It’s been said that it’s impossible to find out what happens in a black hole because nothing can escape it.
If this is true, then black holes might just make the perfect analogy for what happens when Sales sends communications to a buyer. Someone at the buyer company downloads your ebook, views a demo video, they pick up a brochure at your booth, and then … well, then what?
No intel comes back, other than scattered anecdotal information. Did that someone share the video demo, brochure, webinar, or ebook with someone else? Was that person their assistant, their boss, or the manager next door? Did they consume the whole thing or bail out after a couple seconds? We don’t know.
So much of the time, what happens inside the buying group for a prospective customer is a complete mystery—a black hole. Forget that Sales is already coming late to the decision-making party—57% of the way through the buying group’s decision-making process (CEB). Even after we arrive on the scene, we still know relatively little about what’s happening inside their organization.
In Shelley Cernel’s recent KnowledgeTree post, “5 Ways to Improve Your B2B Customer Experience,” she highlights this massive blind spot and recommends a solution:
“B2B organizations must have the tooling in place to collect trusted, accurate, and meaningful information. A sales enablement tool can anticipate the outcome of a particular sales situation and proactively recommend content and selling strategies based on real-time data, best practice, and similar sales scenarios.”
Of course, technology holds the key to this issue—to broadcasting data back out of that inescapable black hole. But what will that technology look like?
DAM tools are already taking a swing at this problem, tracking the links that salespeople issue to prospects to download files. But another situation—and one which would collect far more information regarding who is sharing content, who is viewing content, when they’re viewing, and how long they view it—would be allowing content to be played or viewed in the cloud and providing places where the consumer of that content self-selects their role and other crucial information.
With this kind of tool in hand, Sales would have a real-time view into how buying groups use and share their content—and with that view, an unprecedented window into the mysterious mechanics of the buying group.
To learn how Consensus lets Sales see into the Buying Group Black Hole, click on the orange “Watch Demo” button below.
