Editor's Note: Enjoy this special encore post, which was one of our readers' favorites so far in 2020. It originally published on February 24, 2020.
Think about your last sales breakthrough – that time when, in the eyes of the buying committee at your account, your status seemed to change overnight. No longer were you just another salesperson. You were now an invaluable partner.
What changed?
Venturing a guess, it probably wasn’t any one thing you did, but a culmination of actions that tipped the scales in your favor. Venturing another guess, this change in perception likely happened after you strengthened yet another key relationship within the account. Venturing a third (and thankfully final) guess, more than any other salesperson, you made the buying committee members’ respective jobs easier.
“As hard as it is to sell in today’s world, it has become that much more difficult to buy,” says Brent Adamson, Distinguished Vice President at Gartner. “The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy.”
Here we’ll briefly touch on the evolution of the buying committee, including common roles you can expect to encounter. We’ll also dive into how you might use some of the features within LinkedIn Sales Navigator to position yourself as the easy-to-work-with, strategic partner today’s buying teams so desperately seek.
How Buying Committees are Evolving
Unless you’re just now entering the profession, you’re keenly aware that the days of selling to a singular buyer are now being recollected at the sales Smithsonian, next to the cold calling exhibit.
Though no longer a new phenomenon, buying committees continue to evolve in a few ways. Many are still adding members – it’s now common for buying teams at large enterprises and technology firms to include a dozen or more stakeholders. B2B buying committees are also experiencing a youth movement, with more and more digital natives holding sway over big purchasing decisions. Lastly, buying cycles are getting longer because more buying committees are taking a more rigorous, step-by-step approach. This movement also calls for greater clarity regarding the role each member is expected to play.
No seller likes to hear about longer sales cycles, but B2B salespeople can use this added structure and role clarity to their advantage. By learning what each buying committee’s decision-making workflow entails, who’s responsible for what, and what’s most needed, you can feel much more confident that each engagement attempt of yours will be viewed as both relevant and valuable. That is, with each tailored interaction, you’ll know you’re making it easier for each buying committee member to perform their role in purchasing.
Common Roles on a B2B Buying Committee
In creating our guide, Getting Closer to the Buying Committee, we connected with an actual buying committee at an actual company: Relativity Space. And while the work this company performs would be considered fairly advanced by most standards, the composition of their buying committee reflects that of most other technology firms, manufacturing firms, financial firms... you get the picture.
While working any given deal, B2B sellers should expect to encounter, at a minimum, the following roles:
- An IT leader who’s responsible for vetting the reliability of your solution and making sure it plays nicely with the company’s existing technology stack.
- A finance leader who must ensure that the monetary details of the deal align with the company’s long-term financial strategy.
- An operations leader who will take great care in making sure your solution can be seamlessly implemented in a way that doesn’t disrupt workflow, and once implemented, aids it.
- A supply-chain or procurement leader whose job it is to ensure each potential vendor’s fatal flaws are exposed before the purchase is made. This stakeholder typically does much of the negotiating as well.
- A c-suite leader. Involvement here may hinge on deal size and scope of impact. When involved, it’s normal for c-suite members to be swapped in or out based on how relevant the purchase is to their role. For instance, if you sell a technology solution, expect that the chief technology officer or an equivalent title will be involved.
Learning how each type of stakeholder tends to evaluate your type of solution can give you a leg up when engaging each directly. Understanding what each stakeholder at your target account specifically wants and needs, and then tailoring each engagement based on those specifics, is how today’s B2B salespeople separate themselves from competing sellers.
But how do you discover these details in the first place?
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to More Effectively Engage the Full B2B Buying Committee
Here we’ll run through a few micro-wins that routinely happen before a B2B sale comes to fruition. For each win, we’ll explain how the various features within LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you make it happen.
Mapping the Buying Committee
Use the Advanced Search feature filtered to your target account to gain insight into the company’s operational structure. This is a good way to make sure you’re engaging the right people while also giving you peace of mind that you’re not overlooking potentially pivotal stakeholders. Another way to do this is to visit the company’s LinkedIn Page and click through to the employees, though this tends to work better for mapping buying committees at smaller companies.
You can also ask one or two of your stronger connections for this type of information. It’s important to note, though, that having even a vague idea of the account’s structure going into these conversations can help guide your questions, ultimately making your discovery session much more fruitful.
Multiplying your Connections Within the Buying Committee
It’s common to have a connection at an account where the relationship hasn’t quite reached the point where your contact would feel comfortable introducing you to other stakeholders at the company. In these cases, finding different ways to “multi-thread” the account can mean better engagement and connection-building opportunities to other buying committee members in the future.
A good way to do this is via the TeamLink feature. Embedded in Sales Navigator, TeamLink points you toward promising contacts by automatically showing you how they’re connected to yourself or your colleagues.
Or, if you’ve mapped the buying committee and have a good relationship with a member, you can simply request an introduction to any other member (or multiple members) via Sales Navigator.
Gathering Actionable Insights About Contacts and the Account at Large
Any time you come across promising accounts and contacts, even if they’re not presently promising, save them. By building up your saved leads and saved accounts in Sales Navigator, you gain access to real-time updates and alerts regarding the people you want to engage, but currently lack a good reason for doing so. Eventually, one of those updates will give you a mutually beneficial reason to reach out.
Engaging Contacts and Accounts at Opportune Times
Good reasons for engaging can also be found via Sales Navigator’s new Data Validation feature. One constant with buying committees is change: 20% of decision makers change jobs every year. When these changes happen, you’ll learn about them right away because Data Validation syncs the contacts and accounts within your CRM with LinkedIn’s data, immediately flagging when a key contact leaves or enters an account. Learn about even more Data Validation alerts that can add greater insight to your outreach.
Engaging Contacts in Noticeable, Frictionless ways
The biggest part of getting noticed while at the same time being a pleasure to work with comes from getting all the other stuff right – understanding who the buying committee members are and what’s most important to each individual member, and then customizing your outreach accordingly.
But even when you get everything else right – and especially when you get everything else right – the last thing you want is for your outreach to go unnoticed. When your message has to be seen, using the messaging feature with Sales Navigator (better for existing connections) or sending a LinkedIn InMail can skyrocket the odds that your message gets read.
Often, our sales breakthroughs come when we suddenly see that we can be supremely helpful. By capitalizing on the features within Sales Navigator, you can be the long-awaited answer to your customers’ struggles to buy.
For more ways to make the buying teams at your target accounts merrier, subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Blog.
Topics: Sales trends
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