[00:00:00] So here's a hard truth that nobody in the CX industry wants to admit. You're not losing deals because your competitor is cheaper. You aren't losing deals because your feature set is missing one specific integration. No, you're losing deals because you're making it absolutely miserable for a small or midsize company to purchase from You.

Hey, welcome back to CX without the bs. Today we are doing a gut check. I'm turning the mirror back on us, the vendors, the advisors, the channel leaders, and

we spend all day, well, lots of folks in the industry talking about customer experience and journey mapping for the enterprise giants. But when it comes to SMB, the folks in that five to 500 employee range, we treat them like second class citizens. We force them into enterprise buying cycles, and then we drown them in jargon, and then we scratch our heads when they ghost us.

If you wanna know why your pipeline's stalling or why that perfect prospect, suddenly stop replying to [00:01:00] your emails. Well, this episode's for you today. We're gonna break down the five specific ways we're breaking the buyer experience and exactly how to fix them to double your close rate. So let's get into it.

First, the forgotten buyer and, and first, we actually need to make sure we're defining who we're actually talking about because this group here is often misunderstood. When I say SMB, I'm talking about the forgotten middle. And these aren't the solo entrepreneurs working out of a garage, but they're also not the Fortune five hundreds with, you know, procurement departments.

The size of football fields, what I'm talking about is companies with 20, 50, maybe 200 employees

and maybe they spend anywhere from a thousand up to what, $20,000 a month in technology tech across all their different solutions. And here's the reality of their life that most vendors ignore. They're busy. The person buying your UCaaS solution or your contact center software isn't a chief experience officer.

It's probably the owner. Or an office manager or an IT [00:02:00] director who is also responsible for fixing the printer and managing the wifi. See, they don't have time for your six month sales cycle. They don't have the bandwidth to decode your acronyms.

And they definitely do not have patience for a vendor who thinks they are the most important thing on the schedule, not the customer. See, the formula is quite simple. We aren't losing these deals to competitors. We're losing them to indecision, and we are losing them because we, the sellers create friction.

So today we're gonna remove that friction. And here's the five step framework to stop breaking the buyer experience. Step one, hyperresponsiveness. I call this the Amazon effect. 'cause the mistake number one, and this is a very common one across the industry, is that we are way too slow folks. We live in an Amazon world.

If I wanna buy a 4K camera, I can read reviews, see the price, and then have it at my door, what, 24 hours. But B2B Tech. Like, okay, hello? Yeah. Oh, you want me to [00:03:00] quote? Great. Let me, uh, schedule a discovery call for next Tuesday. Then I'll talk to my sales engineer and then we'll submit a request to the carrier.

Then maybe in about 12 days I'll send you a PDF that you can't understand. Like, are you kidding me? For a small business owner delay. Is the death of their business. If, if they take time to reach out to you today, it's because they have a problem today. If you wait 48 hours to respond, that pain is either subsided or they found someone else who pick up the phone.

See, there is a psychological concept called the decay of enthusiasm. Every hour that passes between their request and your response, their excitement of solving that problem drops by half. So here's the rule. If you insist on controlling the buying process, meaning you won't let them just buy online, then you are morally obligated to be fast.

You cannot demand it to be the gatekeeper and then take a nap at the gate. So how do we fix this without burning out?

Well, [00:04:00] responsiveness is again, non-negotiable. So if a lead comes in, acknowledge it immediately. Even if you don't have the answer, have a reply saying, Hey, I see this and I'm working on it. And that's definitely, dare I say, infinitely better than silence. Silence breeds anxiety. Communication on the other hand, breeds trust.

And oh, by the way, why are you building every quote from scratch? Have a menu ready. You should know your ballpark pricing for a 10 seat deal, a 50 seat deal, a hundred seat deal, and have templates ready. The while you wait content, like if you do have to make them wait for a carrier quote, then send them something valuable immediately.

Like, Hey, while we run these numbers, here's a checklist we bring to the table as we prepare to, to map things over, right? You're keeping the momentum moving. And by the way, speed signals reliability. So if you're slow to sell, guess what? They're gonna assume you're gonna be slow.

