The Engagement Gap: Top 4 Factors Influencing Buyer Purchase Decisions and How Sellers Stack Up w/Andy Springer (Rain Group)

By Tom Pisello | October 25, 2021

When Tom initially came across some research from Rain Group about the growing engagement gap between buyer and seller he was floored, and you will be too.

The results illuminated the four top factors influencing buyer purchase decisions, and unfortunately, just how sellers are falling short now that we are all virtual selling.

If you are a sales or sales enablement leader, this interview with Andy Springer, the Chief Client Officer at RAIN Group and most recently the Author of Amazon Bestseller “Virtual Selling”, is an absolute must listen. Here are a few memorable thoughts he shared:

“A lot of work I had done with rain in the five years-six years leading up to the output to this research showed me that Particularly in larger organizations We don’t know our customer as well as we think we do. And a lot of the root cause issues that I see in when we are undertaking sales transformations inside midsize and large enterprise organizations is that we don’t spend enough time in that Deep discovery of concerns, once, and needs of our buyers. We move to solution way too quickly, and we miss so much that could seriously impact our opportunity to more effectively understand and then more effectively solution in order to position ourselves to win the business. And then, when you bring that into a virtual world, and a lot of sellers are probably out there and listening to this podcast right now, virtual selling has been around for a long time. We didn’t invent it. It’s been there for a very long time and various different forms. It’s the different dynamics that are at play in terms of the environmental factors that force us to sell in a different way virtually than we do face-to-face, whether we like it or not.“

How do you get discovery right in this new virtual environment?

“So we talk in the book in terms of two critical areas that sit across these stages of the conversation that we’re talking about, or stages of the selling journey and the buying journey. And I think the two areas that come to mind in terms of being deliberate and they show up really strongly in the research and they connect with what we share in the book is engagement. How do we keep our buyers engaged through needs discovery, through solution-ing, through ROI, and demonstrate to them that we are listening throughout that? So, engagement is critical. You need to think in terms of how many people am I going to invite to my virtual needs discovery meeting? What we found was, there is a direct correlation between a drop in engagement throughout virtual selling conversations correlating to the volume of people you have in those conversations.”

Check out the full episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1NDgcf0q0FmtR5r77q3w8e

#virtualselling #remoteselling #digitalselling #salesenablement #engagementgap #valueselling #valueacceleration

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