Sensemaking Sales

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Today’s B2B buyers have access to more information than ever before. Blogs, ads, reports, peer reviews, ratings, emails, white papers and wordof-mouth recommendations all have allowed buyers to explore purchases on their own. With so much detailed information available online, B2B buyers dedicate only 17% of their total purchase process talking to potential suppliers. But all this competing information is also causing buyer confusion, and delaying or even stalling purchase decisions. It’s too much for buyers to make sense of it all on their own.

We surveyed 1,100 B2B customers about this topic and learned that nearly 90% agree that the information they encountered as part of a B2B purchase was generally of high quality. But they’ve struggled to make sense of it.

Welcome to Sense Making. More than just a sales strategy, Sense Making is an information strategy. With it, sellers become proactive and objective guides helping buyers find their way to confident, sensible purchase decisions.

Today’s customers embark on a “learning journey” when they set out to make a purchase — and 62% of that learning takes place outside of conversations with sellers.

When customers are overwhelmed, they are far more likely to make a smaller purchase — or do nothing at all — to play it safe.

As they try to cope, Gartner research finds that today’s customers spend 15% of buying time trying to reconcile or deconflict information.

There is too much high-quality information out there for customers to make sense of. And while having high-quality information may be a prerequisite to being competitive, it's no longer a differentiator in a sea of other good information.

“In many ways, today’s high-quality deals are less about what customers know, and far more about how they feel about what they know,”

Sellers already pay a “skepticism” penalty just for being a seller. Besides doubting the obvious self-interest of every seller, customers may become increasingly skeptical when they suspect that the seller is withholding information, contradicting claims made by other suppliers (or their own organization), or suggesting that the best solution happens to be their solution. This penalty must be overcome as customers who are highly skeptical of an individual rep’s claim, whether it appears inaccurate or incomplete, are 1.5x less likely to make a high-quality purchase.

This is something you have to design your early sales motion around/against - March 04, 2023 @ 10:41 PM

Customers feel confident when sellers help them to:
Determine the right questions to ask themselves and their suppliers
Identify which information matters most in their purchase decision
Identify consistent patterns or themes in the information despite origin they encounter during the purchase

Giving, Telling, Sensemaking

Giving
“I can get you a lot more information on that.” 
Primary strategy: 
Believes comprehensive information is generally better. 
Promptly responds to customer requests for information. Giving

Telling
Let me tell you what you need to know.” 
Primary strategy: 
Shares his/her own perspective with buyers.
Bases information on extensive personal experience and knowledge.

Sense Making
“There is a lot of information — let me help you make sense of it.” 
Primary strategy:
Guides customer to evidence. 
Prioritizes simplicity over comprehensive detail.

A Sense Making approach is more effective because sellers acknowledge the difficulty customers experience in making a purchase and provide a way forward. They help customers prioritize perspectives, qualify trade-offs and contextualize — often reconcile — competing perspectives. In this role, they become a much-needed guide. Sellers who practice Sense Making don’t tell customers what to believe, but rather help them to develop a mental framework to make their own decisions.

“While the giving approach focuses on more, those who practice Sense Making focus on less. In essence, Sense Making sellers have an information strategy, not just a deal strategy.”

“Sellers today have to figure out what to disclose when, and put what they're sharing into the broader information context the buyer encounters.”

Because of their approach, sellers who focus on Sense Making are best at reducing buyer skepticism of the seller and increasing buyer confidence in information.

Out of 10 completed deals, eight were high-quality when the sales rep used a Sense Making approach. The telling approach closed only five, and the giving approach only three. The telling approach is more successful than the giving approach, but only because sellers using this approach are less likely to overwhelm the customer with additional information.

Despite the intentions of giving more to boost credibility in the eyes of the customer, each time sellers bring more information to the table, with little guidance on how it fits or why it matters, they are actually making it harder for a customer to buy.

Sellers who take a telling approach, while they are likely known as subject matter experts and very confident in their own knowledge, fail to transfer this confidence to their customers. Their confidence seems to backfire, likely because customers want a second opinion to verify what the teller said. Or, perhaps they already have trustworthy information but it conflicts with what the expert is saying, and the expert doesn’t even know the customer has that information — they never asked. Given that three-quarters of sellers today don’t use a Sense Making approach with customers, it’s vital to start developing the right capabilities within the sales force to close the gap.

Driving Sense Making -- Key Attributes of a Sense Making Approach

Connect to relevant resources - Diagnose customers’ information needs and provide curated sources/tools, helping them feel that they know all the relevant information.
Connect customers to information they are unlikely to encounter on their own.
Default to data and evidence when interacting with customers (as opposed to stories and opinions).
Admit knowledge limits, and connect to answer.

Clarify Information Complexity - Reduce complexity of the information environment by filtering and processing information for customers.
Proactively provide information about issues customers are likely to face in buying process.
Deliberate about sharing information not already made available to customer through company’s website.
Help customers work through purchase decisions by sharing tools that enable buying.

Collaborate in customer learning - Help customers evaluate quality of information and arrive at their own understanding about difficult issues.
Help customers identify questions they didn’t think to ask.
When faced with difficult considerations, help customers arrive at their own understanding.
Encourage customers to independently verify information provided by sellers.

Give reps a framework to clarify the buying journey for customers and include questions to ask to uncover ways to instill customer confidence at key points in the buying process. These confidence-verifying questions allowed the company to not just account for purchase progression but actually advance it more quickly and easily.

Sellers who adopt a Sense Making approach know how to engage customers with information the right way to build their confidence and reduce skepticism, leading to high-quality deals. They accomplish this during preparation and customer interactions by:

To foster the Sense Making approach in your sales organization, implement these three steps:

1. Ensure your current talent management strategy reflects Sense Making behaviors. Determine the key competencies and skills of this approach and integrate them into your competency model as well as training and enablement initiatives for sellers.

2. Embed Sense Making tactics into deal review and coaching. Day-to-day interaction between sales managers and frontline sellers provides an excellent opportunity to develop a Sense Making information approach. Sales managers should be prepared to assist sellers in diagnosing customer information challenges and helping customers make sense of a high volume of information.

What do they understand and what don't they understand? - March 04, 2023 @ 11:46 PM

3. Attract and screen for sales candidates who take a Sense Making approach. Online job postings and descriptions are the first opportunity to attract or discourage promising candidates. Check that your hiring process — from job descriptions to hiring manager interview guides — prioritize Sense Making potential.

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