You're to respond in support. But if you're fast now, they're gonna trust you're gonna be fast when the [00:05:00] server does go down. Step two and, and this one is controversial in the finance department. Uh, I'm sorry guys. I don't care. Because we need to stop optimizing contracts for lock-ins and start optimizing for buyer comfort.

Like look at the standard industry contract today. Three years auto renewal. Insane early termination fees. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? We tell ourselves it's for stability, but let's be honest, it's because we want trap the revenue. We wanna make it painful for a customer to leave so we don't have to work as hard to keep them happy.

To an SMBA three year contract doesn't look like stability. That looks like a trap. See, you have to remember, small businesses are always going through changes and they don't know what their revenue will look like in 36 months. They don't know if they're gonna have 50 employees or five. So when you slap these rigid long-term [00:06:00] contracts on the table in the first meeting, you're triggering their fight or flight response, and usually.

They're choosing flight, they start thinking, well, what if this tech sucks? What if I hate their support? Am I stuck paying for this for three years? And unfortunately, the answer to that question is usually yes. So the fix is we need to flip the script. Comfort controls deals faster than control, so if you wanna speed up the sales cycle, we have to lower the risk.

So how do we do that offer month to month, even if it's slightly more expensive for the monthly cost? Give them the option. Give them a one year bridge. If you need a contract, start with 12 months

and when you offer flexibility, you aren't just changing terms, you are sending a massive trust signal. You are saying, we are so confident that our product works. We don't need to handcuff you to keep you here. See that confidence is contagious. The buyer feels safe, and the safe buyer is the buyer who signs the DocuSign.

Step three, the barrier to [00:07:00] entry. See, remember, step three here is gonna help explain why your calendar is empty. So just keep that in mind 'cause we make it entirely too hard to actually enter into a buying conversation with us. Watch. Let's play a game. Go to your own website right now. Or the website of a vendor you represent.

Just go and and try to find out two things. One, what exactly does the product do, and two, roughly how much does it cost? Yeah. Let's, let's look here. Um, yeah, that's right. I bet you can't. I bet you you see a button that says request demo or contact sales. We have created a gauntlet. We force SMBs to fill out forms.

And wait for an SDR to call them to qualify them, which is just sales speak, to see, hey, do you have enough money? Do you have a budget? And then we schedule another call with an account executive. And for a business owner, especially a small business owner, ho on a quick call is a threat. It means 30 minutes of their life, they can't get back and they don't want a [00:08:00] relationship with you yet.

They just want information. So if it takes an hour for a customer to figure out if your solution is even in their budget, we have failed. You have failed. So that means we need to lower the barrier to entry. So ungate conversations, put a five minute video on your, your website that actually shows the software.

Ungate your demos, right? Like not a marketing reel, but like actual showing people using the interface. Give ballpark pricing. No, you don't need to put your exact price list up, but give them a range, right? Like solutions start around $20 a user. A typical setup for 50 users is X dollars.

Like give them the option, right? And then for self qualification, let them rule themselves in or out. Like when, when you hide information, you don't build curiosity, you're building suspicion. You make them think, okay, if they won't tell me the price, it's probably 'cause it's super expensive. [00:09:00] Be the advisor who gives answers before they are even asked.

See, like that's how you become their favorite. And then step four, ah, my favorite, the shiny object syndrome. Um, and, and this is where technical founders and these overeager sales reps who they trip over themselves, over the features, the benefits, they are addicted to selling the shiny stuff. That unfortunately the reality is the s and b customer really doesn't need.

We love our features. We love our AI integrations. We love our omnichannel analytics. Oh yes, our sentiment analysis engines. And when we get an SMB on the phone, we try to vomit all these features unto them all at once, and we think we're building value. Look at this thing we can do. And the buyer, all they hear is look at how complicated this is and probably how expensive it is, or worse.

And this is the wor, truly, this is the worst. We try to [00:10:00] upsell them. The customer needs a simple phone system for like their front desk, and then we try to sell them a full fledged contact center with workforce management and, and QM qa. Why is this bad, Brian? Well, because it's killing trust. If a buyer senses that you are trying to just pad the deal or that you are more interested in selling your cool tech than solving their boring problem, they check out, they start to wonder if they're gonna pay for a bunch of shelfware.

