The numbers vary depending on your source, but the essential facts are the same: B2B buyers are spending significant time online researching your product or services before they engage with you. This requires sales reps to play a dramatically different role as they seek to acquire and maintain customer relationships: less pitchman, more problem solver.

This was precisely the subject of our recent webinar with Forrester Research’s Peter O’Neill. We’ve included some key take-aways below in case you missed it.

1.  The “Empowered Buyer” is forcing sales reps to rethink the traditional buying journey and accept that they are no longer in control of key information about their product or service.

Because buyers can find increasing amounts of information about your solution online – from your web site, from third-party sites that offer reviews, for example, or from their peers and colleagues—there has been a power shift from the seller to the buyer. As a result, when buyers are ready to engage with a sales rep, they desire a very different kind of interaction. This trend is only expected to continue as Millennials become the workforce majority.

2.  Buyers still want to engage with sellers in specific circumstances, particularly when complexity or cost is high.

 According to Forrester’s own research, despite the prevalence of information online, there are times when a buyer wants (and needs) to speak to a sales representative. These are directly related to both pre-sale and post-sales complexity, including pricing and implementation.

3.  Buyer executives are dissatisfied with the current dynamics between themselves and vendor salespeople. When asked if vendor salespeople were well prepared for meetings with them across several dimensions, buyers consistently gave them poor ratings.

While vendors were rewarded for knowledge about their own company and products, they were seen as lacking understanding of the customer’s role and responsibilities, and were unprepared to address specific questions or issues related to the customer’s business. And the lowest score? Vendors had few or no relevant case studies to share that would support product claims or demonstrate value achieved by similar organizations.

4.  Digital self-sufficiency has the potential to displace B2B salespeople who are not prepared to make the shift to a more value-added relationship.

 The number of B2B salespeople has actually been in a slow decline for 20 years, but the shifts we’ve already cited are poised to see this downturn increase dramatically. Forrester is predicting the loss of 1 million sales jobs by 2020. There will still be plenty of sales jobs available, but sales enablement leaders need to act now to help their reps transition away from the most vulnerable archetypes seen below (the Order Takers and Explainers) to Consultants who can deliver the value-added conversations and business insights today’s buyers demand.


5.  Traditional sales development techniques are no longer sufficient to help sellers move successfully from pitchmen to problem solvers.

In his webinar remarks Peter argued that, in fact, there will be a percentage of your sales team that may never be suited to a more consultative selling style, but your chances of successfully moving the majority of your team into the future increases significantly when you begin to think about sales development not as a one-time training event, but rather as a continuous process supported by strategic reinforcement, coaching and content that drives long-term behavior change. Many of Qstream’s customers are doing this effectively with support from our sales capabilities platform, including the real-time data we deliver via manager dashboards and sales fluency heatmaps.

Ready to jump-start your team’s journey to become more consultative, insightful sellers? Contact us to get the conversation started, or review our library of customer success stories.