Do you know any conflicted laggards? Disinterested laggards? Reluctant followers? Sure you do, but that’s probably not what you call them.
Those are the psychographic profiles used by Gartner to describe technology buying teams who reach decisions very, very slowly, if at all.
This chart is taken from Gartner research on “The New Chasm,” an extension of Geoffrey Moore’s influential Crossing the Chasm (1991).
Of course, no technology seller knowingly wastes resources on organizations who will inevitably “decide not to decide.”
But the fact that a whopping 50% of the buyers in the market are unlikely to do anything until they are forced to doesn’t mean that sellers can afford to do nothing.
Gartner analyst Hank Barnes has written about Gartner’s research (here and here). In a recent post (source of the above chart), Barnes recommends giving consideration to the “mini-commitment” tactics suggested by sales guru Anthony Iannarino.
Commitment to Video
The idea of mini-commitments aligns well with the multi-threading tactics I wrote about last month. Multi-threading is, essentially, reaching out to as many buying team members as you can in order to contend with the large number of members on today’s buying teams (average:28).
Several of the mini-commitments Iannarino talks about sound like they are talking about video.
- Commitment of Time. Buyers value videos because they see video as a time-efficient way to learn something. But they want to be sure their time won’t be wasted. That’s why you should to tell them in advance what’s covered in a video.
- Commitment to Explore. Use-case videos, webinars and other non-sales-y videos fit in here. The more closely you can target different roles on the buying team, the better.
- Commitment to Change. Obviously, video can argue the need for change quite dramatically. On the other hand, we often need to remind our clients that one of the best ways to keep a video short is to avoid telling people stuff they already know.
A Steady Stream of Videos
Reluctant or not, buying team members need to collect information, and they’ll be glad to get it in the form of videos. Implementing these strategies will be easier and more successful if you think about producing videos that your sales team will be eager to share, regardless of length. If it’s useful for decision-making, It doesn’t really matter if it’s a webinar, a tutorial, a traditional explainer, or just somebody answering an interesting question.
