Why Buyers Don't Want To Meet Your Salespeople And What To Do About It

As buyers become more empowered in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, the pressure is building for sales enablement professionals to prepare their sales force to meet buyers' expectations. Salespeople who can only communicate in terms of products and services will see their message resonate with procurement-level buyers, but they will fail to hit the mark with executives. In short, understanding your buyers is only the first step toward optimizing your selling system; you must also understand the competencies of your reps and appropriately map them to your buyers' needs. Forrester organizes B2B buyers into four distinct buyer archetypes. This report introduces an analogous set of four seller archetypes and provides six criteria you can use to identify those archetypes within your sales force. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. This report was amended to reflect new Forrester terminology as defined in The B2B Go-To-Customer Strategy Matrix.