Authored by Chad Quinn, CEO & Co-Founder, Ecosystems
Toaster ovens. Our grandparents loved them. Now they’re back in style.
Bear with me. There’s an important lesson here about the old game in selling versus the new game. The old game focuses on trying to convince your customer to buy. The new game focuses on helping confirm how to help your customer decide. It transforms the seller into a decision coach and based on research increases their win rates by 3.4x.
Confidence is the name of this game—not the seller’s confidence in the product but the buyer’s confidence in the decision. When the playbook is anchored in the Ecosystems Value Validation Framework, the new-game seller is not using superiority claims to convince the customer to buy. Instead, the seller and customer are co-creating their way to a high-quality, low-regret decision.
Old Game: Toaster Ovens and Buyer Indecision
When you’re focused on trying to convince a customer of your product superiority, what happens inside the customer’s business? My family’s toaster oven experience provides a clue.
It started when my daughter told me, via TikTok video, that we absolutely had to get this amazing toaster oven that makes gourmet personal pan pizzas. I’m not a buying expert, and neither is your customer, but I was thrust into the buying journey.
First, there’s the search. Simple. Type “toaster oven” into Amazon, and—holy cow. I’m looking at over 4,000 toaster ovens. Each is the most amazing toaster oven of all time, better than all the rest in heat circulation and number of presets.
Before long, our buying committee of me and my daughter doubles with the addition of my two other daughters. That’s what buying committees do. They expand. Our new members say that we are not solving the right problem. We need an air fryer, too, because how else do you roast cauliflower and carrot sticks?
Now, we’re slogging through an entirely different category filled with thousands of toaster oven-air fryer combos. And then the CFO—a.k.a., my wife—speaks up. If any new appliance comes into our overloaded kitchen, another has to go. Counter space has suddenly become a pop-up key requirement. This creates a new set of problems that center around which older appliance must go along with political infighting about who’s supposed to clean the blender.
By now, the executive buyer—that would be me—is exhausted. We finally settle on a model, until we read the reviews. The four-star review. People love it. We are feeling good.
The one-star reviews. Tray doesn’t fit. Door jams. Now, not one member of the buying committee is happy.
Paralysis takes hold. The toaster oven goes where every Amazon purchase goes to die, stashed away in the “save for later” button.
We decide not to decide. Product superiority claims, sale prices, free shipping—none of it mattered.
And that is where the old game stumbles in today’s selling environment. If buying a simple toaster oven grinds to a halt, imagine the tangled web weaving behind the scenes when a business is buying enterprise technology.
To put the challenge in a real-life business context, I was asked recently by an enterprise salesperson how he could make a good last year into a great one this year. I looked at his closed-lost deals and found $2.5 million worth of time and effort lost to opportunities that stalled for one of two reasons. Either the pain of change outweighed the pain of the status quo or, more likely, the customer simply spun their wheels.
The deals stopped just short of the finish line. The problem? Old-game thinking. A belief, honed by centuries of salesmanship, that the customer needs confidence in the product. Superiority claims position the product as the best, the fastest, and the most effective.
Look again at that $2.5 million in lost costs. Phil’s quota was less than the actual cost incurred by playing the old game.
New-game thinking says that customers don’t lack confidence in your product. They lack confidence in their ability to make high-quality, low-regret decisions. It’s backed by these findings from Gartner research:
- Buyer confidence in their IT buys has degraded since 2019 from an already low 27 percent to an abysmal 17 percent in 2023. Buyers aren’t feeling good about themselves or their abilities to make smart decisions.
- In 2023, more than 60 percent of buyers regretted every IT purchase they made.
- As Matt Dixon said so aptly in The JOLT Effect, indecision is the carbon monoxide of sales. You can’t smell, taste, or feel indecision, but it’s there, and it kills the deal.
Of course, no buyer is going to sit with you and say, “I’m not confident.” It’s the seller’s job to recognize and reverse the three forces eroding customer confidence:
1. Decision complexity: Consider the B2B buying journey. On the surface, all is calm, moved along by four simple steps. Problem identification. Solution exploration. Requirements building. Supplier selection. Done, right? No way. Look beneath the surface, and there’s a spaghetti bowl’s worth of steps and missteps, misalignment, pop-up requirements, buying group turnover, unavailable data, and procurement hurdles. It’s the toaster oven search magnified. In every buying committee, up to 10 different stakeholders with different priorities and politics are jumping in with their thoughts.¹ I call this the long, hard slog for the seller, pitching to a buyer who’s not trained to shepherd a purchase through this morass.
2. Information overload: The data confirms what you already know. 77% of B2B buyers find supplier information trustworthy but overwhelming and 62% of B2B buyers find it trustworthy but contradictory.² In other words, you’re likable and honest enough, but all your white papers, ROI calculations, and testimonials are stacking up like yesterday’s dishes. Plus, the information is rife with conflicts. Whitepaper A lays out six concrete steps for problem resolution. Whitepaper B recommends skipping step and combining 5 and 6. One says zig. The other says zag. The customer freezes in place.
