The amount of product and service information available to B2B customers--reports, blogs, display ads, email marketing, and more--has become overwhelming, leading to indecision and a sharply reduced likelihood of making a substantive purchase. The best reps have turned this conundrum into a prime selling opportunity. Above all else, they help buyers make sense of the information they've encountered. Their approach is a form of sensemaking, and it encompasses three broad activities. Sensemaking sellers connect customers with relevant resources, curating the information they share for utility and clarity and including only what will help customers proceed with confidence. They clarify information, helping customers feel that they've asked the right questions, understood competing perspectives, and accounted for potential contingencies. And they collaborate on customer learning, Socratically guiding buyers on a purchase journey rather than telling them what to do. A lack of self-confidence impedes big deals more often than a lack of confidence in a particular vendor does. Sensemaking sellers boost customers' self-confidence, enabling buyers to take bold, decisive action with assurance and peace of mind.

B2B customers are deeply uncertain and stressed. With virtually infinite information available on any solution, a swelling raft of stakeholders involved in each purchase, and an ever-expanding array of options, customers are increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered. The authors' solution, developed through work with hundreds of sales organizations globally, is a proactive, take-charge prescriptive approach that sweeps away obstacles and guides customers through decision making. Companies that have mastered prescriptive selling share a set of practices: They work to understand customers' purchase journeys; identify significant customer challenges at each buying stage; arm their sellers with tools to help overcome each challenge; and track customers' purchase progress so that they can intervene to keep the process on track.

Sales reps have long been taught to seek out a senior executive who can single-handedly approve a deal, but unilateral decision makers are now rare. Today most purchases are made by groups of individuals, all with different roles and priorities, and all with veto power. As a result, getting deals done has become an increasingly painful and protracted process. But innovative suppliers are finding ways to drive consensus in diverse buying groups, say three authors from CEB, which has been researching the impact of this buying shift. Those suppliers prime group members to find common ground by creating shared language and perspectives around problems and solutions. They identify internal champions for their offerings at the customers' companies; motivate those individuals to become active advocates; and arm them with the skills and materials needed to win over fellow decision makers. Accomplishing all this requires some novel approaches, such as social-media mining, customer "learning tours," and inventive diagnostic tools. It also calls for a new level of collaboration between sales and marketing. But given today's pressure to drive consensus, suppliers that don't align the two functions as a single team will be trounced by those who do.

Sales leaders have long fixated on process discipline, monitoring reps' conformance to "optimal" behaviors and their performance of specified activities. Recently, however, this sales machine has stalled. The approaches that once led to predictable progress in a sale do not work with today's customers, who are empowered with more information than ever before. The new environment favors creative and adaptable sellers who challenge customers with disruptive insights into their business--and offer unexpected solutions. Such "insight selling" gives reps latitude to discover what the customer has already concluded about its needs and the available solutions, determine who the decision makers are, look for signals that the customer is receptive to a new insight about its business, and then figure out how best to proceed. A study of 2,500 B2B sales professionals found that most organizations, despite faltering sales performance, still have a climate that emphasizes compliance rather than judgment. To create a judgment-oriented sales climate, managers must serve as connectors within and beyond their teams, providing a continual flow of information that supports reps as they exercise their judgment on individual deals. These managers must also focus on the long term, monitoring customers' behaviors and directing reps' creativity and critical thinking to the most promising opportunities. And they need to hire professionals--not necessarily those with sales backgrounds--who can thrive in the new climate.

In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers' needs and selling them "solutions." This worked because customers didn't know how to solve their own problems. But the world of B2B selling has changed: Companies today can readily define their own solutions and force suppliers into a price-driven bake-off. There's some good news, though, according to the authors, all directors at Corporate Executive Board. A select group of reps are flourishing in this environment--and lessons from the playbook they've devised can help other reps and organizations boost their performance. These star reps look for different sorts of organizations, targeting ones with emerging rather than established demand. Instead of waiting for the customer to identify a problem the supplier can solve, they engage early on and offer provocative ideas about what the customer should do. They seek out a different set of stakeholders, preferring skeptical change agents over friendly informants, and they coach those change agents on how to buy rather than quizzing them about their company's purchasing process. High-performing reps are still selling solutions--but more broadly, they're selling insights. And in this new world, that makes the difference between a pitch that goes nowhere and one that secures the customer's business.