Buyer Enablement — Who's Really Making the Sale? (The Answer Might Surprise You)

Buyer Enablement — Who’s Really Making the Sale? (The Answer Might Surprise You)

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Who actually makes the sales in your sales process?

  1. The internal champion
  2. Benefits of having an internal champion
  3. Ensuring your internal champion performs well

Your B2B sales reps are the people who start out your sale—but they’re not necessarily the ones that close it. Even with the use of sales force automation, your clients would usually be the strongest driving factor for all your sales. In reality, your customers are going to do more to sell your products or services than your sales reps ever will.

No matter how much sales engineering you put into play, without a person within your client’s buyer group that truly wants your product, the chances of closing the sale is low. These “internal champions” will do wonders for your sales process. They’ll help sell your products and services to other stakeholders even when you’re off the clock!

To learn more about them, our team has put together their best tips and tricks!

The Internal Champion

The Internal Champion

Basically, the internal champion is your guy on the inside — kind of like a spy. They’re someone that’s part of the buyer group that likes your company and loves your product or service.

They genuinely believe that your product or service is the best option for their company, be it because of necessity or because of overall better sales engineering. This confidence in your products will drive them to make sure that the rest of the buying group feels the same way.

Finding someone like that in a buyer group is crucial to increase the chances of making a sale. By putting your sales rep into contact with such a buyer, you’ll be able to provide them with all the information they need to have about your product or service.

By equipping someone in the buyer group with all the data about your products, you’re effectively creating your own “internal champion”.

This results in a fully informed buyer that will spread the information, along with their enthusiasm for your service, to all the other stakeholders.

Benefits of Having an Internal Champion

There are some B2B suppliers that make the grave mistake of assuming that the selling process for their product or service starts and stops whenever their sales reps begin and end the conversation with buying groups. These people probably don’t know that much about how the sales funnel works—don’t be like them.

Keep in mind that most of your client’s buying process happens behind closed doors. An outsider such as your sales rep will almost never be a part of such meetings where the buying group wants to converse only amongst themselves. In these situations, having an internal champion is vital to continue the sales process within.

Chances are, your competitors will probably have internal champions as well. If you don’t have anyone in the buying group who will take a stand for your product or service, you’ll quickly be left behind.

In any conversation, the voices and opinions of buyers will always be far more compelling to their colleagues than those of an external sales rep. Connections will always bring about favor and outsiders will breed skepticism to some.

Because of this, empowering your internal champion with all the resources they need to understand and sell your product or service to others — a process we call Buyer Enablement — will help you close deals faster than if you were to rely solely on your sales and marketing teams.

Ensuring Your Internal Champion Performs Well

Ensuring Your Internal Champion Performs Well

You have to make sure that your internal champion has a decision-making position at the very least. Anything less can still be useful, but they won’t be able to sell your product or service. Go for the members of the actual buying group!

Next, you should provide them with all the necessary information regarding your product or service — including the negatives. They should understand all of it and be able to explain it to the other stakeholders. Take note that some VPs or CEOs hate getting hard-sold, so they tend not to meet with sales reps anymore.

If your internal champion can present your product or service, advantages and disadvantages included, and still convince the buying group that it’s the best option, then their credibility will greatly increase!

Lastly, equip them with information that not only appeals to them but to the entire buying group as well. This can increase the likelihood of your internal champion garnering support from within that will surely increase the chances of you making a sale!

Key Takeaway

For some, the sales process can be difficult and tiring. For those of you who are looking for a change of pace, we suggest looking into our demo automation platform, Consensus Enterprise. It thoroughly researches the interests and motives of stakeholders to automate a custom demonstration of your product. This ensures that each buying group experiences the best representation of your product available at the time!

For more information on what Consensus Enterprise can do for you, click here!

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