Today at Forrester’s largest annual customer event in Phoenix, my colleague Barry Vasudevan opened B2B Summit North America with his keynote address, “Introducing Buying Networks: Your Buyers’ New Reality,” which introduced the new concept of buying networks. This wasn’t an easy narrative to deliver, because there are a significant number of challenging and hard-to-stomach realities in B2B today that compel us all to acknowledge that much about how we’ve sold in the past won’t work in the future. This in turn means that revenue enablement teams need to start pivoting — now — or risk irrelevance. Let’s first review some of Barry’s tough-love findings.

The Bad News About Buyers

Barry told us that “a seemingly never-ending list of people, processes, and technologies involved in making a purchase decision has radically transformed the landscape of business buying.” The hard facts about B2B buyers boil down to the following:

Buyers hate buying 81% of buyers are dissatisfied … with the winning provider.
Buyers are growing far more complex The average B2B sale now involves 13 internal and 9 external individuals.
Buyers are taking longer to buy 86% of purchases experience a significant stall.
Buyers are relying on the direct provider less than ever 28% of purchases already include 10+ external influencers.
Buyers are using genAI to change everything 89% of buyers are using generative AI agents to support their purchase.

 

Not very uplifting, is it? But wait, there’s more … 

The More Troubling News About Providers

Marketing and sales teams within B2B companies remain extraordinarily inward-focused, relying on historically successful or traditional mechanics that fail to address modern realities:

Providers focus on revenue growth at the expense of customer goals Only 3% of B2B companies are legitimately customer-obsessed.
Providers are losing ground to buyer self-service The self-service technology market size is projected to double by 2032.
Providers misalign incentives and behaviors The average conversion ratio from target stage to qualified stage is less than 5%.
Providers are not trusted Buyers rank salespeople ninth out of 12 trust options — only ahead of news media, government officials, and social media influencers.
Providers rely on archaic processes and metrics B2B CMO dashboards focus on an average of nine organizational value metrics and only two customer value metrics.

 

All is not lost, however. Barry provided several examples of revenue process transformation success stories, because after all, “big problems require bold solutions.” It starts with graduating the provider organization’s mindset “from checkers to chess.” We must all better respond to the buyer’s needs, their expanding networks, and use of technology with better abilities to collect and interpret signals, maneuver through the buying ecosystem, and acknowledge that outside-in revenue generation approaches override our internal org charts, fiefdoms, and vanity metrics.

How Revenue Enablement Can React Today

My favorite quote stemming from Barry’s current work is this: “To maximize the lifetime value of the customer, organizations need to maximize lifetime value for the customer,” says Mike Randall, head of global demand generation at Jones Lang LaSalle. Your revenue enablement team can immediately start shifting to a more customer-obsessed mindset by:

  1. Cleansing all traditional enablement materials — onboarding curricula, product launch training, methodology reminders — of “What’s in it for me?”-like, “It’s all about us and our products” content. Replace all the self-congratulatory and product-centric enablement references with buyers, personas, markets, business savvy, and whatever else it takes to fulfill Randall’s vision.
  2. Reviewing the plans for all upcoming spiffs, SKOs, QBRs, blitz days, and contests to identify recurring mistakes. Are you rewarding seller activity instead of genuine buyer interest? Are you working harder to acquire new logos instead of working smarter to secure renewals?
  3. Refining all enablement materials about buyer personas and trends to reflect the realities of their generative AI usage. Sellers can’t and shouldn’t compete with machines but need to be experts on how their buyers are leveraging AI to bypass human interactions … for when they do get in front of their prospect.

What Revenue Enablement Must Prepare For Tomorrow

Forrester also quotes Ali Rastiello, VP of revenue operations at Health Catalyst: “When my company evaluated offerings from two leading vendors, we chose the provider that demonstrated time after time that they knew who we were and what we wanted to achieve.” This informs my sole, focused recommendation for enablement leaders hoping to support the rise of buying networks: Double down on evolving your seller competencies to adapt to changing buyer needs. Pushing an RDR to make 100 dials per day should give way to hiring, onboarding, and everboarding reps with higher emotional inteligence, a stronger ability to identify and navigate buyer networks, and, above all, an understanding of how to earn customer trust.