Getting Personal with Your B2B Sales Pitch

Have you considered leveraging personal and career ambition as a key value proposition in your B2B sales pitch? It could be the angle you need to get to hearts of your prospects.
As the latest OpenView Labs buyer insights report demonstrates, transformational factors like organization transition and career transition are the second most important factor driving B2B sales processes. So why are so many sales organizations focused on selling to corporate objectives and not looking at these other factors?

Perspective is Everything

It may seem obvious, but the reason is that many marketing and sales management teams fail to put themselves in the shoes of their buyers. Consequently, they have a really difficult time relating with buyers and making sense of how and why they behave in certain ways during the sales process.
This results in many misconceptions about buyer behavior, but it also leads to missed opportunities that sales and marketing teams fail to see. One such example of an often ignored motivation is career transformation. Only someone who puts themselves in the shoes of a buyer and truly understands their frustrations and needs will see that career growth and vision for their future are factors they wish they had control over.

Playing Personal and Career Ambition

Personal and career ambitions can be strong forces that make buyers very passionate and emotional about products and purchases. If you can associate your product with career vision and upward mobility, you can create a very passionate customer base that will outwardly promote your products. This is especially great because references from your customer base are terrific sales opportunities.
This obviously does not apply to all buyers, but when it does it can be a compelling angle to test out in your sales pitch. From my experiences in working with B2B marketing and sales executives, this is an underserved need and consequently one ripe with opportunity.

Which Buyers Does This Appeal To Most?

• Dead-end careers like a librarian at a school or careers with limited mobility like an IT specialist or computer technician. Lack of career mobility can be the number one thing frustrating these employees about their careers. Why not position your solution as a key to opening up new opportunities, or even reach out to directly to help provide them with a vision of how things could be different?
• Younger individuals who still believe in change and can buy into this message. Typically, career ambition does not resonate as well with older workers who are entrenched in their positions and accustomed to their ways. In fact, these prospects can sometimes even find products pitched as agents of career transformation as threatening to their job.
• Individuals who work in cost centers who see their role in the organization constrained to a set budget and need to find more creative ways to make this budget go further to increase their responsibilities. Think of positioning your solution as a different way to do more with less.
  

What Organizational Characteristics Exacerbate Frustration and Need?

• Organizations that are late to adopt technology and in some cases even resistant.
• Organizations that have not changed in years and are ready for a fresh take.
• Tenure-based organizations like schools and governments.

You Need to Be Strategic with Your Approach

Before you start working this angle into your pitch, it is key to find examples from your customer base of employees who have actually benefited from the career transformation point that you are selling. These are living case studies of your product’s ability to help buyers achieve their personal and career ambitions.
Also, being creative about how you can play into this frustration is key. The message needs to be positive and cannot be negative. Relevant buyers are likely already down on the fact that they don’t have career vision or mobility, and you don’t want to further this frustration. Rather, you want to inspire them to see change and help them see how your product is the vehicle to achieve career transformation.

Learn More

For more insight into the factors that really influence your buyers’ decision-making process, download our latest report:

IT Buyer Insights: Why Your Sales Team’s Outreach Might Be Missing the Mark