How do I generate ideas for buyer enablement tools?

I spend a lot of time on SaaS companies’ websites looking at their resources pages.

This is where your buyers go to see how they can educate themselves before having to be MEDDICated by a salesperson.

If I am lucky I’ll find one interactive tool that I could use to help me understand my situation - often some form of ROI calculator to help justify a purchase.

How do I visualise buyer enablement options?

I create a grid that maps your customer’s buying process against the different personas in their buying group.

For the buying process I use Gartner’s six buying ‘jobs-to-be-done’.

• Problem identification - “we need to do something”

• Solution exploration - “what’s out there to help us?”

• Requirements gathering - “what do we need this thing to do?”

• Supplier selection - “does this thing do what we need it to?”

• Validation - “we think we know what to do but we need to be sure”

• Consensus - “we need to make sure everyone is on board”

I like these categories as they are valid for new business, upsell and cross-sell opportunities

For the buying personas you’ll want to consider everyone that is involved, directly or indirectly, in the buying process.

Consider all the people that can say “yes”, and more importantly, all the people that can say “no”.

• Champion - the main person leading the search for a solution

• Economic buyer - the person whose budget will pay for the solution

• Executive sponsor - the person that can ultimately say yes

• Administrators - the people that will manage the new solution

• Users - the people that will use the new solution

• Legal - the people that will negotiate a contract

• Infosecurity - the people that will validate the solution’s security credentials

• System Integrators - the partners that will configure and integrate the solution

• Learning and development - the people that will enable the users

• Technical Support - the people that will maintain the solution

• Who else? Your category may have other sets of personas.

Every one of these has an influence on the move from the status quo to a new solution.

With clients I draw up a matrix like this:

One buyer enablement tool leaves a lot of white space

And we can map across the buyer enablement tools that you offer today.

Often its a rather sorry looking picture with one ROI calculator aimed at the economic buyer right at the end of the buying process to validate the purchase decision.

Start with problem identification tools

Now the problem is clear - we need to provide valuable tools to a range of buyer personas at the start of their buying process - problem identification.

If you can help your buyers see their current situation in a different light - to highlight an expensive and important problem to fix, you earn the right to work to continue speaking.

Forrester research shows that the vendor that helps a company identify and validate the problem is chosen 74% of the time.

Workshop this. I love a workshop with a whiteboard and post it notes - but you can do this virtually with distributed teams.

Include members from across your go-to-market - especially implementation, customer success and technical support - they know how your customers are really using your product

For each of the buyer personas generate ideas for interactive and engaging tools that help them specifically to identify and quantify the business problem.

Here are some ideas:

• Champion - interactive quiz to assess pain points, maturity assessment, healthcheck

• Economic buyer - ROI calculator focused on current state - cost of inaction, interactive market trends dashboard, 360 assessment gathering cross-company input on current situation

• Executive sponsor - impact analysis tool focused on key business metrics, interactive peer benchmarking, private exec community

• Administrator - checklist for assessing current state inefficiencies, admin pain point discovery tool, workflow analysis tool

• Users - aggregated/summary assessments across large user groups, user forums for problem identification, templated reports for current state platforms

• Lawyers - Current state contract FAQs, compliance risk assessment tool

• Infosecurity team - security risk self assessments, security checklists

• System integrator partners - integration complexity assessment tool, integration healthcheck assessment, integration planning virtual workshop,

• Technical support team - support ticket analysis tool, route cause analysis assessment, triage design virtual workshop

Your ideas will be specific to your customer segment and your product or service, but you can see how quickly you can start to create a large list of tools that could be valuable to the entire buying group at the very start of their buying process.

Give your sellers something to give to your buyers

Buyer enablement tools are not just valuable for driving inbound opportunities, they are critical to giving your outbound teams something of value in their outreach.

The pipeline pyramid describes the foundations on which successful outbound depends.

The missing item I see in many SaaS businesses is the offer - what is it that your sellers are taking to the buyer that is of value?

Often it is weak - either nothing but an ask, or an upcoming webinar or ebook.

Buyer enablement tools give them something truly valuable to share with their prospects that provides business insight and moves their process forward.

How to get started

If you’d like help with this process, I provide an all in one bundle where I’ll lead your go-to-market team through this ideation phase, plus the design, development and management of one buyer enablement tool - driving you new pipeline in 90 days.

For more information check out the buyer enablement platform:

And if you aren’t ready yet, take the buyer enablement assessment where I’ll provide you with personalised feedback and guidance based on your current situation.