We entered a new age of the internet in the last 12 months, with AI now being fully integrated into the search engine. It’s not a search engine we are going to anymore, it’s an answer engine and both reps and go-to-market teams need to adapt. There are plenty of changes already happening with this shift, but how we sell and where we meet the buyer is worthy of an immediate revisit.
Up to 72% of buyers don’t engage with a salesperson until they’ve done what they feel is an adequate amount of their own research and as little as 7% of today’s sales cycle consists of actually speaking with a salesperson. Once a meeting is scheduled with an inbound lead, it’s safe to say they’ve read the reviews, got their AI summary, talked to a peer, skimmed the websites, maybe watched a demo video at 1.5x speed.
Your “discovery call” is often just a formality wrapped around a decision that’s already been made and often times this decision is not you.
These numbers and examples will vary based on transaction size, industry, etc however all industries are seeing this effect. A close friend of mine is a car dealer and I asked him recently, “How often does someone walk in the door randomly with no intention to buy but then walk out with a car?” His response was that “Probably 85% of buyers these days, by the time they walk in they already know what they’re doing and they’re pretty much there to ask some basic questions, look it over and pick it up.”
Going off these numbers plus my own sample size (approximately 1500 competitive demos) it’s a safe estimate that 50% of the time we meet with an inbound lead, their mind is already pretty made up on going with someone else. Conceding 50% of our inbound leads is something few can afford. So how do you beat the odds? How can we get into that 50% and get at least some of them to change their mind. Cutting this 50% down to 40% would likely make or break our entire year. After reviewing all competitive product demonstrations with a review of results, it comes down to three things, in this order:
A Compelling and Different Value Proposition. Not a singular feature we think we have that the others don’t. Not “we’re the leader in X.” A structural, foundational belief that our product was built on that the competitors are not. This is often articulated with phrases like “The clients who choose us are looking to keep it much simpler.” “Our belief is different, we design the platform for the companies who want to completely eliminate errors.” The foundation for this is in one of the best marketing discussions you’ll ever see, The famous “Start with Why” discussion linked here. To make it effective, this structural difference needs to have….(see #2)
Relevance to them, specifically. A differentiated value prop that doesn’t map to their actual situation or solving their problem is just noise or a hail mary. It has to land on something they already feel, not something you wish they felt. What are their priorities and how can our foundational difference serve them better.
Direct delivery to the Decision Maker. Differentiation that never reaches the DM might as well not exist. I’ve watched brilliant messaging die in a middle manager’s inbox more times than I can count. If you’re not meeting with the decision maker, (which most of the time we aren’t, especially in a diligence stage), we need to inspire our contact to come to the table internally and basically say “I may have found something interesting.”
Everything else, the rapport, the follow-up is table stakes; it does not win the deal.
If you want to actually move a number that’s already 72% set against you, it’s not a matter of polishing your pitch but instead asking: who do we truly serve the best, how do we do this? How could this matter to them? And is it reaching the person who can say yes?