B2B customers say they care most about product and price, but what they really want is a great sales experience. For sales reps, that means getting the basics right.

A recent McKinsey survey of sales targets found a big difference between what customers said was important and what actually drove their behavior. Customers insisted price and product aspects were the dominant factors that influenced their opinion of a supplier’s performance and, as a result, their purchasing decisions.

Yet when they examined what actually determined how customers rated a vendor’s overall performance, the most important factors were product or service features and the overall sales experience.

And they found that the two behaviors that most undermined the sales experience (55% of the "most destructive" failures of B2B sales reps) are too much contact with customers and inadequate product knowledge. The upside of getting these two elements right is significant: a primary supplier seen as having a high-performing sales force can boost its share of a customer’s business by an average of 8 -15 percentage points.

Source: McKinsey Quarterly