RAIN Group surveyed B2B buyers on what influences their purchases. Effective customer discovery and active listening topped the list at 70% critical, but vendors only scored 26 out of 100 on these skills. Most vendors never truly understand what outcomes buyers want, leaving that work to customer success teams after the sale.
Chapters
So the RAIN Group asked a huge number of customers, what influences your purchase decisions the most? And there were 15 answers. Number 1 was doing an effective job of customer discovery to uncover my true needs. And number 3 was listening, just listening. So 2 out of the top 3 out of 15 were discovery and listening as the most important. The second question they asked was, how good a job do vendors do on each of these things? And so let's just say 71% of buyers said that discovery was biggest influence on their purchase decision. How did they rate vendors? 26 out of 100, almost the bottom quartile. Same thing for listening. 69% said it's one of the most important things to influence my purchase decisions, yet vendors do like a 26 out of 100 on that. It's horrible. It's one of the biggest gaps that we can close. It's not just giving customers what they want. They're telling us how to sell to them. You could say, oh yeah, well, that study is just sales. No. Once a customer buys from us, then we still have no idea kind of really why they bought. All we know is that they bought. We don't know the outcome they're trying to achieve because we don't really get that far in the sales discovery process, then it falls to the customer success team and the account management team to go back and rediscover, like, why is this important to you and all that. Don't just assume that just because the customer is paying you every month or every year that they're going to keep paying you every month or every year. You have to keep going back and understanding why are we adding value? How are we adding value? And if we're not, then we really need to know what to do.
