The Evolution of B2B Selling: Focus on Helping Customers Buy

Many B2B companies are experiencing longer sales cycles, declining win rates, and increasingly unreliable forecasts—not because their sales teams are ineffective, but because their customers are struggling to buy.

What’s Changed?

Gone are the days when a single person makes B2B purchasing decisions. It’s now a buying group made up of many people from different functions, with diverse perspectives, needs, and priorities. In six-figure B2B purchases, it’s now common to see 12 or more stakeholders involved across procurement, finance, legal, and the business. These buyers move through four core jobs:

1. Problem identification

2. Solution exploration

3. Requirements building, and

4. Supplier selection.

However, what makes this exercise more challenging is that the buying process is not linear. B2B buyers routinely revisit earlier stages as new stakeholders are introduced or priorities shift. Add to this a flood of information and the complexity of the B2B buying decision increases dramatically. As a result, 40 to 60% of deals lost today are lost to the status quo—ending with no decision at all (Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, The JOLT Effect).

Over time, B2B sales have evolved from selling products, to solution selling (bundling products and services), and then insight selling (providing thought leadership). However, even insight selling is becoming commoditized. As more vendors adopt challenger-style approaches, buyers increasingly hear similar insights, diminishing their ability to differentiate. Effective B2B sales teams now need to become experts at helping the customer buy.

The modern B2B seller’s primary job is not to persuade, but to increase buyer confidence.

What’s the Solution?

The solution, according to Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt in their recently published book The Framemaking Sale, is to increase customer confidence so they can make high-quality, low-regret decisions. They see four challenges that undermine customer confidence that sales teams need to help their prospects address:

1. Decision complexity

2. Information overload

3. Objective misalignment, and

4. Outcome uncertainty.

Failure to address these areas will likely result in either no decision, or a smaller, safer, price-driven purchase. They also contend that a customer’s confidence in the vendor matters far less than the customer’s confidence in themselves.

For a salesperson to be viewed by his prospect as a trusted advisor in helping them through their buying journey, they need to take a vendor-agnostic approach. For example, providing decision criteria templates, internal alignment decks, risk-mitigation frameworks or ROI models that help customers build confidence and consensus.

An Opportunity for Competitive Differentiation

Your sellers are not just competing against other named competitors but against their prospects’ lack of confidence. If they want to sell more, they need to help the customer be more confident in their buying decision.

This is also about differentiation. Based on a Gartner Group survey of buyers of complex B2B solutions, 75% would prefer to make purchases without ever speaking to a sales professional. As a result, helping a prospect through their buying journey provides an opportunity for a seller to provide client value and distinguish themselves from their competition. They want to be the one their prospect sees as best at helping them feel less overwhelmed in navigating through their complex purchasing process. They want to make them more confident in taking decisive action and making better, bigger buying decisions for their company.

Help Buyers, Not Just Sellers

CEOs and their sales and marketing leaders must rethink enablement, messaging, tools, and metrics to help prospects buy—not just help sellers sell. In today’s environment, the companies that win are those that make it easier for buyers to move forward with confidence.