According to Gartner, buyers spend only 17% of their time with salespeople in the B2B sales process. This includes all vendors.
When I first read this, I was really surprised and thought that buying behavior has changed massively in the last few years.
Then I saw that the study was from 2017.
Of course, buying behavior has changed a lot because of the Internet. Also, especially for established solutions, tech sales reports from Gartner, Forrester or customer reviews on various portals play a big role.
This will become even more important in the future, because various studies show that younger people have a different buying behavior and do not like to spend much time with salespeople.
Regardless of any trends, I wonder how I, as a salesperson, can enable my customers and prospects to make a purchase decision when I am not there.
I think one answer is to provide the prospect with resources. From presentations to recorded demo videos and short loom recordings that specifically address the customer’s open questions.
Since the study is from 2017, the time spent with sales reps will probably be even lower in 2024.
As you said, prospects don’t really want to talk to sales reps to learn about products anymore. They use other media for that.
I think another problem is that more and more SaaS products are basically identical. The differences are often not big enough to “surprise” the educated buyer.
I think that’s why the “expert status” of salespeople is becoming more and more important. In addition to preparing them with smart resources, I think it is also important to show up early in the sales cycle with your own point of view. If you know enough about your buyer’s industry and come with your own point of view to challenge them, they may be armed with something for their internal discussions that they had not thought of.
I have tried to draw conclusions from the study and now do much longer follow-ups in which I share many resources. When possible, I also try to be multi-threaded and send different people resources that are relevant to them. Since I use multiple tracking links, the result is that many resources are used, sometimes even weeks after the meeting. My highlight was an email with content that was distributed internally and opened over 200 times.
All of this fits into the narrative that for new, fast-growing SaaS companies/start-ups, the founder is also the brand that generates significant inbound traffic.