Buyer-Led Selling ... through email?
Buyer-Led Selling ... through email?
Imagine a world where buyers called more of the shots. Would selling be easier for everyone? Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #201
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: a low-cost robot arm, with a parts list and software. This looks like an amazing hobby project today … how long before we’ll see a version of this as an everyday appliance? Edition 201 of this newsletter is here - it’s June 3, 2024.
If you have a comment or are interested in sponsoring, hit reply.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Buyer-led selling … through email?
If you’re trying to reach a buyer right now, you have an attention problem. If you’re doing outbound sales, very few buyers know you exist, and only some of them are in the market to buy a solution. Even if you’re doing inbound sales, you have a problem. Your buyer has lots of stuff going on that has nothing to do with your message.
This attention problem exists whether you’re using email, LinkedIn messaging, text messages, or calling someone to help them understand what you do. In the typical first encounter you, buyers don’t know what you want to sell them and you’re not sure what they want either. In the best-case scenario, you’ve got great product market fit and awareness, and they come to you ready to buy.
There is a gap to bridge before a buyer can make a yes or no decision.
The knowledge and expectation gap
Buyers: you’re not sure what sellers have to offer.
Sellers: you’re not sure if buyers are interested.
Here’s a thought experiment. What if you could publish an email address specifically to engage with sales pitches and use a procurement agent to respond or gain details based on the content and rules you wanted to use?
That’s the concept of buyer-led selling through email. Establishing a conversation on the buyer’s terms is the goal, and the new angle is doing it through a mailbox dedicated to these conversations.
You are right to think skeptically about this idea, as we get too much email to pay close attention to each message.
Consider this idea as the buyer’s equivalent of a /pricing page on a website, or “learn how to sell to me”, and this idea makes more sense.
In this email mailbox – perhaps it would be inbound@yourdomain.com – you’d have a private LLM-powered or rule-based agent responding to inbound requests using the rules that you set.
Your ruleset might look like this prompt…
Here are the four things I care about researching right now:
finding new accounts from personal email addresses (this is a long shot)
researching the market share of competitors
validating company data on accounts
etc..
Help me to find the three best options among the people who contact me about this need and prepare a 1 page summary for the team comparing the different products for cost, suitability to the problem, difficulty to implement, and capability.
If you don’t find three good options after [date], end the search and produce a summary of the available information
With this list, you could start to filter out the kinds of requests you never answer, and get more information on the ones you want. The outcome is better information about products and services that people are trying to sell to you where the information content is established by you.
When a seller answers your questions, this will thread into a typical conversation, or you can short-circuit the process by presenting calendar options or by jumping into an instant meeting.
This sounds a lot like what good sellers do right now - qualifying the customer while not burdening them with details they don’t need at the current state of the sales process.
The difference is that with this idea of pre-selling (buyer-led selling?), some of this sales process can happen before you get involved. And you get answers to your questions that are more easily comparable between vendors, which is really useful if you’re doing a bake-off between products.
A new (old) way of selling
None of these techniques are brand new. The novelty is moving the burden to shape the information to the person who is trying to sell to you.
Smart sellers are already doing this by building content to be read by AI readers. When this happens they are moving the sales conversation to a different surface and earlier in the cycle.
Old way: “Are you ready to buy my product?”
New way: “What questions do you have about this topic? Here are the answers we share with buyers like you.”
Imagine this flow:
As a buyer, this interaction feels much more natural than a cold sales call. You can engage with the information without instantly being asked to buy by a seller and know that you can accelerate or decelerate the conversation as needed. Instead of an “are you trapped under an alligator” email begging for attention, you could get an answer to a question.
As a seller, this process might feel one step removed, but imagine the benefits of being able to scale your conversations beyond the people you can reach now into the larger group of people who are interested in the topic but not yet ready to buy. This moves the “nurture flow” of marketing content into a sales conversation and personalizes it to the needs of the buyer.
What could possibly go wrong?
At present, this is an idea and not an implementation. It’s easy to imagine a solution without guardrails where the sellers only try to game the system, and send emails to both the intended place and other places (a sequence that bombards two inboxes!)
It’s also easy to imagine a summary answer to a question that’s not much more useful than asking ChatGPT.
What else might go wrong with this idea? Wasted time. This process might lengthen a buying process rather than shorten it and improve qualification.
But the goal here is sound:
raise the bar for the seller
tilt the buying process toward the buyer and help answer qualification questions
make a multi-vendor search more efficient
It’s worth a try to see if sellers change their behavior.
Ensuring buyer’s choice
The goal of this idea is to improve the opportunity quality presented to a buyer and to waste less time for all parties. With a prompt driven by the buyer, it might be possible to make the selling (and buying) process more efficient.
Will it be better than the current state? It has to be an improvement to get the buyer and seller closer together to solve a core problem.
What’s the takeaway? Buyers and sellers are often not well-aligned in an outbound motion. Even in an inbound motion, it’s easy to miss buyer questions and fail to answer them effectively. If we imagine a way to let buyers ask for what they want, it will create better selling conversations.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ That product is the same - When you search for something online, it often feels like retargeting is in effect (and it probably is) because all of a sudden you see the same brand or product across multiple sites. It turns out that many of these products are sold on different sites under similar names. And of course, at different prices.
2/ Links are disappearing - We used to say that what’s on the Internet is forever. It turns out that information entropy is reducing many pages to dead links.
3/ Insight on insights - A really good interview snippet on the value of understanding metrics. Once you know more about how an application works, pointing out the potential flaws in measuring it is easier and more effective.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
Want to book a discovery call to talk about how we can work together?
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon