Be Present For your buyers at all stages
I’m on a call with the president of a mid-sized B2B company. Her team is presenting their findings on why they’re about to select a platform, a six-figure annual platform, mind you. She listens, gives her feedback, then runs the two options through a comparison ChatGPT prompt, recaps that it validated what she was already thinking and what the team recommended, and approves it.
All of the “what ifs” came to mind.
What if there wasn’t that comparison piece written by the platform they selected?
What if the internal team at that platform didn’t get approval to write comparison content because it wasn’t on brand?
What if the president used Claude instead of ChatGPT with the same prompt?
What if a competitor was advertising in ChatGPT and the president saw that ad?
What if someone three levels below her had already crossed the platform off the list, months before this meeting?
You can document every technical spec, every feature, every configuration option. If the decision gets made on a comparison someone else wrote, none of it is in the room. You’re at the mercy of whoever published it.
I’m not going to walk through G2, Capterra, or the rest of the review-site landscape. Keeping this high level to make the point. The person who signs the contract and the procurement analyst running due diligence usually aren’t experts in your category. Neither of them can champion you. Both of them can eliminate you.
It’s not a new concept, just a newer place to account for it. I wrote about this while at Seer and said it on stage too — “why would I pick you for my solution when you weren’t there when I searched for my problem?”
This also speaks to understanding why your customer selects you. When you lose one, you begrudgingly want to know why to improve. When you win a new customer, it’s usually off to the races with paperwork and kicking off. Take a moment. Ask questions like “what was something your team took into consideration during the selection process that was different from a few years ago?”.
Knowing what got you selected is just as important as knowing what made you lose, and sometimes it’s as simple (or frustrating) as showing up in a comparison ChatGPT prompt.
(Many of my posts will feature dogs we’re fostering or have fostered. This is Beans. Him and Kua are very present at every stage of the food prep and consumption process.)
