What is Buyer Enablement?
Buyer enablement is the provision of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary for making a purchase. Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy by offering prescriptive advice and practical support, making the buying process easier to navigate and complete.
Why Does Buyer Enablement Matter?
The Complexity of the B2B Buying Journey
In a survey of over 250 B2B customers, Gartner found that 77% rated their purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult. This complexity is largely due to the abundance of high-quality information available. Typically, a buying group involves six to ten stakeholders, each consulting four to five sources of information that must be reconciled.
Additionally, 95% of buying groups report revisiting decisions at least once as new information emerges.
Suppliers That Simplify the Process Win Big
Customers want information that helps simplify the purchase process. Suppliers who provide such information are rewarded. Gartner research shows that customers are three times more likely to make a larger purchase with less regret when suppliers provide helpful information to advance the purchase process. This type of information is known as “buyer enablement.”
Need to Assess your Sales Teams Health?
Evaluate 21 Sales Competencies ->
Supporting the Completion of Buying Jobs
“Buying jobs” are distinct tasks that customers must complete to make a purchase. Through interviews with hundreds of B2B buyers, Gartner identified six buying jobs:
- Problem Identification: “We need to do something.”
- Solution Exploration: “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
- Requirements Building: “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
- Supplier Selection: “Does this do what we want it to do?”
- Validation: “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
- Consensus Creation: “We need to get everyone on board.”
For each job, suppliers can support the completion through specific, tactical ways.
B2B Buying Jobs
Problem identification
Solution Exploration
Requirements Building
Supplier Selection
Validation
Consensus Creation
Source: Gartner
Minimum Standards for Buyer Enablement
At a minimum, buyer enablement must be:
- Relevant to the specific challenges buyers face
- Easy for customers to use quickly and effectively
- Useful for customers in accomplishing the intended buying job
- Credible and backed by data and facts
The best buyer enablement content is also shareable, aligns with customers’ emotional needs, provides confidence, and highlights the supplier’s unique differentiators.
Buyer Enablement Design Principles
At minimum, buyer enablement content must be:
Relevant
Easy
Useful
Credible
The best buyer enablement content also:
Is Sharable
Provides Confidence
Aligns to Customers' Emotional Needs
Leads Back to your Unique Differentiators
Source: Gartner
Forms of Buyer Enablement Content
Buyer enablement content can take many forms:
Calculator
Provides a structured way to analyze data.
Diagnostic
Offers a framework for assessing performance or identifying options.
Connector
Helps stakeholders identify and establish common ground.
Recommender
Provides prioritized options for a purchase task based on customer inputs.
Advisor
Guides customers through discrete purchase activities.
Benchmark
Offers hard-to-find data for peer comparison.
Simulator
Demonstrates how the solution will work in the customer’s context.
Buyer Enablement Boosts Seller Performance
Buyer enablement alleviates the frontline sales force’s burden of figuring out how to drive customer value by placing that effort within the organization, ensuring greater quality and consistency. While sellers remain crucial in delivering this information, the bar is much lower to deliver buyer enablement than to create it on the spot. This allows organizations to build world-class customer interactions without needing to build world-class sales experts.
If the goal of sales leaders is to increase reps’ ability to drive high-value customer interactions, then equipping them with the right information is the key to success.
