In today’s fast-paced business environment, the buying process for companies can become increasingly complex. Your well-intentioned lead qualification process can turn out to be a terrible customer experience when your sales model doesn’t meet the requirements of today’s buyers.
To meet customers’ high expectations, it’s important to reduce the complexity of your B2B buying process. By doing so, you can improve your overall efficiency and increase customer satisfaction.
In this blog post, we’ll share four ways to boost your sales by making it easier for customers to buy from you.
1. Simplify the sales process
One way to reduce complexity in the B2B buying process is to simplify the sales process and make it more user-friendly.
Companies rarely consider the sales process from the customer’s perspective. In many cases, companies’ CRM pipelines are filled with “gates,” where a sales rep can’t move forward unless they’ve performed an action required in the sales process. While this is good for a sales rep-initiated process, it’s rarely the right way to work with a buyer who’s further along in their journey. For example, a buyer who has already familiarized themselves with the product might get put off when a sales rep runs through their standard questioning process.
By simplifying your sales process and reducing the steps a customer needs to take, you can offer a much better buying experience.
Additionally, companies can train their sales team to provide clear and concise information to potential buyers, which can help to reduce the amount of time and effort that buyers need to spend on research and decision-making.
2. Offer self-service options
Another way to reduce complexity in B2B buying is to offer self-service options. This can be done by offering clear and transparent pricing on your website, as well as providing detailed product information and specifications. By doing so, you help customers save time in the buying process and make more confident buying decisions.
It used to be difficult to showcase pricing for complex products, but nowadays, you can easily build product configurators that let your buyers customize the exact product or service they need and get the pricing information.
A product configurator is a software tool that allows buyers to create customized quotes for products or services based on their specific needs. One of the main benefits of configurators is that they provide buyers with real-time pricing information. By allowing buyers to select different options and features, configurators can automatically calculate the total cost of the product or service. This saves buyers time and effort, as they no longer need to contact multiple vendors to request quotes or manually calculate prices.
3. Make requesting a quote a better experience
We’ve likely all been in this situation before: after doing some research for a product or service you need, you find a company that seems to offer a great solution. You fill out the “Contact us” form (or try to chat with the bot), only to be ghosted by the sales teams—you’re stuck waiting to hear back about your request.
Product configurators make requesting a quote a much better experience for customers. By allowing buyers to build and request customized quotes, product configurators ensure that buyers are getting exactly what they need, while also helping sellers understand buyers’ specific requirements.
Customers get the pricing information they need on their own terms, and sales reps’ don’t need to go through back-and-forth calls and emails to agree on a price. This helps to build transparency and trust between you and your customers, and increase customer satisfaction.
4. Enable faster reordering
Nothing is as frustrating as needing to talk to a sales rep when all you want to do is complete a simple reorder, whether it’s for exactly the same product or a slightly different one.
When it comes to reordering, 86% of B2B buyers prefer using self-service tools rather than talking to a sales representative, according to McKinsey. By making reordering and repeat purchasing easier for your customers, you save your sales reps time and enable a better experience for your existing customers.
Selling online doesn’t have to be hard. Join the waiting list for HeadQ—the easy-to-use platform tailored to how you sell—and start reducing complexity in your B2B buying process.