What is Buyer Led Sales, and How Can It Impact Your Sales?

Are you still focusing on explaining how your product works instead of explaining what it’s really for?

If so, you might miss out on essential sales tactics that can help you sell more.

In today’s digital era, buyers are more informed and empowered than ever. They have access to information on virtually every product, service, and company in the world — and sellers can hardly influence their buying process. This has created a new sales paradigm where buyers drive the buying process rather than sellers.

But how can you ensure your sales strategy keeps up with the times?

The answer is by implementing a new way of selling—buyer led sales.

In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of buyer-led sales and how it can impact your company’s bottom line. We’ll also share some tactics you can implement right now to help you transition to a new sales strategy.

What are Buyer Led Sales?

Buyer led sales is a sales strategy that focuses on your buyer's needs. It involves understanding what your customer wants, how they want it and when they want it. This technique can help you create more value for your customers and build stronger relationships.

The strategy here is to focus on your customers' needs and the problems they have—not what you intend as a solution.

Why is it essential to have a buyer led sales approach?

The current state of B2B marketing has shifted from focusing on customer needs to being heavily tactic-focused. This is mainly due to the growing prevalence of digital marketing channels, which have made it easier for companies to push out their message.

As a result, B2B marketers have become more tactical and less buyer-centric. The problem with this is that buyers are now inundated with information from numerous sources, making it harder for them to decide.

This is why B2B marketers need to take a buyer-led approach. By focusing on what the buyer needs, you can create content that will resonate with them and ultimately help them decide.

These are the essential reasons why you should adopt a buyer-led approach:

1. Sellers have little opportunity to influence buyers.

According to Gartner research, B2B buyers spend only 17% of the time considering a purchase meeting with potential suppliers.

With buyers now able to access quality information independently with just a few clicks, sellers have lost some control over customer decisions. This means the sellers are more likely to be perceived as a salesperson rather than an expert if they attempt to sell their products. This is why sellers need to use a buyer-led approach.

When your marketing efforts focus on the needs of your prospects, you can help them decide without feeling like they are being sold. This approach will build trust with prospects, which is one of the essential factors in creating long-lasting relationships with them. 

2. Buyer's journey is becoming more complex than ever.

The B2B sales cycle can involve as many as 6 people, meaning that companies selling to businesses must convince six individuals before they're successful.

These decision-makers are often armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently—and you must deconflict with the group before making a final purchase.

It's harder than ever before for marketers like you to reach their target audiences because of the proliferation of new products and readily available information.

To overcome this challenge, sellers need to focus on providing value to the buyer. That means helping them solve their biggest challenges, saving time, and making their lives easier. You can do this by developing a sales strategy that focuses on creating value for buyers and getting them to buy into your solution.

The best way to do this is by creating an interactive demo that educates the value of your product and makes it easy for the buyer to see how it will help them. This can be done by providing a demo of your product or service, showing how it works in real-world scenarios, and answering common questions about how it works and why someone would use it.

3. Most buyers don't have sufficient knowledge about their pains.

Appealing to people's pain points won't help your business grow faster than market demand. Most buyers don’t recognize their own pain, or they don’t care enough about it.

These days, it's not enough to make claims; you have to change how people think about your products and services. Effective B2B marketing involves persuading buyers that they need what you're selling—not just giving them reasons why they should buy from you.

You can do this by showing how your products help them achieve their goal and make a difference in their business. For example, if you're selling a software product that helps companies manage their inventory, try to show how it will make them more efficient and profitable. This can help turn a “nice-to-have” into an urgent “must-have.”

Ignition followed the same approach to showcase the value of their product with the help of an interactive demo like this, 

They embedded an interactive product demo on their home page to translate high-quality traffic to high-quality leads. 

When someone is interested in learning how your product works, they have to submit their mail address to access it. This way, they filled their pipeline with product qualified lied rather than just leads and got 20% increase in their conversion rates. 

How to Transform Sales Led Strategy to Buyer Led Strategy?

In today’s market, buyer-led growth quickly becomes the driving force of most successful companies. Because sales and product led models only provide resources as needed while maintaining a ceiling in revenue, they have become outdated compared to the rapidly expanding approach that has dominated recent business strategies.

For B2B companies to survive and thrive in the future, they must build their buyer-led growth muscle by focusing on—and building around—what buyers want.

Here are some ways to transform your sales-led strategy into a buyer led one.

Build your brand narrative.

