Forrester’s guidance on how to successfully sell B2B products to Millennial buyers is already Northern Light’s standard practice
For nearly a decade, Northern Light has been talking about the importance of accommodating the business research preferences of Millennials. A generation conditioned by social media, Millennials typically prefer an enterprise market and competitive intelligence (CI) knowledge management tool that lets them “browse to content” and seek referrals from trusted peers over “searching” for information, as their Baby Boomer and Gen-X colleagues grew up doing.
Millennials increasingly are B2B buyers
Now, Millennials are not just a majority of the workforce with particular user experience expectations; increasingly they are the purchase decision makers for all manner of products and services in large organizations. In its predictions for 2024, Forrester Research says generational differences will alter B2B buying preferences; specifically, “two out of five Millennial buyers will demand early access to B2B product experts.”
This dynamic may require many companies to alter how they sell, but not Northern Light. We’ve always embraced a “high touch” model in how we interact with our prospects and our clients. From day one, we emphasize sharing our technical expertise and best practices for implementing market and competitive intelligence portals, including how to drive their usage and value across the enterprise, and how to maximize the scarce resource of professional CI analysts.
Northern Light’s “high touch” sales and support
Our hands-on approach to sales is best represented by our “Feel the Love” pilot program, in which Northern Light creates (at no cost to the prospect) a fully functional market and competitive intelligence portal for a company. Typically, a “Feel the Love” pilot is deployed to a limited group of users that the CI leader at the prospect company selects, accompanied by active support from a Northern Light Customer Success Manager with deep product expertise.
Once a company signs with Northern Light, the Customer Success Manager provides all required training to the client. Other members of the Customer Success Team include a Research Librarian and a Content Operations Manager (if needed for secondary content integrations). The Research Librarian will create Expert Search libraries for the client that can be subscribed to by users as alerts and which power Strategic Dashboards and Newsletters. The Research Librarian will create the initial set of Strategic Dashboards for the client and will train the client’s Content Contributors. The team continues working with the client for the life of the relationship with weekly or bi-weekly meetings to review open items, manage change requests, resolve problems, brainstorm new ideas for increased engagement, and study portal metrics, and consider Best Practices.
The easiest company to do business with
Northern Light’s goal is to be the easiest vendor any company has ever done business with, starting with our very first interaction. We are heavily invested in every client’s success; in 20 years we have never lost a client over a service-related issue.
As Forrester writes: “We predict that 40% of younger buyers will rate person-to-person meetings with product experts as their most meaningful personal interactions. As a result, successful sellers will need to match buyer needs to appropriate offerings — and their representative experts — earlier in the sales process.”
To which Northern Light replies: We’re way ahead of you!