Vladimir Blagojević’s Post

Buyer journey ≠ your marketing funnel or sales stages. Here is how the B2B buying process happens. Here is how B2B buyers buy: - Review key priorities and challenges with their team and execs - Consider solving issues intermally or with existing solutions - Research different (types of) solutions and weigh the alternatives - Start with top-of-mind vendors they discovered BEFORE they even started their research - Ask internally and check if there are vendors previously vetted by procurement - Ask their peers or communities - Develop requirements and criteria for a good solution - Loop in the executive sponsor and validate key criteria - Discuss vendors and alternatives with their team  - Get critical questions and try to find out answers on their own  - Reach out to prioritized vendors - Discuss budgets with vendors meeting requirements, that left a positive impression - Evaluate internal resources & timeline for a successful implementation - Create an internal presentation or business case to get purchase approval - Get questions or objections they cannot answer (but don't always reach out to reps for anwser) - Finalize the deal with the vendor, get through procurement (can take months) - Vendor onboarding The best ABM teams create buyer enablement programs that facilitate these stages: - Create awareness & engage with target buyers in the channels they use for research - Provide an overview of the best solutions and industry best practices through content - Prepare personalized content hubs with the most common questions, industry case studies, etc. for their champions - Update content hub regularly with the newly collected insights - Create business cases early, together with the champions, to facilitate internal sales - Start multi-threading with the buying committee group to create awareness - Add to business cases implementation plans, cost of inaction, milestones, ROI and other critical documents to address the concerns from key executives -- A lot of B2B teams still leave in their siloed "sales stages" world measuring the conversions between MQLs -> discovery calls -> POC -> Proposals -> Won/Lost. They don't understand what's happening on the buyer's side and don't influence the internal buying process. It is a huge gap that costs millions of dollars. --- Attached is a screenshot from Gal Aga's keynote from our summit about how AE's can use buyer enablement to win more deals. This Wednesday, Andrei and I will share how marketing teams can support in enabling buyers to choose you—especially when you're not in the room. You can save your seat here:  https://lnkd.in/dJMpDhjV