In our recent webinar, trumpet CRO Ollie Sharpe sat down with Koen Stam, Director of International at Personio, to explore how sales teams can turn the buying process into their competitive edge. The session unpacked why buyer enablement is now mission-critical, how Mutual Action Plans shape deal success, and why teams who master async selling and stakeholder alignment consistently win more.

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Meet the speakers

Ollie Sharpe, CRO at trumpet
Ollie is a GTM leader with a track record of scaling SaaS companies across EMEA. He was an early employee at LinkedIn, before building Salesloft’s EMEA presence to $25m+ ARR. Today as CRO at trumpet, he is championing a new era of digital sales rooms and buyer enablement.

Koen Stam, Director of International at Personio
Koen leads Personio’s commercial growth across all regions outside DACH, with teams in Dublin, London, Amsterdam, and Madrid. He brings a blend of sales leadership, RevOps, and scale-up experience, and is also author of the Human and AI GTM OS Substack, offering practical playbooks for modern go-to-market teams.

Key takeaways

• Buyer enablement > sales enablement: “We’re not there to sell, we’re there to enable the buyer.”
• Mutual Action Plans build trust and confidence - when aligned with buyer maturity, they shorten cycles and lift win rates.
• Too much content too soon kills deals - drip-feed the right info at the right stage for up to 50% higher win rates.
• Async selling is non-negotiable - buyers spend <15% of their journey with vendors, so value must land between meetings.
• Team buying = team selling - peer-to-peer alignment across C-levels dramatically increases success.

👉 Download The Definitive Guide to Buyer Enablement here.

What is Buyer Enablement?

Ollie explained during the webinar

‍“Buyer enablement is about helping your potential customers understand and solve their challenges. It’s about enabling them to buy.”

Where sales enablement focuses on the seller, buyer enablement flips the lens to the customer. The shift reflects a hard truth: B2B buying has changed.

• Buyers complete most of their research alone before engaging with sales.
• Stakeholder groups are larger and more complex than ever.
• Expectations mirror B2C: speed, personalisation, and clarity.

For sales teams, this means success comes less from pushing and more from guiding. The buying process itself becomes the differentiator.

How do Mutual Action Plans build buyer confidence and shorten deal cycles?

One of the strongest themes in the discussion was the power of Mutual Action Plans (MAPs).

Koen talks about how Personio adopted MAPs to help buyers manage complex internal processes. Initially run through spreadsheets, MAPs quickly proved too clunky. Moving to digital sales rooms transformed the experience.

Why MAPs matter:

• They align buyer and seller on clear next steps.
• They boost internal credibility for champions who must “sell” the solution internally.
• They reduce cycle length and forecast risk by providing visibility.

‍“A MAP is only mutual if it’s truly aligned with the buyer’s maturity. Forcing your plan never works. Sometimes it’s better to follow theirs.”

Trumpet’s Mutual Action Plan widget (available within its Digital Sales Rooms) is designed exactly for this, structured, collaborative, and adaptive.

What is the best way to use sales content without overwhelming buyers?

Another mistake Koen sees often is content overload. After a great demo, too many reps flood buyers with links, PDFs, and case studies.

The data proves it:

• Dumping content early slows cycles and reduces win rate by 3%.
• Drip-feeding relevant content mid-cycle can lift win rates by 36%.
• Delivering tailored content in the final third boosts win rates by over 50%.

“It’s not about how much you share, it’s about when you share it.”

P.S. This is where Pods in trumpet shine. Reps can structure content libraries, control visibility, and reveal the right material at the right stage. You can also sync documents, so if anything needs updating throughout multiple Pods - it's an easy task with trumpet.

What is async selling and why is it the future of B2B sales?

Async selling is the practice of enabling buyers to move forward in their purchasing journey outside of live calls or meetings. Instead of relying on emails that get buried or waiting days for a follow-up, buyers can access everything they need, content, next steps, proposals, and updates - in their own time.

But why is this the future of B2B sales? Because buyer behaviour has changed. Research shows that buyers spend less than 15% of their total journey with vendors. The other 85% is spent researching independently, aligning stakeholders, and building internal business cases. Traditional selling methods - long email threads, endless meetings, or scattered file sharing - don’t support this reality.

Async selling fits how modern buyers want to work:

• Control and flexibility: Buyers can access information when it suits them, not when a seller is available.
• Faster internal alignment: Champions can share one link with their teams instead of forwarding endless documents.
• Consistency of message: A digital sales room keeps every update, file, and Mutual Action Plan (MAP) step in one place.
• Trust-building: Features like personal welcome videos, FAQs, and engagement analytics give buyers confidence to move forward without waiting.

How to align your sales team with buyer stakeholders

Modern B2B deals rarely hinge on a single decision-maker. Research shows that 8–12 stakeholders are often involved, each with their own priorities. To succeed, sales teams need to mirror this complexity: team buying requires team selling.

Why alignment matters

If only one seller is engaging, critical conversations with finance, IT, or leadership can be missed. Peer-to-peer alignment builds trust and speeds consensus:

• CRO to CRO: Strategy and revenue priorities
• CFO to CFO: Budgets, ROI, and risk
• IT to Solution Engineer: Integrations and compliance

Practical ways to align teams

• Map the buying committee early to identify decision-makers and influencers
• Assign internal counterparts to mirror each persona
• Leverage async updates like short executive videos to connect without scheduling hurdles
• Track engagement signals with tools like trumpet to validate champions and forecast deal health

Aligned teams create credibility, spread risk, and ensure every stakeholder feels understood - turning transactions into partnerships.

Is buyer enablement a competitive advantage?

Buyer enablement is about making it easier for customers to make confident decisions. Instead of focusing only on the sales process, it shifts the attention to how buyers gather information, build internal support and move forward.

• Higher win rates: Trumpet’s CRO Ollie Sharpe reports close to a 50% win rate when applying buyer enablement principles.
• Proven results: At Personio, teams that use trumpet sales rooms see win rates improve by around 10 percent compared with those that do not.
• Faster sales cycles: Clear Mutual Action Plans, well-timed content and asynchronous updates remove friction and keep deals moving.

“Async selling and buyer enablement are no longer optional. They are proven to lift win rates, shorten cycles and create buyer confidence.” In competitive B2B markets, that confidence is what sets successful teams apart.

Final thoughts

The message from both leaders was clear: selling today is not about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about creating clarity, trust, and confidence at every step of the buying journey.