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One of the biggest changes affecting your commercial performance over the past fifteen years happens before your salesperson ever gets into the conversation.
Buyer behaviour has changed.
Research cited by the B2B Institute and similar organizations has found that buyers can complete somewhere between 60% and 80% of their purchase decision process before they speak with a sales representative.
Think about what that means for us as business owners.
Before someone talks to your sales team, they may have already Googled the problem. They have read your website and probably several competitors’ websites. They have looked through case studies and testimonials. They may have asked people in their professional network what they think.
And then they show up to the sales call.
A lot of us still build that conversation as though this is where their education begins.
It isn’t.
Buyer Behaviour Changed Before the Sales Call
We used to put a tremendous amount of responsibility on the salesperson. Find the prospect. Educate the prospect. Build the relationship. Then close the prospect.
That model assumes the salesperson is a major source of information for the buyer.
Modern buyer behaviour has changed that part of the equation because your prospect can get an enormous amount of information without ever speaking to you.
This creates a strange problem inside a lot of sales teams. We keep training people to provide information the buyer already has.
A hospitality group opens its first meeting with ten minutes about the company and its history. A recruitment firm spends the beginning of the conversation talking about headcount and how many years it has been in business.
The information may all be true. It may even be important.
The problem is the prospect probably already read it.
So the salesperson spends valuable time repeating the website to someone who has already done the research.
Then the conversation goes nowhere.
We often respond by assuming the prospect wasn’t convinced enough. Maybe the presentation needs work. Maybe sales needs to do a better job explaining what we do.
But if the buyer entered the meeting already knowing what you do, explaining it again doesn’t solve the problem.
You have to give them something they couldn’t get before they called.
Buyer Behaviour Has Changed What Sales Is For
This is where I think the value of a good salesperson has actually gone up.
The information itself is easy to find. The experience behind the information is much harder to find.
Your team has seen situations the prospect hasn’t seen.
You know what happened in analogous situations. You have seen where implementations tend to go wrong. You know the failure modes. You can explain the difference between an implementation that works well and one that becomes a problem.
That is where the conversation starts becoming useful.
We can bring contextual judgment. We can bring expertise. We can help someone assess risk. We may have network connections that matter to the situation.
The buyer can’t always Google those things.
And that changes what your salespeople need to be capable of producing in a conversation.
Their job becomes less about walking someone through information available on your website and more about helping that person understand how the information applies to their specific situation.
That is a very different sales conversation.
Marketing Has to Carry More of the Education
The other side of changing buyer behaviour is that marketing has to do more work before sales ever gets involved.
Content marketing, SEO, paid digital, social proof, expert content, and community building can all help educate the buyer and establish credibility before there is a direct commercial conversation.
That matters because the buyer is already looking.
If we know prospects are going to search for answers before they contact us, we need to make sure those answers exist before the questions reach a salesperson.
Your content can help someone understand the problem. Your case studies and testimonials can give them evidence. Your website can explain what you do. Your other marketing can continue building familiarity and trust while the buyer is working through the decision.
By the time that person reaches sales, they may have already made significant progress.
That should change the conversation sales is prepared to have.
Your Commercial Investment Has to Follow Buyer Behaviour
This is the part founders can miss.
We can recognize that buyer behaviour has changed while continuing to spend money as though it hasn’t.
The historical answer to growth was often to hire more salespeople and expect them to create personal activity that found prospects, educated them, developed the relationship, and eventually closed the business.
The modern buying process puts much more of that education before the direct sales conversation.
So our commercial investment has to move earlier too.
We need marketing that answers the questions buyers are already asking. We need content they can find while they are doing their research. We need credibility established before the first meeting.
Then we need a sales function built for the conversation that’s left.
That conversation is shorter and more specific. The buyer has information. Now they need help making a determination about their situation.
This doesn’t make sales less important. It makes generic sales conversations less useful.
And it means we shouldn’t measure the strength of a commercial operation only by how many salespeople are creating activity. We have to look at what happens before those people ever get the opportunity.
Because buyer behaviour determines where the work gets done.
If your buyers are educating themselves before they call, your marketing has to meet them there. Your sales team then has to bring the expertise, judgment, connections, and risk assessment they couldn’t gather on their own.
If buyer behaviour has moved the education ahead of the sales call while your commercial model still pays salespeople to repeat that education after the call begins, you are spending money on work the buyer already did and leaving the scarce knowledge they actually need out of the conversation.
Justin D Maxwell provides family office and investment bank services to the lower midmarket to founders who want 8 or 9 figure net worths. You can learn more here: www.justindmaxwell.com or take our free assessment here: https://fielding.global/articles/diagnostic.html