A hyper-personalized buyer experience is typically associated with B2C companies and the consumer journey. No longer. It has become equally important for strong B2B growth.

I recently spoke to Pouyan Salehi, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Scratchpad, about personalizing and creating delight in the B2B buyer experience.

“We want a five-star experience for our buyers and customers,” says Pouyan. “If you think about a five-star hotel, the focus is on customer delight. You can ask anyone anything and they will figure out how to get you the answer. We want our teams to think this way rather than in the traditional mindset — ‘my role is sales, marketing, or success…so I need to hand this off.’” 

Scratchpad delights revenue teams and its customers by bringing together previously disjointed work processes — notes, tasks, pipelines, calendars, etc. — into a single workspace. Revenue teams waste less time on administrative work to have more time for their craft, working and closing deals. 

Pouyan and Scratchpad are on the right track in focusing on B2B customer delight. A recent Salesforce study showed that 72% of business buyers expect a similar level of personalization in the B2B experience as they get in a consumer experience.

Under Pouyan’s leadership, Scratchpad has not surprisingly grown 200% to 300% for two years running. Pouyan shared his key practices for B2B buyer delight and personalization. 

Practice 1: Right Team, Right Mindset 🎯  

For Pouyan, the foundation of buyer delight and offering a five-star buyer experience is having  the right people on the Scratchpad team.

“It all starts with the right team,” says Pouyan. “We want team members who will take all the ego out. In our recruiting process, we screen to find individuals who lead with giving and curiosity, who focus on buyer delight and who demonstrate empathy.”

Pouyan and the Scratchpad team prioritize these innate characteristics over traditional go-to-market skills, believing they can teach the technical skills for marketing, sales, and account management if they start with the right mindset.

Practice 2: Buyers First, Product Second 🙌

“We want our team members to focus on the buyer experience first, product second,” says Pouyan. “Buyers never remember all the features, they remember how they felt.”

The buyer-first focus at Scratchpad starts in the new employee onboarding process and then continues in targeted skill development throughout an employee’s time with the company.

Specific strategies to build this buyer-first, product-second orientation include:

• Prioritizing the buyer journey in onboarding new employees, including time spent reviewing buyer profiles and sharing customer stories on “a day in the life”
• Building skills for customer storytelling through role plays and feedback that result in an internal certification of mastery
• Expecting all employees, not just sales, to review recorded customer calls as part of the onboarding process and then on an ongoing basis to stay rooted in the “customer voice”

Practice 3: Situational Fluency as Culture 👂

“Growth culture is messy,” says Pouyan. “The whole point of focusing on curiosity, delight, and empathy is so we have a team that is good at adjusting. There is a lot we can learn from improv. A growth team needs to process new information and adjust on the fly.”

Pouyan and the leadership team at Scratchpad place a high priority on the team’s situational fluency. Situational fluency helps externally to personalize the buyer experience. It helps internally with the bumps and adjustments that are required of any early growth team.

Scratchpad’s recruiting and skills development support situational fluency, but the leadership commitment is what makes situational fluency a core part of the company’s culture.

The five-star experience, as Pouyan says, is “the north star for more and more B2B buyers.”  High-growth B2B teams need to double down on buyer personalization and delight.