How to Ease Buying Friction and Capture More Commercial Wins

For commercial leaders looking to make 2024 their benchmark year, winning over buyers seems increasingly difficult. They’re not alone in thinking so: most CEOs we spoke to agree that external buyer factors are the biggest challenges to commercial productivity. They cite unpredictable changes that occur in the buying process, threatening to reset all buying progress.

This new trend ­– we term it “reset buying” – has introduced and amplified buying friction at an unprecedented scale, slowing decisions and grinding deals to a halt. However, based on our findings, the greatest threat to commercial productivity is, in fact, the commercial strategies themselves. Many businesses still rely on complex selling processes that hinder the buyers’ decision-making, resulting in poor customer experience and lost deals.

For commercial leaders facing this daunting new reality, SBI’s research has uncovered valuable insights from our latest B2B buyer survey. It sheds light on how outdated selling motions hinder your commercial success and what you can do to win over more tough buyers in 2024.

Overwhelming Complexity Undermines Deal Progress

When designing commercial strategies that can give sales teams the best chance of success, many businesses resort to giving buyers more of everything: additional information, people, and choices, intending to provide buyers with the flexibility and freedom to choose. While buyers have long dealt with such approaches, the advent of reset buying has exacerbated the friction felt by decision-makers, slowing down deals. Our discussions with buyers also reflect this sentiment:

• 78% of buyers say there is so much information available they tune out and trust their gut.
• 70% of buyers say they talked to an overwhelming number of supplier reps and aren’t sure what they all did.
• 74% of buyers say the number of products, options, and pricing models made it more challenging to know what to buy.

This method of excess in every buyer touchpoint also creates immense complexity when commercial teams try to guide buyers to suitable sources and facilitate consensus. Often, sellers find themselves getting closer to a win, only for buyer requirements to change or stakeholders to be shuffled. This forces commercial teams to start the buying journey all over again, reintroducing more complexities and hindering future consensus opportunities.

While companies cannot prevent reset buying from occurring, the most successful commercial teams proactively anticipate how changes will impact their buyers’ needs and solution requirements. Their offerings are tailored to adapt together with the buyer through their flux of changes, giving the decision-makers a clear direction when priorities shift.

The best commercial teams share a fundamental methodology: understanding your buyer and preempting their changes. For commercial leaders who are just entering the new reality of reset buying, ensure that deals are constantly making progress by discussing standard change events and likely impacts, taking the buyer’s current and possible future business situation into consideration. Then, go beyond matching buyers to solutions that meet their needs today; use the predictions established earlier to identify solutions that will best fit the buyer when changes happen.

To smoothen deals and minimize the friction felt by stakeholders in the buying process, we advise commercial leaders to avoid the obsolete method of saturating buyers with information and options. Instead, reduce buying complexity as buyers are resetting by narrowing specific offerings based on prior conversations to date. Streamline the buying journey by limiting the number of commercial stakeholders involved, ensuring that every member is aligned with their responsibilities and position in the buying process.

The secret to winning more deals in an era of reset buying begins with having the correct info on your buyer and executing actionable insights to get you ahead of your growth goals. Uncover more tips to help your business get ahead in our B2B buyer research report here: Revive Commercial Productivity by Easing Buying Friction.