When Sense Making, sellers essentially move their chair to the customer’s side of the table, jointly “look out at the market” with the customer, noting the variety of good – if conflicting – information and possibilities, and admit it may seem like a mess, but to fear not. Sense Making, by contrast, is based on a market-in view from the customer’s perspective. Challenger, in this regard, is about powerfully sharing your capabilities with the customer. Remember, the critical distinction of Challenger is to lead TO your solution, not WITH your solution, by reframing how the customer thinks about their own business. Challenger, on one hand, is based on a supplier-out view, capturing how the best sales reps explain what makes their offerings uniquely valuable. Stated simply, Challenger and Sense Making operate independently. How does Sense Making differ from Challenger? In an era of too much good information, this Sense Making approach, engenders greater customer confidence, reduces customer skepticism, and most importantly, yields far greater likelihood of the customer purchasing an upgraded, premium offering from a supplier. Their posture is one of helping the customer elevate their perspective on the information they’ve encountered and to simply make sense of it. Great care is given to guide customers toward a clearer, more rationalized view. The Sense Making approach, in contrast, is predicated on the careful sharing of information. They are very forward with providing information, taking on a more aggressive sharing posture. Telling sales reps overtly share their opinion, stories, and anecdotes. Giving sales reps are characterized by a responsive posture, providing comprehensive information and operating under the assumption that more is better. Through a detailed survey asking B2B customers to reflect on their experiences with both winning and losing supplier sales reps, we were able to isolate three distinctive information-sharing approaches: Giving, Telling, and Sense Making. Knowing this, we set out to better understand how customers get value from today’s top sales reps. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but noteworthy nonetheless, we also found that customers who felt confident in the information on which they based their decision, as well as those who felt little skepticism toward any claims made by sales reps, ultimately made bigger and bolder purchase decisions. In other words, optimizing to higher customer confidence, and lower skepticism of sellers, is critical to sales success in today’s information-rich buying environment. Worse yet, the impact on sales outcomes was dramatic, with overwhelming information harming the likelihood of closing a high-quality sale reduced 54%, contradictory information reducing those odds 66%, and conflicting information on tradeoffs between vendors reducing those odds 33%. Half of customers claimed that the amount of trustworthy information was overwhelming, and 55% felt that making informed tradeoffs between vendors and their capabilities was difficult, based on the information encountered. We found 44% of customers reporting various information they encountered made contradictory claims. While that might seem like a good thing, we’re seeing this overabundance of good information seriously hampering the customer’s ability to make a purchase decision. Indeed, 89% of customers reported encountering high quality information in their purchase process. Improvements in data and analytics, content thought leadership, and sales messaging have resulted in a high-quality information set that now informs nearly any B2B purchase. However, this latest research highlights a new phenomenon - customers are not simply awash in information, but good, substantive, evidence-based, and highly credible information from suppliers and other third parties. This left the purchase process subject to navigating a maze of options, choices, and noise. Previous research we’d conducted on B2B customer buying behavior had shown us that customers often felt awash in too much information. In the time since we released this work, many organizations have asked us to help make sense of Sense Making, particularly in light of our work on Challenger.įor those unfamiliar with Sense Making, the idea originated from detailed analysis into nearly 1,200 B2B purchase interactions. Similar to our research on The Challenger Sale, which we first highlighted a decade ago, this research sheds light on what separates the best sales efforts from the rest. Just a couple months ago, Gartner’s Sales Practice released new research highlighting an unconventional approach that is striking a chord within the sales world: we call it Sense Making.
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