April Dunford: evaluation

Transcript context

…I mentioned a lot of this comes from doing this enough times. You get to understand where people generally agree, this is a problem. We all know this is our problem. And it's unlikely that you're going to have to throw everything out because someone just decides, "No, this isn't for us." I think one of the biggest shift maybe from this framework is that you go into a teaching mindset. It's not just like, "Here's our product, it's going to solve your problem." It's more, "Here's what's happening broadly. Maybe you don't have the time to do the research we've done. Here's what we found." And then that builds trust, I think in you as a company and as a leader, a salesperson. And then they're like, "Okay, see, they see the world the way we do." Or, "I've just realized something new. I never thought of it that way." And then, "Okay, cool. How do they think about the solution to this?" Right. One of the key things to think about in all of this stuff that I think we don't think about enough as software vendors is that customers will come to us and they've done their homework. They've Googled around and they've looked at stuff, but that doesn't mean they have perfect understanding of the market. In fact, it's usually far from it. If we think about it, most of the folks in B2B software, most of the time, your buyer has never purchased software like yours before. This is the first time they've done it. And their bosses come to them and said, "Hey, figure this out. Go find us a CRM and look at all the CRMs and figure it out." And the buyers looking at it going, "Geez, I don't know, man. There's a lot of CRMs out there, and I'm looking at all the things. I'm on G2 Crowd and there's 24 CRMs in the top right corner. And I'm looking at Gardner Group and I'm looking at this thing and I'm actually doing my research, but I'm overwhelmed. What I don't have is a clear picture of the market. What are the different approaches to this problem? Forget about products. What are the approaches to the problem? Where do the products fit in those approaches? What's a good solution for me look like? What should be my purchase criteria?" That's really hard for buyers to figure out. And in general, in a sales process, we're not doing anything to help the buyer figure that out, even though we know it. We eat, sleep and breathe this market. We spend all day looking at competitors and thinking about this stuff and whatever. But we've got this idea, "Well, we shouldn't do this because first of all, we can't talk about the other guys that we'd be seen as bashing our competition, and that's bad. " The other thing is, even if we did give our opinion, nobody would trust us because we're biased. But if you look at the research on this stuff, the research doesn't support that. The research actually says what B2B software buyers want in a sales interaction is perspectives on the market and help weighing their options. And we don't do that. We're just like, "Here's our stuff. You figure it out, it's up to you. You figure it out." And so as a result, what we get are these buyers come in, they're overwhelmed with all this information. They come in and they sit in our sales process, and we overwhelm them even more with more features and more information. And what they're really worried about is, "What if I make a bad choice here? I've never done this before and I'm going to have to recommend to my boss. And if I make the wrong suggestion to my boss, maybe my boss thinks I'm stupid. Or maybe I buy something and the whole department hates me because awful to use. Or maybe I pick something and it's just bad software and then bad things happen for the business, maybe I get fired." And so the data on this shows that for B2B, 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. omething and it's just bad software and then bad things happen for the business, maybe I get fired." And so the data on this shows that for B2B, 40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. And then when you look at, if you scratch on that data, the majority of those aren't saying, "Well, I'm not making a decision to buy something new because the old thing we were doing is better." That's not true at all. In fact, the majority of the... The old thing we were doing is better, that's not true at all. In fact, the majority of those is they couldn't figure out how to make a choice confidently. So what they did was they just went to their boss and said, "You know what? Now's not a good time. Let's not do it now. Let's do it next year. Let's just delay it," because that is the safe risk-free thing for that person who's on the hook to make the decision to do.…

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