Topic: SALES & MARKETING

The world of B2B sales is undergoing a dramatic shift—and the PEO industry is not exempt. In fact, if your pipeline development strategy still relies heavily on traditional outbound tactics and seller-led conversations, you may be missing a significant percentage of today’s buying activity.

According to the 2024 B2B Buyer Experience Report by 6sense, today’s buyers are more independent, better informed, and further along in their decision-making process before engaging with a sales rep. The data is striking:

• B2B buyers are nearly 70% through their purchasing process before they ever speak to a seller.
• Buyers initiate first contact in more than 80% of cases—not the other way around.
• Approximately 85% of buyers have already defined their purchase requirements before reaching out to vendors.

These statistics are a wake-up call for PEOs still relying on conventional sales playbooks. Let’s unpack what this means—and how PEOs can evolve to meet modern buyers long before they ever pick up the phone.

THE PEO SALES PROCESS IS NOW BUYER-LED, NOT SELLER-LED

Historically, PEO sales have been driven by relationship-building and consultative selling, often initiated through cold calls or networking events. While these tactics still play a role, they’re no longer the primary way buyers engage.

That buyers are 70% through their journey before speaking to a sales rep for the first time signals a major change: your prospects are researching independently. They’re reading articles, reviewing comparisons, asking peers, and consuming digital content well in advance.

Implication for PEOs: If you’re not visible in the digital spaces where research happens, you’re invisible to your next client. Content marketing, SEO, and thought leadership—not just lead generation—must be foundational to your strategy. The earlier you enter the buyer’s awareness, the better chance you have of making the shortlist.

PROSPECTS REACH OUT WHEN THEY’RE READY – BE READY

With over 80% of first contact initiated by the buyer, sales power dynamics have shifted. Rather than being “sold to,” buyers arrive with specific needs and expectations—and they engage only when ready.

For PEOs, this makes it essential that your website (and your perspective on the challenges prospects are dealing with) are easy to find and easy to engage with—especially for buyers who prefer autonomy.

Implication for PEOs: Create low-friction pathways that help buyers self-educate. Offer a mix of gated and ungated resources that answer common questions and address objections before they’re raised. Examples include buying guides, ROI calculators, buyer checklists, educational webinars, and industry-specific case studies. These tools let potential clients explore your value proposition at their own pace and build early trust—making it more likely they’ll reach out when ready, on their terms.

WILL YOU GET A SEAT AT THE TABLE?

Perhaps most eye-opening: 85% of buyers have already defined their purchase requirements before speaking with a rep. This includes scope of services, compliance needs, technology platforms, and pricing expectations.

That leaves little room to shift a buyer’s direction during a sales conversation. If your offering doesn’t match—or is misunderstood due to unclear messaging—you may not even get a shot.

Implication for PEOs: Your website, social presence, and marketing materials must clearly communicate your offerings and differentiators before a conversation starts. Ask yourself: Can a visitor understand what makes your PEO unique within five minutes? Are your solutions clearly aligned with their size, industry, or stage of growth? These are the moments that determine whether you’re considered—or passed over.

ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES FOR THE NEW BUYER JOURNEY

This shift doesn’t mean sales is obsolete—it means sales and marketing must work in lockstep. In a consultative industry like PEO, aligning both teams around a shared understanding of today’s buyer is critical.

Here are four ways to bridge that gap:

1. Collaborate on Content Development. Your sales team knows the questions prospects ask. Use that insight to create proactive content—blogs, videos, webinars, white papers—that support each stage of the funnel.
2. Adopt an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) Mindset. Instead of casting a wide net, focus on high-fit accounts with personalized outreach, relevant content, and coordinated sales-marketing touchpoints. ABM makes you relevant before buyers engage.
3. Invest in Buyer Enablement Tools. Give buyers the tools they need to make internal decisions—think side-by-side service comparisons, implementation guides, or executive-ready summaries.
4. Measure What Matters. Go beyond lead counts and track engagement signals that reveal buying intent—time on key pages, repeat visits, downloads. These can indicate where a buyer is in their journey and guide smarter outreach.

FINAL THOUGHTS: MEETING THE BUYER WHERE THEY ARE

The PEO market is evolving—and so are its buyers. CEOs, HR leaders, and CFOs are doing their homework. They’re informed, confident, and looking for partners who align with pre-set expectations.

