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Imagine this: You’re halfway into a demo. For the past ten minutes, the prospect’s camera has been off, and her microphone has been muted. Is she impressed with your detailed explanation of the product’s single sign-on features? Is she even still on the call at this point? You have no way to tell, so you soldier through: “Moving on to the next feature: AWS integration…”

If you feel this process is broken, you’re not alone. Many sales reps and revenue leaders can sense the disconnect between current sales processes and the way companies want to evaluate and purchase complex technology solutions. But what do buyers actually want?

Ahead of launching buyersjourney.ai, we wanted to answer this question - so we spoke to 31 prospects who had recently evaluated B2B software. How did they view the sales process? What do they look for when evaluating software?

As it turns out, there are major gaps between the way buyers see the world, and existing B2B sales playbooks.

TL:DR; 4 Key Takeaways About the Buyer-Led Sales Cycle

We learned four key insights we learned from our interviews with 31 software buyers are:

1. Asynchronous information gathering: Buyers prefer to do their own research rather than go through endless calls
2. Self-qualification: Technical buyers want to own the tech evaluation and decision criteria, but need help building the business case
3. What buyers want: Buyers seek information, best practices, access to technical expertise, and dialogue with real users, as much as they seek a solution to their specific problem
4. Guided implementation: For complex enterprise products, a free trial is rarely compelling - this is where buyers need help.

Software Buyers Have Changed, the Sales Process Hasn’t

The people we spoke to: 

• Worked in large enterprises as well as smaller start-ups in the US, Europe, and Australia
• Had recently been part of buying committees for a large-scale cybersecurity solution 
• Were all on the technical side but held different levels of seniority - from security engineers, DevOps, IT managers, to CTOs. 

But despite these differences in background and culture, almost none of the people we spoke to were happy with the current sales process - which they saw as cumbersome, slow, and ineffective. Why is this?

Buyers are digital-first. Many (but not all) of the evaluators we spoke with were younger. Most had a strong technical background. They were used to researching technology on Google and in professional groups. They worked in distributed, remote teams, often in disparate timezones - and so their work communications were mostly asynchronous over Slack or Teams, rather than in Synchronous phone calls and meetings. 

The sales process hasn’t evolved to meet the expectations of the current generation of prospects. Instead, salespeople - and we are certainly guilty of this - rely on Synchronous meetings (“can I have just 15 minutes of your time?”). They withhold crucial information such as pricing details until the buyer completes a series of meetings, frustrating evaluators who don’t know if they’re even in the ballpark. 

Think of it this way: for an engineering-heavy solution, a buyer would typically need to have the same conversation at least three different times: with an ADR, an AE, and a sales engineer. Meanwhile, according to Gartner, 44% of millennial buyers prefer to have no interaction at all with a sales rep. In Harvard Business Review, that number rises to 54% of millennials, along with 29% of baby boomers. Is it any wonder they’re exasperated?  

Will Product-Led Save the Day?

Product-led growth (PLG) is often seen as a silver bullet solution by CEOs and investors. With the rising popularity of tools such as Airtable and Notion, it’s easy to become enamored with the idea of an app that sells itself - where buyers can self-evaluate during a feature-rich trial experience, and all the sales reps need to do is ring up their order.

But here’s the thing: the buyers we spoke to didn’t want to self-evaluate. They saw the free trial for what it is: an invitation to spend days or weeks learning how to use a product that might end up being completely irrelevant for them (more on this later). A hands-on approach wasn’t what buyers wanted when evaluating complex enterprise-grade products (security, cloud, AI, finance, HR, legal..) that required lengthy configuration (e.g., to deal with firewall rules) and permission approval, or had a steep learning curve.

The Future of SaaS Sales is Buyer-Led

If buyers don’t want a free trial, what do they want? In our conversations with buyers, we became convinced that the future of B2B SaaS sales isn’t product-led, but buyer-led. We kept hearing variations of the same key concepts: 

• Asynchronous communications
• Guided self-research
• Fast track to technical expertise with less sales meetings 
• Access to a community of real users.

In the next section, we’ll go into more detail on each of the key insights we learned around the future of SaaS sales, and show how sales organizations can use them to move deals forward.

1. Asynchronous Research and Buying Journey

Buyers expressed a uniform frustration with the current sales process, which forces them to go through an SDR / ADR call, a discovery call, and a canned presentation followed by a short and often irrelevant demo - all before they can get basic information that could help them determine whether the product is even relevant (e.g., about pricing).

In a buyer-led world, this is replaced by an asynchronous journey that’s driven by the buyer’s own online research. Instead of a series of calls, buyers would rather be able to ask questions as they arise over the course of their independent research process. The salesperson role is to:

• Provide transparent access to information
• Help fill in gaps around product functionality, benefits, and security

An asynchronous communication channel where questions can be answered on-demand was seen as superior to lengthy Q&A sessions over video calls. 

