The Best B2B Selling Strategy

Top organizations succeed with sense making sellers

Sense making seller insights

Today’s customers have access to high-quality information and rely less on sellers for data and insights across a purchase. This buying environment places significant pressure on sales leaders to evolve how they influence customer purchase decisions. It is essential to figure out what the best selling strategy is, when customers are doing so much of their learning independently

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    Organizations with the Sense Making sales approach win

    Optimizing your B2B selling strategy to increase customer confidence, and lower skepticism of sellers and their claims, is critical to sales success today. The Sense Making sales strategy increases the chances of closing high-quality, low-regret deals by connecting customers to relevant resources, clarifying information complexity, and collaborating in customer learning.

    Sense making insights you can use

    The winning formula for closing high-quality, low-regret deals is to increase customers’ confidence in information and reduce their skepticism of sellers. Heads of sales must adapt to this selling strategy to help customers navigate, prioritize and make sense of available information.

    The world is crowded with good information

    Customers are awash in good, evidence-based, highly credible information from suppliers and other parties. Discover how improvements in data and analytics, thought leadership and sales messaging have resulted in high-quality information that informs most B2B purchases.

    Watch anon-demand webinar讨论了如何关闭更多质量协议的聪明人h the sense making approach.
    Pie chart showing that 89 percent of B2B buyers indicate that the information they encountered during the purchase process was of high quality. Neutral occupies 7 percent while Disagree occupies 4 percent.
    条形图显示信息质量的影响y and volume on winning a high-quality, low-regret deal.

    Too much good information has negative impacts

    Buyers, overwhelmed by information, are struggling to make purchase decisions, and this indecision trickles down to suppliers. 55% of customers say that making informed trade-offs between vendors and their capabilities is difficult based on the information encountered during the buying process.

    Accesskey buyer enablement insights.
    条形图显示信息质量的影响y and volume on winning a high-quality, low-regret deal.

    Sellers take one of three approaches

    In response to rising customer demands for information, sellers respond by taking one of three distinctive sales strategies to information sharing: Giving, Telling, or Sense Making.

    Read key insights in Gartner's 'How B2B Sales Reps Maximize Customer Interactions'.
    An illustration showing three selling approaches to engaging customers with information. Giver:

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    How Gartner helps CSOs with B2B selling strategy

    Article

    The Sense Making approach leads to high-quality deals

    Gartner data shows that sellers using a Sense Making sales approach were significantly more likely to reduce skepticism and build confidence with buyers, compared to the Giving and Telling approaches.

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    Article

    Sense Making means sellers connect, simplify and support

    In a world of more high-quality information and advice, Sense Makers focus on less. They accomplish this during preparation and customer interactions by connecting customers to relevant resources, clarifying the complexity of information, and collaborating in customer learning.

    Read article
    Blog

    How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

    Similar to our research on The Challenger Sale, the Sense Maker research sheds light on what separates the best B2B sales strategies from the rest. In the time since we released this work, many organizations have asked us to help make sense of Sense Making, particularly in light of our work on Challenger.

    View blog post
    We’re specifically looking at how we enable our buyers to progress in their decision process. In fact, Gartner is helping us to think through what that looks like in terms of our organization and what that looks like in terms of the tools and process that we use to enable them.

    Jenny Lee

    VP, Global Sales Operations and Strategic Initiatives, Ellucian

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