Business-to-business (B2B) buyers are young and tech-savvy. With forty percent of corporate buyers now under 40 and eighty percent of those responsible for procurement in their mid-career, today’s B2B market is changing faster than ever. Is your business keeping pace with this generational shift?

Maintaining the status quo of poor alignment between sales and marketing teams is causing many companies to fall behind. Organizations out of alignment can create inconsistent brand messages. They also offer weak sales support that reaches only a few top-performing salespeople.

Whatever stage your business is at, it’s never too late to enable your salespeople to be more competitive in today’s marketplace. Sales support is a great place to start.

To reduce costs while improving the quality of your product, you need an intelligent solution. You can achieve accountability and quality control through a martech solution. To be effective, it must be responsive to the market and your salespeople’s needs, while being easy to use.

The B2B market is entering a new era

Today’s consumer is connected and expects a seamless experience across print, product, direct, digital, and mobile. Marketers are thinking less about marketing channels and more about “omnichannel” strategies.

Most B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content online before engaging with a vendor. Only nine percent of people connect with a salesperson before doing their own online research. In addition, 74 percent of B2B buyers say they do more than 50 percent of their pre-purchase research on the internet.

Rather than fearing change, B2B companies should see this shift as an opportunity. For example, GE’s innovative World in Motion interactive was not only commercially successful but radically changed perceptions of the company. It uses company data and a tech platform to provide an enthralling B2B buyer experience.

But, most of the B2B sector has plenty of room to grow. Customer experience in B2B is, on the whole, poor. B2B buyers mostly have bad experiences when compared with B2C ratings. Why is this?

Customer experience is lacking partly due to a lack of control. Only one in five B2B marketers say they have complete control over their sales partners. Can your business control how partners deliver customer experience? If not, how can you expect to grow revenue?

Tech solutions solve control issues by providing data and transparent feedback. As a result, the digital sector in B2B is showing strong growth. B2B eCommerce is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent over the next five years.

What can your business do to prepare for major changes in the B2B marketplace?

The best companies celebrate their sales support

Getting the right tools, documents, and staff to support your sellers takes time. It can be hard to justify any extra spending on these non-core items. But, the best companies to sell for, like Hormel Foods, Northwestern Mutual, and Heartland Payment Systems, celebrate their sales support when they get it right.

What does success sound like? At the best companies, salespeople sound like this:

• “The people are the best part of my job. It’s like a big family. Sales meetings are more like family reunions. Everyone getting together and catching up. I think that’s rare,” says Hormel’s Jessica Campbell.

• “I’m a different person today to the person I was when I started. And that’s because of all the opportunities that this company has to offer,” says Northwestern’s Linda Whitaker-Procaro.

• “The real secret is our people. Heartland has built an environment for value-based sales professionals and leaders who want to succeed by pursuing mastery of their craft, career, and character,” says Heartland’s Tony Capucille.

Support includes extensive training, development programs, and generous rewards.

Most B2B companies, unfortunately, have limited resources in this area. Many only support their top-performing sales reps. But, what conversion-rate boost would occur if you supported your bottom 80 percent of sellers? Top-performing B2B companies have 30 percent more sales support than poor performers.

There is a way to provide full sales support for all, and it involves scaling up using technology. But first, you need a good look at your current state of affairs.

How B2B companies fix sales support

To begin rolling out sales support, you need more than small technical changes. Sales support will require larger changes in your organization:

• • Put a visionary leader at the helm. Your leader should be able to decide on optimizing and adopting new sales support systems. Through leadership, you’re removing the potential for infighting and discord. A leader can boost top-down alignment in the organization.

• Eliminate busywork. Most sales content created by marketing never gets used. Removing these glaring inefficiencies will be among your top priorities. To remove wastefulness, you need transparency on what your reps need: what works in the field and what doesn’t.

• Define your true customers. Marketing can fall into the trap of assuming that the market is their one-and-only customer. Actually, marketers should direct their first thoughts to sales reps. If you can’t convince sales to use your content, then you’ve already lost the battle.

Once you have the large changes in place, you’ll also need to implement the rest of your sales support overhaul. A tech solution can help you to track performance and improve any weaknesses.

Improve your sales support for B2B excellence

B2B organizations will need to change as their buyers change. To exceed your competitors in a complex marketplace, you need intelligence. This comes from data and tech solutions, not remaining in the status quo mentality.

Top performing companies have discovered the untapped gains available within sales support software. By optimizing your sellers, you will increase selling time. You’ll also provide marketing with valuable knowledge. Over time, you should see a more-aligned organization with higher revenue.

Author bio: Jessica Dunn, Sales Director for Triptych, has spent the last 14 years engaging with some of the largest and most recognized brands. She’s helped position them to solve business problems and reach goals through technology implementation. By taking a consultative approach to understand the needs of the client, Jess has helped her clients hit their business objectives.