Good day PROs!

Buyers don't actually care about our product. Wearing our Buyer hat will reveal the questions behind the questions.

Setting the Stage

In our humble opinion, being Buyer (Customer) Led is critical for any organization, but especially for companies in the lower middle market, which means:

• Revenue of $5mm - $50mm

• Self-funded or PE-backed

The market landscape for these companies can be described as:

• Huge number of competitors (and complements)

• One (or two) "category leaders" that are 100x the size of the others

• "Platform" companies (currently integration partners) expanding horizontally and now competing

This landscape has created the following conditions:

• Noise. Lots of it. Buyers are tuning us out, which has led to …

• Declining performance in every channel, which contributes to …

• Pricing pressure. Too many companies, too little demand.

From the Buyer's perspective, they are:

• Avoiding risk. Better to live with the "devil you know."

• Under resourced. Growth is harder than ever and resources are constrained.

• Not confident. There is way too much (suspect) information to navigate.

And it doesn't look like it's getting any better.

Educate on the (full) solution, not just the Product

When we consider these market dynamics from the Buyer's perspective, we can see that as hard as it is for us to sell, it is even harder for the Buyer to buy!

Part of the reason for that is the explosion of alternatives available to a buyer. But the biggest culprit is that we leave it up to the customer to come up with the plan of how to get to the moment of value.

An increasingly important part of a Buyer's process is mapping out an end-to-end plan of how the Company will get value from the selected solution, so that they can reduce the perceived risk.

Sure, we promise all kinds of support in onboarding, but at that point, I'm already committed and taking all the risk!

Let's provide an example

We are advising a company in the HR Tech space that provides solutions around recruiting.

In some situations there is a Champion (person leading the project) with previous experience in all of the software tools. Not just using, but implementing.

In other situations, the Champion is brand new to all of the tools. Never used. Never implemented.

To further complicate matters, every Champion, regardless of previous experience, works in organizations with varying dynamics:

• Stakeholders are fully supportive of the project and have made it a priority

• Stakeholders are open to the idea, but have yet to make it a priority

• Stakeholders are ambivalent and need to be convinced of the project's impact

We could take this further, but you get the point. Two Buyers that work at companies of the same size, in the same industry, same growth rates, etc. can have drastically different perspectives of risk.

Through the Eyes of the Buyer

With this in mind, let's now take a walk through our Buyer's experience, as we've designed it.

• When they first land on our website homepage, is our message:

  • clear (clarity > clever).

  • relevant.

  • compelling.

  • differentiated.

• From there, do we make it easy for them to understand their path to value?

  • Use cases > case studies

  • Guides to Success (regardless of whether or not they select our product)

  • Visibility on Stakeholder Experience - from our HR Tech example above; recruiters, candidates, hiring managers, senior leadership.

  • AND, do we connect the dots for them, anticipating their likely next question?

• When they visit our "request a demo" page, do you make clear the value they can expect to receive?

  • Do we make it easy for them to schedule the demo?

  • After scheduling the demo, do we continue to educate (based on their perspective) and build excitement?

  • When the Buyer completes the demo call, are we prepared to provide our Champion everything they need to "derisk" this decision with stakeholders?

We could keep going, but hopefully you can now see the power in this exercise, which we refer to as a Buyer Zones Analysis.

Recommendation

Do this with a cross-functional team to include Marketing, Sales, RevOps, Product and even CS. Use (cohorted) metrics to identify where Buyers are getting stuck. Review each stage of the experience in detail to assess if we helping the Buyer to buy.

One extremely important input to this process is actually understanding, with empathy, the various buyer dynamics (see our HR Tech example above).

The only way to do this is to have these insights in the first place, which is going to require some elbow grease.

But we can start this today. We can have every person (yes, every person) in customer-facing teams commit to 2-3 discussions with (ideal) customers every week. Then have a weekly review with everyone of what was learned.

In a very short period of time, we will have captured the consistent themes on which we need to take action.

What are other ways you've seen this work well? Reply and let us know!

See you next week!

-Gary and Andy