New Research: The Buying Experience of the Future

By Michelle Voznyuk, Marketing Specialist at Heinz Marketing

In partnership with Bigtincan, we surveyed 206 professionals across multiple experience levels, company sizes, and industries to discover how teams are communicating the value of their solution in a way that addresses buyers’ wants, needs, and expectations, while simultaneously meeting the goals of their business.

Our hope was to discover the roadblocks revenue-generating teams encounter in preparing sellers to be ready in today’s market, and to understand the differences between high and low performing teams. In addition to our findings, we compiled recommendations on how to enable sellers to create highly personalized experiences that attract and retain buyers and impact the bottom line. Click here to access the full research report.

2022 Buying Experience Insights

Here is a sneak peak of the report and the findings we uncovered.

1. High performing teams have unlocked the key to streamlining buyer-centric sales enablement strategies.
Organizations exceeding revenue goals stand out as developing thoughtful, buyer-first strategies for their sales teams.

2. Most sales and marketing teams do not prioritize the factors they recognize as having the greatest impacts on revenue.
Although sales and marketing teams understand that delivering an experience that exceeds buyers’ expectations has the highest attribution to revenue growth, most teams are not prioritizing these efforts as a part of their seller onboarding and training. This negatively impacts buyer-facing teams’ ability to tell the brand story and share their value proposition effectively.

3. Sales content related issues reign supreme as the biggest pain point for sales and marketing teams.
Data shows both sales and marketing agree having content is valuable; however, issues still exist related to finding and using the most up-to-date content.

4. Most buyer-facing teams recognize they are not meeting buyers’ expectations and it reflects in their revenue performance.
Today’s buyers are doing more independent research than ever before. In turn, they have higher expectations when facing sales teams. Organizations must enable their teams to properly address their needs and guide them to the best decision. This will not only build value and trust with buyers, but create the biggest impact on revenue performance.

5. Preparing buyer-facing teams to exceed buyers’ expectations, have value-based conversations, and personalize the most relevant content for buyers have direct correlations with positive revenue growth.
To ensure its success, companies must increase effectiveness of training, onboarding, and productivity to help buyer-facing teams deliver on expectations and contribute to revenue growth of the organization.

Sales and Marketing Teams Must Move to a Buyer-Centric Mindset

While most sales and marketing teams understand that delivering a competitive buying experience is essential to their success, many aren’t prioritizing these efforts as a part of their strategy. Organizations that do prioritize a buyer-centric mindset by aligning their teams and creating personalized experiences will stand out amongst competitors and be more likely to exceed revenue goals in the future.

To discover more observations and recommendations, check out the full research report: Roadblocks to Delivering a Competitive Buying Experience.