Some things don't sell on a datasheet alone
It'a exciting what AI can do for sales, but it will be put into operation differently in different industries where we have different sales processes. My focus is on enterprise B2B sales, and in my experience in Internet of Things (IoT), smart grid / energy, enterprise software, and semiconductor sales, I've seen a common thread in these enterprise B2B sales processes: they're built around trust and alignment.
Trust and alignment are critical in enterprise B2B sales because your customers are not just buying your product. They're buying you, your company, your product, and your future products. A formal framework for this comes from economists Phillip Nelson and, later, Michael Darby and Edi Karni. They sorted goods into three categories:
- Search Goods. The customer can establish the value of through specs. A gallon of gas, or a clearly specified semiconductor product.
- Experience Goods. The customer establishes the value only by experiencing your product. A meal at a restaurant, or a microcontroller software stack.
- Credence Goods. The customer may not even be able to establish the value after consuming it. Like a medical procedure, a next-generation chip, an investment banker, or an enterprise software platform.
It's the purchase, not just the product
Many enterprise B2B products fall into the Credence Good category: you're not buying a finished thing off a shelf. You're choosing a partner whose success has to stay intertwined with yours for the value to be realized.
The banker's advice only pays off if they keep working your interest through a multi-year process. The software platform only delivers if the vendor keeps investing in your use case and your roadmap. The custom subsystem only works if the supplier keeps engineering alongside you through revisions no one could fully spec up front.
That's why these decisions run on trust. Trust is a forecast about alignment — made before you have any evidence.
However much research the customer does, however much our salespeople help with the evaluation, however many executive meetings align the direction — when the customer finally chooses a supplier, they are taking a leap of faith. We - as salespeople - have to earn it.
An example: choosing a motion-control subsystem
A large surgical robotics company is choosing a new motion-control subsystem for its next-generation system. The company sells thousands of these multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment per year, and the reliability, accuracy, and precision of the mechanical subsystem are critical to how the robot performs.
The subsystem has to be custom designed for this next-generation system, so there is no historical data for this new motion-control subsystem — nothing to benchmark against, no installed base to point to.
The company is left to evaluate not just the technical reliability of the motion-control subsystem, but also the business integrity and reliability of the supplier itself, because it's committing to years of shared engineering, not a one-time delivery. The decision comes down to the credibility and track record of the supplier as much as the expected performance of the product.
Earning trust
That credibility and performance of the supplier is not something that shows up on a datasheet. It is something that is earned, every day, by great salespeople.
AI can help with this, but cannot replace it.
That is what we keep in mind every day as we serve salespeople at ept AI.
Trust - critical for enterprise B2B sales - is something that is earned, every day, by great salespeople.
