Why Multichannel Buying Experiences Aren’t Delivering Results

Commercial teams continue to make multichannel experience more simple and seamless in hopes of more quality deals. But our research shows it’s more important to help buyers better understand what they need and how a purchase will drive value. Sales and marketing must align to choreograph opportunities for buyers to learn more about themselves during the purchase process.

Download now: How to Deepen Customer Learning With Sales and Marketing Alignment

Today’s buyers often rely on multiple channels to complete a purchase. But despite sales and marketing efforts to offer a seamless multichannel buying experience, this inadvertently stifles customer learning. Buyers are unfulfilled by both digital and human-led channels — and companies are failing to secure high-margin deals.

• Seventy-five percent of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, but 22% are more likely to regret self-service digital commerce purchases.

• Buyers whose purchase decisions were primarily led by sales reps were 63% less likely to complete a high-quality deal, than those who purchased by self-navigating or through a hybrid approach.

• When buyers experience a self-reflective learning path, they understand their own needs better, recognize potential mistakes, identify alternative approaches and evaluate progress toward their goal. This process builds decision confidence.

• Customers who report high decision confidence are over 10 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal than those reporting average decision confidence.

Creating customer learning paths requires a unified approach across sales and marketing to orchestrate customer learning across channels.

• Commercial organizations must remove silos between sales and marketing, and integrate around core activities and goals.

• Organizations that have coalesced around core areas/goals have shown notable commercial outcomes and results, such as increased lead volume, close rates and revenue.

1. Evaluate your current commercial maturity, in collaboration with marketing partners, across seven dimensions: audience understanding, messaging, measurement, revenue enablement, process design, customer data and systems.

2. Develop a roadmap that outlines prioritized focus areas for tighter sales and marketing integration.

3. Launch a targeted strategy to address at least one gap in maturity through a process, motion or tool.