How $50 buys you an education on your prospects

As solution sellers, we’re constantly trying to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes. Any while doing market research, looking at a 10k or looking at a website, is good, in 2024 it isn’t’ good enough.

According to the authors of The Jolt Effect, your prospects are already 60% through their buying cycle by the time they start to engage with a sales team. That means you’re constantly playing catchup. That means that they don’t want to answer your basic discovery questions or hear about where your product is according to Gartner or Forrester. They want specific answers to their calibrated questions.

But what if there was a way to spend less ~$50 (which you will most likely be able to expense) and teach your customer something they don’t know about their own business? What if you could get ahead of your customer and change the conversation?

Last week, I bought products from my biggest customer and their top 3 competitors. What started as a way to help my champion get better intel on their returns process for a deal pursuit has turned into an incredible education about manufactures—both their ecommerce and support process.

Specific Industry Knowledge

By buying 4 different products from 4 different manufacturers, I learned something new about all of their ecommerce processes. I’ve sold B2B commerce to dozens of manufactures over the past 6 years, and up until now, I’ve only bought a handful of products. And I’ve never ordered from 4 different competitors at the same time.

What stood out to me was how clunky their websites were. Missing images, poor search experience. Now, I get that I’m not a typical buyer who knows exactly which product to search for (I was looking for anything around $7-12), but what if I was a new employee buying from these companies? I’ve heard prospects talk about how their customers need ‘a PhD in our products to buy from us’ and I definitely felt that during the process.

And I only got more intel when I attempted to return these products. Only one of the four customers had an easy to find web form on their website that allowed me to answer questions and upload images. The rest of the customers made me search all over their website only to find a ‘contact us’ email buried deep on the website. One even had a web link that said “Order Returns and Questions” only to not have any language about returns at all on that webpage.

This has been a huge help for me as I prospect to dozens of manufactures this year. I know exactly want to look for on their existing websites and have some person experience with returns that I can leverage.

I’m expecting to sell 10 Order Servicing deals in 2024 and I can’t think of a better way to educate myself on the return process than by buying and returning products. It is one thing to talk about returns, it is another thing to try to get a customer support to mail you a form to print and mail back.

Deeper Partnership of the Customer

I’m a little embarrassed that it took me 9 months into my relationship with my biggest customer to buy products from them. I have visited them onsite, toured their warehouse, sent gifts, but this was the first type of firsthand research I had done. Now part of the reason was that I did not close their first deal, I inherited it. But regardless, I should have offered long ago to become a ‘secret shopper’ to help them make a compelling business case why they need to revamp their customer return process.

Was it a pain to search for products that are hard to find? Of course it was. And the return process at these B2B manufactures is nothing like returning items to Amazon. You can’t do a few clicks and drop it off at a convenient location. There are pictures to upload, requests for ‘failure reports’ and restocking fees at 18%. But all of this has won me a ton of trust with my champion…and way more than sending gift cards.

I have detailed notes, screen shots and lots of thoughts about how to improve both the buying and returning process for my customer. I was shocked by how different my experience was than from a retail experience. Even buying tickets to go to my kid’s soccer game is three clicks and I’m done.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about how to become more of a trusted advisor to customers (Naked Sales, The Jolt Effect). In the end, it is doing things that are outside of the norm. It is about looking for opportunities to create different types of conversations that your marketing department hasn’t thought of yet.  

Putting Into Practice

1.   Identify your ‘biggest bet’ prospect for the quarter.

2.   Ask your supervisor if you can spend $50 buy (and return) a product for a prospect.

3.   Buy something from them and document the experience.