What is buyer enablement? Buyer enablement is the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase.
Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy by providing them with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete.
In a survey of more than 250 B2B customers, Gartner found that 77% of them rated their purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult.
The complexity of making a purchase decision can be largely attributed to the abundance of high-quality information available to buyers. The typical buying group involves six to 10 stakeholders, each of whom have consulted four to five sources of information that they must then deconflict together.
What’s more, 95% of buying groups report having to go back and revisit decisions at least once as new information emerges.
What customers truly want in this complex buying environment is information that helps them simplify the purchase process.
And suppliers who can provide them with that information will be rewarded. In fact, Gartner research shows that customers are three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret when suppliers provide information perceived as helpful in advancing the purchase process.
We call this type of information “buyer enablement.”
“Buying jobs” are distinct sets of discrete tasks that customers must satisfactorily complete in order to make a purchase. Through interviews with hundreds of B2B buyers, Gartner identified six buying jobs:
For any given job, there are a number of specific, tactical ways that suppliers can support job completion.
At a minimum, buyer enablement must be:
The best buyer enablement will also be shareable, align to customers’ emotional needs, provide confidence and lead back to supplier’s unique differentiators.
Does your content meet the standards to be considered buyer enablement? Use our audit tool to find out.
Buyer enablement content can take many forms:
Provides a simple, structured way to analyze data
Provides customers with a useful framework for assessing performance or identifying their options
Enables stakeholders to identify and establish common ground
Provides a clear, prioritized set of options in a particular purchase task based on customer inputs
Coaches customers through discrete purchase activities
Provides customers with hard-to-find data for peer comparison
Demonstrates how the solution will work in the customer’s context
Buyer enablement lifts the frontline sales force’s burden of figuring out how to drive customer value and places that effort inside the organization, where quality and consistency can be assured to far greater effect.
Sellers are still a critical force in delivering this information, but the bar is far lower to deliver buyer enablement than create it in the moment. This allows organizations to build world-class customer interactions without necessarily having to build world-class sales experts.
If the goal of the sales leader is to increase reps’ ability to drive high-value customer interactions‚ then equipping them with the right information is the recipe for success.
