of liaising and communicating to get everyone aligned and make that deadline. Finding opportunities to streamline this process throughout your organisation will be a source of competitive advantage for your sales motion.
6. Engineer your product so it integrates into the software stack and coordinates multi-capabilities for the end-user in a single workflow
There are so many options for specialised programs/apps that can provide value to your tech stack. How many apps do you have in your tech stack? A dozen? More? Productive, the SaaS management platform (SMP), published a report on the number of apps used in an average SaaS company. Turns out this is something we highly underestimate. According to Productiv, the average SME/MME (businesses with less than 2,000 employees) adopt 242/238 apps in their operations, respectively. Now think about how the functionality & usefulness of each app may change, depending on their integration with each other. The slightest inefficiency or annoyance in pulling data between this large network of apps can create serious confusion, time loss and thus revenue leakage, each year.
This is obvious but begs the question: Does the functionality of your product now depend on your buyer's tech-stack? Differentiating vendors no longer emphasises the ‘benefits’ the app provides (although important), but the ability for customisation, integration and giving the end user a frictionless experience. Allow your product to flow through others, and be malleable and personal. Not having functionality beyond your app’s internal benefits, will ultimately lose you deals.
7. Develop a Digital Sales Room to meet the needs of your buyer and help your sales team move faster
It’s 2022. What’s not digital? It’s a hard question to answer. With so many innovations and efficiency-driven solutions, what’s been missed? Sales.
Now, I should mention before you disagree, the sales enablement area has developed some truly intuitive and digital solutions over the past couple of decades. Lead generation tools, prospecting methods and innovative ways of reaching out to your potential customers have all flourished over the past 10 years. The optimisation has been the focus for SaaS companies and still is, even more so in 2022. But the deal-making process is still often archaic.
Liaising back and forth between the buyer and your team, emailing, calling, and texting. Then filling all of this data into your CRM. It can be done well, but is it optimised?
Being able to digitalise the conversations and actions, in one place, integrated throughout your tech stack, is vital in optimising the deal-making experience for both your selling team and the buyer. It’s the first opportunity and experiences your buyer has of how you do business. You want to make a good impression, be swift, succinct and aligned. For SaaS companies in 2022 and onwards, being able to optimise this often disjointed experience will not only improve buyer experience but win you more deals and ultimately, more revenue. Knowing where you are in the deal process, especially when your buyer is weighing multiple vendors, will give you the edge in sealing the deal with process, rigour and pace.
Summary
In a B2B SaaS world of B2B SaaS solutions–many solutions–optimisation remains the focal point for sustaining competitiveness, even more so with inflation and potential recession around the corner. For your sales motion, this means understanding your buyer at every move and finding the most efficient, integrated means of doing this. Those that can communicate with and understand your buyer in a seamless process, will be the winners of not only more volume, but valued deals.
What is a dealpad?
dealpad is software that enables organisations to create personalised, two-way buying experiences.
Key product highlights;
- A platform for SDRs and marketers to convert prospects into sales meetings
- A personalised Digital Sales Room to engage and collaborate with your entire buying team
- Integrate your CRM data into dealpad to build out deal plans for each of the deals in your pipeline. Align your buyer and selling teams on key dates, decisions, tasks and goals, adding cadence, rigour and accountability to the buying process.
- Map out stakeholders and their influence, to make sure you know who will influence the process and when to get the deal done on time.
- Build out Mutual Action Plans and the buying process WITH your buyer collaboratively, so you both know what’s happening at every stage and when. Use this cadence to bring valuable insight and data to your pipeline.
- Use the Closing Certainty Index, a proprietary scoring algorithm, to predict the likelihood of each deal closing + recommendations on how to increase the likelihood of closing the deal.
- Use dealpad to win more customers, close deals faster and forecast better.
