Three Reasons Why Buyers Love Private Buyer Portals

Private buyer portals vs. emails: Which do your buyers prefer? If you don’t know, it’s probably because you’ve never thought about the sales process from their perspective. According to Aberdeen research, best-in-class B2B sales organizations that utilize buyer portals to deliver information achieve 28% higher revenue than organizations that rely on email communication. Why is that? Because your buyer has a better experience with private buyer portals. Let’s take a look at the typical buyer experience and see the difference that using a buyer portal instead of email makes in the buyer’s experience.

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes: You’re a busy person, likely in communication with multiple companies, doing research to find the perfect solution for your needs.

Email: You go to compare a certain feature between two companies, but it’s not an easy task. You’re having to sift through tons of emails to find the exact piece of information you’re looking for. Because you have information from multiple companies, that pile of emails is turning into a mountain, cluttering up your inbox. Unless you have a perfect memory and can remember exact phrasing, you’re going to have to click through multiple email conversations to find what you need. It’s time consuming and annoying – NOT a good buyer experience.

Private buyer portal: You’re searching for that elusive piece of information, but instead of taking a bunch of time sifting through emails, you simply go to your personalized portal where all of the content and communication with the sales rep is neatly organized. You can search by keyword, post comments on individual pieces of content and share that content with other people. It’s efficient, it’s fast and it’s easy – a GOOD buyer experience.

Let’s look more closely at the main reasons why buyers prefer portals over email:

1. More Efficient Information Management

A private buyer portal provides the buyer with one centralized repository for all communication between buyer and seller, including relevant content and marketing materials and buyer comments. Whenever the buyer wants it, all the data is in an easily accessible, organized area. No delay. No extra work.

2. Easier Content Viewing

When your buyers get sales information via email, such as a video or sales brochure, what’s the typical process? They see an attachment, download it, go to the download folder and open up the attachment in the appropriate program…. OR they click a link to the private buyer portal and immediately see the presentation, video or other such media without having to deal with downloading anything.

3. Better Personalization

With private portals, the buyers are getting more than just a personal message at the beginning of an email. Instead, they get their own visually appealing webpage with focused messages and content. The portal gives sales reps complete control over the look, feel and impact the content has on the buyer, allowing for a far better experience than a simple email. That experience makes a big difference to the buyer — according to an Avanade global survey, 56% of buyers are willing to pay more for a product or service simply because the customer experience was better than the less expensive options.

Sales 101: Know what your buyers want. Make the buyer experience great for them, and you’ll get complete buy-in for the sales process. The core of the idea is this: Private Buyer Portals help sales reps give buyers a superior, centralized, accessible and customized experience. We hope this helps! Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts on private buyer portals.