What this means for sales teams:

Withholding and gatekeeping information over a months-long sales process is no longer the way to go. Instead, facilitate the buyer’s research and discovery process by guiding them to the relevant information, and providing the tools to collate and organize that information in a way that’s conducive to their evaluation process. 

2. From Sales Qualified to Buyer Qualified - The Buyer Wants to Own the Evaluation

In popular contemporary sales frameworks such as MEDDPIC and Command of the Message, the sales rep is expected to extract information from the buyer: their current pains, metrics, decision process, cost of doing nothing, and other key information points. This is meant to happen over a series of calls or emails.

However, this is not what the buyer wants to do. The buyer is often bombarded by jargon, buzzwords, and marketing websites that don’t disclose the relevant information, and instead try to funnel them into a premature demo call. Getting a group of busy stakeholders in different time zones to attend a demo is a chore, and engineers aren’t too thrilled to spend time on the phone with sales reps.

Instead, what technical buyers seek first and foremost is clarity: the ability to create a requirements table, define due diligence criteria, and find a clear way of comparing different vendors on paper.

Rather than speaking to a rep who will decide whether or not they are a ‘qualified’ lead, the buyer wants to qualify the vendor based on factors such as features, unique differentiators, price, integration, and security.

• Key features, prioritized by nice to have / must have 
• Unique differentiators and perspectives
• Price (indicative/RRP is fine)
• Integration and implementation  
• Security credentials and privacy standards
• Support and customer service
• Ease of use
• Pros and cons of different tools, with confidence scores
• Analyst reports, 3rd party reviews, and industry awards
• Feedback from other team members and existing users

What this means for sales teams:

• Allow buyers to self-qualify by adopting a more consultative approach. 
• Help buyers understand the competitive landscape and provide templates and examples for evaluation criteria, but let the buyer own the process. 

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You might have fewer calls initially - but the calls you’ll have will be higher quality and your win rate will improve over time.

How transparent should you be with pricing?

Serious buyers want to see value before talking commercials - but if you hide your price, they might assume it’s too high or out of reach. Jason, the CISO of a tech company, told us: “My CTO and I find it always easier to justify on the values than the savings on solutions that don’t fit our needs”

Showing or hiding Pricing 

Vendors stress on value sale

In our interviews, serious Buyers want values and tech fit first as well then commercials.

But if you hide, they will think its going to be too high or out of reach

Jason (CISO of a tech company) said we are a SMB but ended up choosing more expensive solutions like Keepa Zscaler, Crowdstrike

“My CTO and I find it always easier to justify on the values than the savings on solutions that dont fit our needs”

3. Access to Best Practices and Expertise is Crucial

Address Vendors concerns (here? Show survey then segue to best pratices?)

"would people put in the info" “would this create more friction”?

First, this is just providing another option.  Aysnc first buyers would appreciate.

Secondly, We asked  buyers this question and they  told us  these are the values they seek. Nigel: need to do this anyway. Time saving. 

Jason : “willing to share info if that gets me Fast track /access to a technical or product expert. To ask specific Qs”  best practices. How to solve the problem efficiently

They want to skip sales initially (until price negotiation ) and 1st qualification not offering values .

they just get qualified, info sucked out of them  with no guaranteed value.

P.S.  :"felt this may be the same cultural moment - airbnb. "would people be happy to live with strangers"" (bit too cheeky or good to show personality?)

Buyers don’t want to sit through a slide deck or a canned demo - but that doesn’t mean that the vendor shouldn’t be involved in the sales process. Quite the opposite: buyers appreciated the ability to discover best practices and technical expertise, as well as real-life pros and cons from existing users, and saw it as a compelling reason to evaluate new technology.

Buyers value the vendor’s unique expertise and broader view of the industry. They want to  learn about:

• How others are solving this problem
• The solution and industry landscape
• New trends or integrations
• Tricks they might not be aware of

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Vendors - especially solution engineering teams and other technical resources - are often uniquely positioned to provide this information. Meanwhile, account executives have a crucial role to play in building the business case. Many of the technical stakeholders we spoke to openly said they wanted the vendor to help them quantify the benefits into dollar values, and help them sell the solution internally to their CFOs and CEOs.

Another repeated desire we heard from buyers was to speak to other users. This is not only for the sake of a product reference, but also to learn how other organizations are solving the same problem and connect with like-minded professionals.

What this means for sales teams:

Information and expertise are tools you can wield to your advantage throughout the sales process. Leverage the buyer’s thirst for knowledge by tying it to stages in the evaluation, and constantly offer additional resources and access to your user community as ‘hooks’ to keep the buyer engaged throughout the process.

