B2B sales now require a ‘holistic’ selling approach, study finds

LAWRENCE — Global business-to-business (B2B) sales are expected to reach $36 trillion in 2026, with about a third in the United States alone.

However, the foundational elements of B2B selling are changing significantly in response to shifting buyer behavior, according to a new study.

“For a dozen years now, it’s become clear that the buyers are running the show,” said Murali Mantrala, the Ned Fleming Professor of Marketing at the University of Kansas.

“With all the digital information, media and technologies available today, buyers are very well informed. So some of the info that salespeople in the past used to provide, these purchasers are already familiar with and knowledgeable about. They don’t even want to talk to salespeople if it’s at an early stage because they are already doing research on their own.”

Mantrala examines this pattern in a new paper titled “Holistic Selling: An Emerging Paradigm in B2B Markets.” It reveals how the key role of the salesperson has evolved from order-getting or long-term relationship building to orchestrating all buyer/seller touchpoints to boost buyer-led purchase journeys. The research appears in the Journal of Marketing.

Co-written with Tim Kalwey of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Manfred Krafft of the University of Münster, Germany, and Yeji Lim of California State University, Fullerton, the research finds that technology has helped buyers’ familiarity with products before ever meeting a salesperson.

“Undoubtedly, that has triggered cascading effects on how they interact with their suppliers and sellers,” Mantrala said.

“They’re extremely well-informed and kind of impatient with people who are repeating information which they already know. More millennials are moving into responsible buying positions, and those folks have grown up searching things on the internet and through social media. That has made them reluctant to interact with salespeople, who they think just drain their time.”

How can salespeople make themselves valuable to this new generation of purchasers? 

“What we found is salespeople need to be aware they’re not going to drive the entire interaction,” he said. “Buyers don’t want to talk about stuff they can easily find out. They want to talk more when it gets down to actually making the purchase. ‘What are you going to do for me? How are we going to interact? What will be the kind of support I’ll get if I buy your product?’”

Thus a new B2B selling paradigm — holistic selling — has emerged, which relies on a mix of digital and human channels and touchpoints that must be orchestrated by the salesperson to add value to the buyer over all stages of the latter’s purchase journey.

To study this concept, Mantrala’s team partnered with a large multinational corporation in Germany.

“Nobody there was quite realizing the whole role of sales has changed. We said, ‘Hey, we’d like to investigate this, and if you’re willing to give us access to your managers and your data, we might come up with something that will help you.’ They were quite enthusiastic about it, and so they opened up all their senior leadership, who also introduced us to other people in other firms,” he said.

This led to 42 in-depth interviews with B2B executives and two focus groups with a dozen B2B salespeople over a three-year period. Armed with this information, the researchers determined a holistic approach is needed for those in sales to address current market needs.

“Today’s holistic seller must manage multiple technologies because to add value, you can’t just keep repeating whatever your point of view is. You have to network with your internal people and with outsiders to generate the latest intelligence to put in front of the buyer,” he said.

Companies must also reorganize their sales forces.

He said, “It’s no longer necessary to be assigned a set of customers in a territory. Because these people can come from anywhere. When they do, you must be ready to be a holistic seller.”

A KU faculty member since 2020, Mantrala specializes in quantitative marketing strategy (specifically retailing channels, marketing resource allocation and sales force management). He has also been doing research in the fashion retail space for more than 30 years. 

This change in B2B buyers’ behaviors hasn’t reduced the need for sales professionals, Mantrala said. He confirms there are almost as many salespeople today as there were 10 years ago. Yet it’s the tech companies who are hiring most of them: Google, Microsoft and the very companies that produce the technologies which were supposed to eliminate sales forces are themselves employing people tasked with selling more and more complex systems.

“This is one domain where AI may not actually replace human agents,” Mantrala said.

“A human sales force adds value which cannot be given by AI because in almost every case, B2B buyers we interviewed said, ‘We need to meet the people. We need to see into the eyes of these people and judge whether we’re going to get a good deal.’ So however much technology was used earlier, in the end, they want that human connection — but on their terms.”