So what's the fix here? Well sell the screwdriver, not the hardware store. Solve the immediate pain if they come to you because their calls are dropping. Talk about call reliability, and that's it. And then position the fancy features as future proofing, right? Like say, Hey, the system has all of this stuff for down the road, but for today, for day one, let's just get your phones working right?

Like, let's get it ringing correctly [00:11:00] and, and ask yourself if this was my money, if I was actually in the buyer's shoes, would I purchase this? Like do everything premium package. And if your immediate gut reaction was no, then don't pitch it. The best upsell strategy is a happy customer. So how do you get them happy?

Well start them off small. Get them on that basic tier, make them successful, and then when they experience the success, they come back asking for more.

But if you try to do that on day one, you're going to crush the deal. All right, step five. We're almost there. Final step, we need to talk about cognitive load. Um, and there's a famous study from Columbia University that was called the Jam Study. And in Scenario A, they set up a display with 24 flavors of jam.

And in scenario B, [00:12:00] they set up a display with six flavors of jam. Now the table with 24 flavors of jam got way more traffic. But here's the kicker. The table with six flavors had 10 x the sales. Wh why? Well, because when you present the human brain with too many choices, it shuts the brain down. And we all love and know this, right?

It's paralysis analysis or analysis by paralysis. And this is where in our industry we love to overwhelm the SMB. We send them a proposal with three different vendors. If you're in a technology advisor space, and each has four different licensing tiers, five different pages of technical specs, and then we think as we're giving them all this information that we're being thorough, but we're not being thorough.

Sorry, this is gonna be probably a little tough to hear, but when we do that, we're being lazy. We are asking the [00:13:00] customer to do the work and figuring out which of these is best. And because they're afraid of making the wrong choice, they make no choice and they stick with the status quo. Your job as an advisor or as a vendor is not to present options, but rather it's to help show outcomes, right, to build those outcomes.

So never present more than two or three options. Say, Hey, here is the good option, here's the better option. Here's the best option, right? So it's baby bear, mother bear, father bear. Good, better, best. And don't just slide the PDF across the table. Say, Hey, Brian, based on what you told me about your remote team, I strongly recommend option B, and here's why.

Right? And then go into plain English. Stop selling, you know, SD WAN redundancy. Sell internet that doesn't go down during your Zoom calls. Outcome [00:14:00] versus the thing. Again, reduce the cognitive load, make the decision easy for the buyer. A confused buyer is gonna say no. A confident and clear minded buyer is going to say yes.

So let's bring this home. I'm not here to just beat up on the industry, and I know sometimes I get comments that they think I do that and, and no, I'm, I'm actually here because I want us. To win, but to win, we have to realize that the s and b buyer, it has changed. They are consumer minded. They are way more research heavy than they were in the past.

They value their time more than they value your sales process.

And if you're wondering why your numbers are down or why nobody's buying, I challenge you to look at these five areas. Are you making them wait? Are you trying to trap them into long-term contracts? Are you hiding behind your [00:15:00] forms or your request? A quote docs, are you selling features that they don't need?

Are you confusing them with too many choices? Nobody ever lost a deal because the process was too smooth. My call to action to you today is simple. Pick one of these five, just one, and fix it. Go change your email templates. To be faster. Go simplify your proposal deck. Go fight with your finance team to get a 12 month option approved.

Do the work to remove friction and watch what happens to your close rate. All right, folks. That's it for this week's episode of CX Without the bs. And if you found value in today's episode, well do me a favor. Hit that little subscribe button and like button so the algorithm doesn't think we're boring.

And if you're an SMB owner listening to this and are nodding your head in agreement, leave a comment down below. Tell us your worst sales experience that you've had this year. Or I guess even going back to last year, we all want to hear it so we can get better. Uh, and with that being said,

until next time, this is Brian Nichols [00:16:00] saying Stop making it hard to buy and start making it easy to succeed. We'll see you later.