Who would you rather buy from:

1. A company you know, that has done good work for you before
2. A company you have no experience with but that has a well-known brand name
3. A company you don’t know that is either too new or too small to have previously come to your attention?

These three options represent different levels of provider risk. A buyer could just choose the trusted, incumbent provider and be done with it, but that approach doesn’t factor in all the relevant variables.

There is another category of risk that has to be taken into account: solution risk. The usual provider may do a fine job when we need a familiar solution, but the little start-up that just came out of nowhere may have the best fix for a new and unusual problem.

This is the Buyer’s Risk Paradigm:

This chart illustrates an axiom of complex sales: Every customer makes every decision differently—every time. B2B buying processes are becoming more formal and more complex, with more people involved in the decision. And since these decisions are likely to be both strategically important and highly visible, all the stakeholders will feel a degree of both personal and professional risk. 

When buyers worry about risk, the antidote is trust. And that brings up another axiom: Relationships matter. Top-performing salespeople earn their customers’ trust by consistently striving to understand and address their issues—at the account level and at the level of each buying influence.

In the 2013 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, survey respondents were presented with this statement: “We clearly understand our customers’ issues before we propose a solution.” Eighty-nine percent of the companies that had achieved significant growth over the past year said that this statement was true of their sales organization. 

For more of the study’s findings about the Buyer’s Risk Paradigm and how the top sales organizations manage customer relationships, see the 2013 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study Executive Summary.

Joe Galvin is Chief Research Officer and EVP at Miller Heiman. Joe’s mission is to continuously research, measure and analyze the best practices, innovations and emerging trends for complex B-to-B sales organizations providing clients with on-demand access to the most compelling research and insight required to make strategic decisions.