Will buyers be willing to give you more information in exchange for technical expertise?

While it’s natural to be concerned about creating more friction in the process, the buyers we interviewed were willing to invest this small additional effort in order to fast-track the evaluation. “I’d need to do it anyway as part of my due diligence”, said Nigel; while Jason noted that “if this will get us to the tech evaluation faster, I’m happy to give the info.”

4. A Discounted Trial is Often Better than a Free One

Vendors love offering free trials. Marketing teams, in particular, see this as a very alluring exchange - the prospect gives their PII and opts in to a sales call, and in exchange gets a fully functional trial that “costs them nothing”.

But the truth is that free trials are not really all that free, and buyers understand this well:

• The trial often needs to run on the buyer’s infrastructure, especially if the app has access to sensitive data
• Multiple stakeholders need to spend days configuring the software in order for it to work
• Other departments are required 
• Engineering processes are disrupted

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When the solutions evaluated were complex, buyers were mostly indifferent to free trial offers - especially as the first touch. Why would they want to spend hours or days learning a tool that they might not be able to install in the company’s production environment? 

According to one of our study participants, “A free trial costs us thousands of euros: IT provision, UAT testing. Feedback… and worst of all, engineering hours when devs are pulled away from their work. We can’t afford the downtime.” 

Perhaps surprisingly, many of the buyers we spoke to were more open to the idea of a paid trial or proof of value - where the experts on the vendor side do the configuration and are truly committed to building a working solution, without the time pressure or sense that the vendor is “doing you a favor”. 

Tom, who works at a tech MSP, said: “We recently evaluated Splunk - a lot of people think it’s complex or expensive, but it can actually be really cost-effective if you know how to customize it. Relying on the vendor’s expertise to run a PoV was really helpful”. Jason added: “Paying for 1 or 2 days of professional service to see a working solution is far better than spending 14 days of my own engineers’ time”.

Tom (from a tech MSP) said :”Splunk is an interesting tool - a lot of people say expensive.  But theres a lot it can do/customise than cheaper versions. But Sadly its complex without expert knowledge people they cant make use of the tool or run a good PoV”

Jason (CISO - yea again he is a champion and shared a lot)

“I prefer paid trial.   dont have 14 days to learn. more than happy to pay company. 1 or 2 day professional services.  you set up for us properly.”

“A free Trial costs us thousands of euros.    IT provision.  UAT testing. feedback,  engineers cost so much time and cost to trial. Cant afford downtime. Pull them away from their work.”

‍What this means for sales teams:

Instead of trying to push the buyer into a free trial they might not be interested in, explore the possibility of offering a discounted paid trial or proof of value for serious buyers who have self qualified . You can offer this as a ‘reward’ for a speedier evaluation or broader activation (in line with Dan Martell’s idea of Challenge Funnels).

Putting It All Together: Facilitating the New SaaS Sales Model and Filling Your Funnel with Buyer-Qualified Leads

What did we learn from these conversations with software buyers?

• Today’s sophisticated buyers don’t blindly trust the vendors to provide information or competitive battlecards. 
• Buyers see lengthy demo sessions and qualification calls as a waste of time and want a fast track to expertise, best practices and real users
• Buyers want to own the technical evaluation and come to a demo call after they’re 70% sold on the product. 

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All of this might sound overwhelming, and different from how your B2B sales team is currently managing its pipeline. But the good news for sales teams is that buyer-qualified leads are much more likely to close. Instead of trying to swim against the current, forward-thinking sales organizations should think of ways to empower a new generation of software evaluators.

That’s exactly why we launched buyersjourney.ai: to provide a single tool for asynchronous sales, buyer-led qualification, and alignment between B2B sales teams and software buyers. 

Buyersjourney provides a simple and intuitive interface where vendors and buyers can work together to summarize information, compare solutions, and manage the evaluation process. Progression through the process is rewarded with access to best practices and additional information - rather than another unwanted sales call.

Watch this video to see how a buyer-led sales cycle looks like:

[DEMO VIDEO] 

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Like any savvy prospect, you might be asking yourself: What if I do nothing?

Well, this might be fine, for a while: change doesn’t happen in a day, and you can get away with continuing to force most buyers through the traditional sales process. But you’re leaving some money on the table - and this will only get worse. As the next generation of workers become the core decision-makers, and especially after two years of pandemic-induced remote communications, outdated legacy sales models will become even less relevant.

When technical evaluators are underserved by what you’re offering them - such as a free trial or a ‘demo request’ (which they know means an SDR call), they’ll hesitate to start the process. This could result in buyers not finding the best tech solutions, and vendors missing out on valuable opportunities. 

By making asynchronous evaluation easy, sales teams can reach a broader range of prospects, generate higher quality conversations and close more deals.

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