I am fascinated by a recent Gartner study about the journey of 700 enterprise buyers across the U.S., EMEA, Brazil, India and China. According to a recent with Hank Barnes, Research Vice President at Gartner, the study focused on four areas:

• During the buying process, what types of activities and information do you use, independent of the firm you are evaluating?
• What type of content do you use from the provider itself?
• What marketing activities get your attention?
• What are you expecting from sales interactions?

The findings? Buyers spend only 32% of their journey interacting with supplier-side content or sales people. Two thirds of the buyer鈥檚 journey is devoted to internal assessments, peer networking, and the recommendations of external experts.

According to Barnes, buyers 鈥渉ave access to all this stuff from vendors, but making sense of it, interpreting it, understanding that they have the right stuff is where they鈥檙e really struggling.鈥�

This data quantifies exactly what we hear every day in our buyer persona interviews. And as a career sales and marketing professional, I am amazed that every company hasn’t realized that filling this void could be the best way to gain a competitive advantage.

In a few months ago, I related our experience interviewing buyers who say that marketing materials do nothing to help them make a decision, as competing solutions relate the same obvious benefits rather than useful information. The buyers鈥� experience with sales people is mostly a continuation of this theme, as sales arrives with the same marketing message rather than the critical details that help buyers gain confidence in their decision.

We know that many marketers are trying to explain the value of interviewing buyers to understand their needs and expectations. Maybe now that we have a report stating that vendors are privy to only 1/3 of the buyer鈥檚 journey, we can make it clear that it doesn鈥檛 work to build buyer personas by culling information from salespeople and marketing automation solutions. We’re seeing a very small part of the decision we need to influence.

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One of the life experiences I credit most for teaching me about marketing was the five years I spent in sales. I came to that job in a roundabout way 鈥� a division of Wells Fargo Bank wanted a paperless office and asked me to make that happen. I knew nothing about technology (and ultimately failed to create paperless-ness) but I quickly fell in love with computers.

My boss at that company helped too, giving me some of the best career advice I鈥檝e ever received. He told me 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got to love the core business you鈥檙e in or you鈥檒l never get ahead.鈥� I hated the core business I was in (banking), so I cut bait and started trying to find a job as a salesperson in a technology company.

My first assignment was a sales 鈥渙verlay鈥� position that focused on winning more business from the current customer base. I loved it and grew revenue by 300%, but the reps weren鈥檛 happy that someone else was making money from their customers. Management didn鈥檛 want to irritate the reps, so they eliminated my position and offered me a job in marketing.

Fast forward ten years, and in another company I spent four years in charge of both sales and marketing teams.

So while I consider myself a marketer, those five years in sales helped me see that several aspects of the way we differentiate the two roles is illogical and costly.

Consider this:

1. Sales and marketing are both about persuasion. The sales person鈥檚 job is to persuade one buyer at a time, while the marketer鈥檚 job is to persuade markets full of buyers.

When I was in sales, it was marketing鈥檚 job to get a buyer to notice us, and then it was my job to persuade that buyer to choose us. This was a great division of labor, because it鈥檚 way more difficult to persuade a market full of buyers than one at a time. But today鈥檚 buyers have changed the rules, navigating 60% to 80% of their decision before they talk to a salesperson. Companies that haven鈥檛 made the shift to persuasive marketing risk elimination before the salespeople have a chance to do their job.

2. Salespeople have the opportunity, permission and training to listen to buyers before they build a strategy to persuade them. Marketers have none of these things.

As a sales rep, I learned to dedicate the first part of every sales call to listening to my buyer, gaining real insight into that account鈥檚 needs and expectations. Then it was my job to describe our solution in a way that established a perfect fit between that buyer鈥檚 needs and our product. Go tell sales management that you want their reps to stop listening to buyers before they sell to them, and they鈥檒l look at you like you鈥檙e crazy. But everyone expects marketers to do just that.

3. Sales people have to optimize their time to persuade buyers to buy now, but marketers have to optimize their investments to build pipeline for the future.

By the time I started running sales, I completely understood the importance of marketing. 聽However, it wasn鈥檛 long before all of my time and attention shifted to the salespeople. Faced with the urgency of meeting this month鈥檚 numbers, our longer-term investments suffered. I learned that it鈥檚 really difficult to balance short and long term priorities, and that marketing metrics need to focus on results that impact the next quarter or next year, even if this seems less tangible.

4.听 While there are dozens of things that every good sales person learns about each buyer, the ability to be persuasive hinges on just 5 key insights.

When I decided to help marketers understand their buyer personas, I knew that many of the things I learned about buyers in sales only worked when I had the opportunity to build a strategy to persuade one buyer at a time. It was easy to see that tracking all of these distinctions about buyers would cause a lot of confusion and far too many different strategies. So I started thinking about what really helped me to be a persuasive sales rep, and that鈥檚 how the 5 Rings of Buying Insight became the foundation of buyer personas.

5.听 Despite everything you鈥檝e heard about price, the company that wins the buyer’s trust wins their business.

The solutions I had to sell were invariably more expensive than our competition. So we didn’t win on price. We competed for the buyer鈥檚 business by being the best listeners and using our insights to persuade buyers that we were best qualified to meet their expectations. Now that buyers can avoid sales contact for so long, a lot of that responsibility belongs to the marketing team.

I think it鈥檚 fair to say that when I was in sales, we had a lot more impact on the outcome of a deal than the reps I know today. And because this change is driven by buyers who have ready access to the information they think they need, this trend is unlikely to reverse itself. It’s time for marketers to gain the deep buyer insights that have always been the foundation of successful sales.

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One of the hardest parts of bringing our 色花堂 model into practice actually comes after the project is completed.

We鈥檝e accomplished so much with the client, working with them to build clear, actionable buyer personas, and the results are spectacular. We just can鈥檛 share them with anybody.

Needless to say, marketing departments like to keep their successes close to the vest to make sure that their competitors don鈥檛 hop on board. There鈥檚 nothing I鈥檇 like more than to trumpet from the rooftops how Client X or Client Y improved their marketing content or sales results using the 5 Rings of Buying Insight, but iron-clad NDAs keep my mouth shut tight.

However, sometimes clients are so excited that they just can鈥檛 help talking.

色花堂 Masterclass alumni Samuel Williams, with his firm , was contracted by Deloitte Private, the division of Deloitte Consulting that specializes in families and small businesses, to develop a marketing plan.

The firm started by interviewing people who had recently evaluated solutions like theirs, modeling the buyers鈥� decision to uncover clear, factual insights about how they compared Deloitte to its competitors.

When Deloitte saw the details that these personas revealed, it was easy to identify the targeted messaging and marketing content that would persuade their buyers to choose them. And it was simple to help the sales teams see how to tell those same powerful stories to their customers.

Don鈥檛 take my word for it 鈥� watch this video from Deloitte head of marketing and communications Cassandra Worrall about the whole process.

Strong stuff, right? Here鈥檚 a more from Aamplify with even more data.

One of the key takeaways from their buyer persona research was that buyers had three key motivations for coming to Deloitte:

1. Help leveraging global business development opportunities

2. Heavy lifting to help solve specific challenges

3. Technology solutions to improve business processes

Armed with these insights, Deloitte Private pushed that messaging front and center to their home page, giving their digital strategy a powerful, clear call to action.

The best way to judge the power of a marketing campaign is by real-world results, and Deloitte got them. Using the tools and interviewing skills they acquired by attending the 色花堂 Masterclass, Aamplify gave their client exactly what they needed to connect with buyers without the guesswork.

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