Are Your B2B Marketing And Sales Skills Keeping Pace With The Way Your Customers Buy?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

B2B prospects are revealing themselves to sellers in the late stages of their buyer’s journey. By the time a prospect has decided to contact a seller directly, they will have:

• Gained agreement in their organization about a problem they have.
• Developed a strategy to overcome the problem.
• Determined if they need outside vendors or consultants for assistance.
• Established criteria for those organizations.
• And began side-by-side comparison of vendors.

Imagine for a moment how a cold calling strategy employing a prepared script works when the salesperson has only a list of names and phone numbers to prep for the call. Good salespeople may do some research on LinkedIn or a company website to learn a bit, if their sales manager doesn’t have them on an NFL-style 40 second play clock between calls. And imagine contacting someone and going right into a scripted product pitch when they are still determining what problem they have.

A couple of years ago I interviewed sales expert Kathleen Glass about the kind of skills needed by modern-day sales professionals. Needless to say, they aren’t the skills portrayed in popular entertainment culture and movies like Glenngarry Glenn Ross. When helping B2B solution providers build sales teams, Glass looks for the following skills: empathy, listening, effective writing, and spatial reasoning. You can read the entire article here, Are you transforming? Your buyers are!

Life Science Connect is the parent company of Follow Your Buyer. It became a B2B publishing company when traditional print advertising and telephones were the primary way that sellers and buyers connected. Today it can be described as a combination B2B publisher, media company, technology innovator, business development facilitator, marketing consultancy, and more.

The epicenter of revenue generation for Life Science Connect is a business development team that possesses the same skills Glass stated were characteristic of today’s most successful sale professionals. They describe their job using terms like learning, helping, engaging, and understanding their clients.

What skills and character traits do you find most valuable for your B2B marketing and sales team? Are you recruiting, testing for, and hiring people with these character traits? Are you developing and rewarding the right skills? 

If not, or if you’re not sure, determine what your business needs by looking at how your buyers make purchasing decisions and determine what they need to help them along their journey. Those are the skills and character traits that will best serve your business.