In order to feel confident in the purchase decisions they make on behalf of their company, B2B buyers need to perceive clear and meaningful differences between the supplier they choose and the suppliers they don’t.
While the point seems self-evident, the actual differences between one supplier and another are actually anything but. In fact, they’re typically quite nuanced.
Of course, that’s one of the key jobs of a good sales professional: to help customers see and appreciate those nuanced differences as meaningfully important. Meaningful enough to win the deal and command a premium.
But the real challenge is most modern B2B buyers choose to engage those sales professionals as little as possible, preferring instead to learn on their own through self-serve digital channels.
As Nicholas Care teaches us in his book, The Shallows, however, the world of digital is a superficial world of skimming and scanning. It is definitively not the world of nuance.
What happens next? Take a guess. What do we do about it? Here are some suggestions.