Before you can build a buyer-led strategy, you need to understand your company’s brand narrative. If you’re unsure what your brand narrative is, it’s time to ask yourself some questions.

• What do you want your company to stand for?
• What values are most important to you and your customers?
• What do you want people to think of when they hear about or see your brand?

Focusing on the narrative of your brand will transform how you approach marketing. Instead of focusing on benefits, features, and pain points—which occur in customers' consciousness after they've identified a problem with their lives—try targeting messaging and content to people where they are right now, even before they recognize their pain.

Then guide them toward a shift in their thinking so that they begin considering your brand.

Once these answers have been identified, begin crafting a story around them that provides meaning for both parties involved. This should be the first step in your marketing efforts because it helps you understand what buyers want and how they think about your brand.

Resolve customers' buying uncertainty.

Many B2B buying decisions are made by many people who consider various factors, and they take a long time to make a decision. To succeed at winning deals, sales leaders must help customers deal with their uncertainty by mitigating it as much as possible.

This means providing more data, evidence, and proof that your solution is right. It also means helping them understand how it will work in their environment and how they can use it to achieve their goals. Interactive product demos will help you surpass this stage, allowing you to show your product in action and provide a more immersive experience. It helps your customers see how it works and answer any questions.

Here's an example of how Toplyne used the interactive product demo,

They have a clear call-to-action on their homepage that invites visitors to tour the product without speaking with a salesperson.

Once the user submits their email address, they will be allowed to interact with your product demo. This approach allowed Toplyne to increase its conversion rate by 25%. And this is how you can use the interactive product demo to increase your conversion rate.

With Storylane, you can create, customize and share interactive product demos in just a few clicks without coding or design skills. The best thing is you can track how your prospects are interacting with your demo, and you can customize your sales messages according to them. This allows you to focus on their needs rather than on your product.

Prioritize value.

Once you’ve convinced a consumer to buy something from your brand, the next step is removing any barriers between them and making the purchase.

The marketing process exposes your buyers to products they may not need or want, creating fear and anxiety. To overcome these anxieties, you must tackle the problem head-on. You have to show your prospects that the benefits of your product outweigh any perceived drawbacks. This is why marketing is essential because it allows you to identify where consumers are in their buying process and then allows you to communicate with them accordingly.

Enable your buyers.

While sales enablement is into helping your sales team to sell more, buyer enablement is more about guiding your users to make the best possible decision. Buyer enablement is about helping users find the solution that fits their needs, not just selling your product.

An effective buyer enablement program will help salespeople better understand their customers and how to solve those customers' problems. This leads to a more proactive sales approach and a greater understanding of how to make the best use of your product.

Analyze and optimize.

The final step is to analyze and optimize your marketing efforts. This allows you to see exactly what’s working and what isn’t so that you can adjust accordingly. 

When you use interactive product demos as the center of your buyer led marketing strategy, you can create a powerful and effective marketing funnel that helps you generate leads and sales. This is because interactive product demos can engage with your audience personally, making them feel more comfortable with purchasing your company’s products or services in the future.

With Storylane, you can easily create an interactive product demo that tells a compelling story and illustrates the value of your products in a way that is easy for customers to understand. Moreover, with the auto personalization feature, you can create a personalized experience for your prospects, as 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience.

You can also leverage advanced analytics with real-time Slack notifications, which will help you track and monitor the activities of your prospects. This helps your sales team focus on the right prospects, ultimately increasing your sales.

Get started with buyer led growth.

If your marketing is no longer working or you are stuck with stagnant results – it's time to change how you do business. The best way to do this is by starting a buyer led growth journey. This means that you're no longer pushing your product or service on people but instead helping them find out what they need and providing it for them.

This is a more sustainable approach that will help you to grow your business over time. It also means that you'll be able to keep up with the changing needs of your customers and stay ahead of the competition.

The key here is to show the value you bring to the table in a way that helps the customer to understand that they need you, rather than just being another vendor offering a product or service. This can be done in many ways, including showing them how your solution will solve their problems or improve their lives.

This is where Storylane comes in. It is a no-code demo-building software that helps you create compelling product demos that take a deep dive into the interface and features of your product without giving direct access to the product.

Moreover, with the features like auto personalization, rich editing features, and advanced analytics, you can create a demo that has the power to sell your product.

Want to see how you can drive more sales by shifting to buyer led content? Schedule a free demo, and we will show you how you can make a smooth shift to buyer led sales with an interactive demo. 

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