Must I meet your salesperson? I already want your product

However, the business buyer has more resources to help make a decision now. This means that they are talking to salespeople later in their decision-making process. Gartner, Forrester (paywall), BCG and 6sense have released research that shows this, with buyers talking to sales when they are about 70% through the buying journey.

The 6sense research suggests that buyers are in two distinct phases: a selection phase and a validation phase. The making a selection phase accounts for the first 70% of the buyer’s purchase journey, and the validating a selection phase accounts for the last 30%. This nicely aligns with when buyers engage with salespeople. So, the buyer doesn’t talk to a salesperson until they want to validate the selection they have already made.

This is where marketing must step in.

Sales activities that used to help buyers make their selection can be seen as unnecessary. I recently had this experience when buying a training solution for the company I work for. I already knew what I wanted to buy, filled in a contact me form, and then went to an online meeting where a sales development representative (SDR) ‘qualified’ me and my colleagues.

We were asked if we had the budget to buy the thing, the authority to buy the thing, the need for the thing and when we planned to buy the thing. We were BANT’ed. Once we had confirmed all of the things that we had typed into the form, we were eventually allowed to book a call with a solutions expert (code for a salesperson) in two weeks. while we ultimately purchased the product, the follow-up call with the salesperson introduced us to some other suppliers we had not considered (probably not what the salesperson wanted to do). Ultimately, we were marketed and sold to as if we had not yet made a selection.

With this kind of experience being common, there is a case to redefine the roles of marketing and sales across the buying journey. In the past, marketing was responsible for brand building and activation, which meant generating leads by hiding content behind forms. These leads were then passed to sales, who would assist with the selection and validation process using a sales methodology. Now, marketing needs to be responsible for brand, activation, and ‘selling at scale’.

In order to sell at scale, marketing needs to partner with sales to find out the sales methodology that their company is using (there are many, ask a well informed LLM for a review of popular sales methodologies, although many sales team select different bits from a few of them), and then work out which bits can be done at scale, and how that information will be captured, so that it can be exposed to the sales team (normally in a customer relationship management bit of software). This requires a high level of personalization, as it is replacing things that would historically be done in a sales meeting or call.

With AI technology, it is now possible to create web experiences that are far more personalized to the buyer. Imagine a buyer visiting your website to research a new solution to their problem. Instead of a generic contact form, the site recognizes their company and dynamically serves up case studies, testimonials, and solution guides tailored to their industry and company size. The content addresses their likely pain points and helps them build a strong business case, essentially guiding them through the selection phase that was once handled by a salesperson. This personalised experience, powered by data, replaces the first few stages of the sales pipeline, ensuring that by the time a buyer ever speaks to a salesperson, they are already a highly informed, qualified prospect, ready to validate their choice.

While a personalized website is a powerful tool, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. The company’s website is not the only place the buyer will look when building their selection. They will also look at review sites, talk to colleagues, read articles on LinkedIn, your friendly LLM, trade shows,… Not all of these places can be personalized, so marketers will need to think creatively about how to get the right messages to the buyers.

An account-based marketing (ABM) approach is perfect to facilitate this approach, but it applies to most B2B buyers, so where businesses had ruled out ABM as it was cost-prohibitive for the size of purchase, or scale required, an ABM at scale (as explained above) approach would need to be adopted. This is why the brand, activation, and ‘selling at scale’ must make sense no matter where a buyer jumps in.

With all of the technology developments going on at the moment, this level of personalisation and giving buyers a really good experience is possible. It is a really exciting time (in a work way) to be in B2B marketing. The future of B2B sales isn’t about who wants to talk to a salesperson; it’s about who has to. The challenge for marketers is to make sure that the answer is “no one.”

Get in touch with Harry on LinkedIn

Read more opinion on The Drum