3. The value gap: Outcome uncertainty could be the most piercing problem of all, getting to the heart of buyer regret. Half of IT buyers aren’t confident that their purchase will deliver value.³ Are they getting their money’s worth? They just don’t know. Of the more than $3 trillion invested in digital transformation over the last three years, only 26 percent has delivered ROI.⁴ Throw it all into the hopper, and high customer indecision corresponds to win rates below 5 percent.5
The old game might as well be football played with stiff-arm blocks and leather helmets.
New Game: Introducing the Value Validation Framework
There are more definitions of business value than there are toaster ovens on Amazon.
I think “value” is one of the most abused and misused words in modern business.
Value does not live in a PowerPoint deck, a proposal you give your customer, or an ROI calculation, Value is an experience.
It is contained and shaped by the Value Validation Framework, a five-part guide for transforming the seller from a product representative to a decision coach:
The seller who aligns the buyer with these five decision elements instills confidence in the customer and in that fractious buying group. No more arguments about who's supposed to clean the blender, because the decision framework is clear to everyone.
The decision coach relies on six tactics that lead the group to a high-quality, low-regret decision:
1. Align the stakeholders
Everyone agrees on and embraces the common objectives from the beginning. A colleague tells the story about a CRO for a medical device equipment provider whose team single-threaded on just one objective from the Chief Medical Officer at a hospital. They created a bulletproof business case around this single objective and how the enhanced medical procedure would save lives. Off it goes to the buying committee, and it loses out to—drumroll, please—a parking lot. Seems the Chief Marketing Officer did a better job aligning the group to the hospital’s brand improvement when families in distress had instant access to parking. A classic case of how a deal can die if we single-thread around one objective.
2. Prompt Exploration
As the seller, you’re accustomed to implementing this solution. After all, it’s your job. To the buyer, implementation is once-in-a-lifetime, fraught with risk. Inexperienced buyers don’t even know the questions to ask. The decision coach supports with advice and insights on shaping the product to suit the buyer’s unique differentiators.
3. Bound the discussion
Focus the conversation on toaster ovens, not blenders. Stick to the top three tactics or a couple of key metrics that can move the needle.
4. Create customer memory
The seller and buyer co-create those original objectives, tactics, metrics, targets, and timeline in the Value Validation Framework which is embedded into the Ecosystems software, on the record as unswerving guideposts.
5. Silo busting
A fully aligned digital collaboration process in the Ecosystems software welcomes input from multiple stakeholders and is all encased in the Value Validation Framework.
6. Adapt to evolving content
Objectives change. Tactics adjust. Targets move. All of this gets memorialized instantly in the shared plan between customer and supplier in the Ecosystems software.
This is the Value Validation Framework. Five key decision elements, plus six distinct practices, engender a world-class, low-risk experience around value by imbuing confidence in your customer.
The seller gains confidence, too—and wins more. You’re confirming each step as a decision coach. You’re not trying to convince the buyer of anything. No more superiority claims that, to the buyer, sound just like the competitors’ claims.
Still, why move from convincing to confirming?
Because the research is incredibly compelling. Ecosystems reviewed 2,960 opportunities across five different cloud providers. The study followed the full sales life cycle, studying buyers’ and sellers’ behaviors from interest through to close.
The results? When customers and sellers use the Value Validation Framework to co-create objectives, tactics, metrics, targets, and timelines, the process yields a 3.4x increase in win rates, and the customer is confident in the decision.
Takeaways
You’re reading this because you want to create massive differentiation. It’s time to adopt the new game. Remember that:
- The biggest driver of purchase likelihood is customer confidence and their ability to make high-quality, low-regret decisions on behalf of their companies.
- Sellers have the power to dramatically boost customers’ self-confidence by differentiating themselves as decision coaches and, as a result, driving bigger deals, faster.
- Adopting the Value Validation Framework is research-proven to build buyer confidence. It conquers the barriers of decision complexity, information overload, and the value gap by aligning all stakeholders around key goals.
The future looks bright for customers and sellers, especially when buying technology isn’t dreaded but is embraced for its power to drive innovation. If you’re ready for a 3.4x jump in win rates, get into the new game.
Connect with us for an introduction to the Value Validation Framework, and co-create your way to confidence.
Sources
¹ Gartner Research (2018)
² HBR, Sensemaking for Sales by Brent Adamson
³ Gartner Research, The Pessimism Problem by Hank Barnes
⁴ An IDC Perspective: Driving the Right Conversation with the CxO in 2021 and Beyond. (2020)
⁵ JOLT Effect, Matt Dixon, Ted McKenna