Sales isn’t going away—but it must become more adaptive, strategic, and marketing-informed. In many cases, your most effective sales rep is your content and online presence.

If you want to grow your book of business, stop chasing prospects—and start helping them find you. Because by the time they call, they’ve likely already decided whether you’re a contender—or not.

Since 2018, NAPEO has partnered with market research firm Povaddo to track PEO awareness among business owners and key decision makers. The 2024 survey found that PEO awareness now stands at 67%, a 48% increase since 2018.

Amid an ever-shifting set of challenges — from rising costs to changing consumer preferences and generational shifts in the workplace — employers now face a “permacrisis.” The formerly unprecedented has become the norm, ramping up pressure on employers to devise new strategies to safeguard their talent and grow their business.

If you’re struggling with low close rates or stalled deals, be brutally honest with yourself by using these three criteria for each opportunity in your pipeline.

Leveraging actuarial skills and data-driven strategies is like having a GPS for your sales journey. It helps PEOs target the right markets, optimize profitability, tailor pricing, and continuously improve.

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, PEOs must expand their businesses to thrive and remain competitive. As companies continue to seek efficient and cost-effective solutions for their HR needs, PEOs have a unique opportunity to leverage their expertise and comprehensive services to capture a larger market share.

To remain competitive and keep clients, PEOs must address these critical gaps in HR analytics, platform scalability and data security. By enhancing their service offerings in these areas, PEOs will better meet the evolving needs of their HR clients, ensuring sustained strategy, scale, security and satisfaction.

The ultimate objective of every marketer is to produce a meaningful and measurable ROI. Unfortunately, having that objective and actually achieving that objective are two very different things. As with any goal and objective, there are three key elements to success – a strategy, a plan, and disciplined execution. But keeping your fingers crossed isn’t a sustainable marketing strategy. And hope isn’t an executable plan.

Before setting out to develop a strategy and plan, it helps to understand where you want your plan to take you. What’s the goal? And with marketing, things like new websites, more social media engagement, or even a boat load of new leads shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. The goal should be sales and top-line revenue growth.

Writing a big revenue number on your conference room white board may help rally your team for growth, but it won’t help you build a marketing strategy and plan. In fact, it can actually be a little intimidating. So how do you achieve such a goal? How do you even start?

The best way to start is to break the revenue goal into smaller objectives by reverse engineering the sales and marketing process. Reverse engineering is exactly as it sounds. It’s the process of working backwards from the conclusion to understand how that goal can be reached.

STEP ONE: SET CLEAR REVENUE GOALS

Setting achievable revenue targets and comprehending their sources is crucial. The first step is to determine the proportion of revenue that needs to come from new business as opposed to the existing customer base. Knowing this target number is the starting point to reverse engineering your marketing strategy.

STEP TWO: HOW MANY NEW CUSTOMERS NEED TO BE SIGNED?
To determine the number of new customers required to meet your revenue objective, divide the target for new business revenue by the average size of a new deal. This process will require some research into the closed deals in your CRM over the last few years. Throw out any outliers (i.e., unusually large or small deals) to determine the average revenue per deal.

STEP THREE: HOW MANY PROPOSALS NEED TO BE PRESENTED?
Use your team’s average closing percentage to determine the number of proposals that will need to be presented. How many proposals did your team pitch to potential clients last year? What percentage of those proposals led to successfully closed deals? Often, sales teams tend to overestimate their closing percentages, so thorough research is essential. Again, employing a CRM tool can facilitate transparency and maintain a realistic metrics.

STEP FOUR: HOW MANY SALES QUALIFIED LEADS (SQLS) NEED TO BE GENERATED?
To answer this question, you first need to understand the percentage of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) that have historically received a proposal? Not every qualified sales opportunity is guaranteed to receive a one. There are various factors that can cause the sales process to stall (poor timing, decision-maker changes, budgets, etc.). Again, it’s important to understand your team’s historical percentages in order to determine how many SQLs need to be generated to achieve your revenue growth objective.

STEP FIVE: HOW MANY SALES LEADS NEED TO BE GENERATED?
It’s important to understand at all sales leads aren’t equal. Not everyone who “raises their hand“ to demonstrate interest or a desire to learn more warrants the time and attention of your sales team. This becomes clear when you set clear criteria/definitions for lead types and track their conversion from one stage to the next (i.e., “Lead” to “MQL” to “SQL”).

These definitions may help.

A “Lead” is any new contact that’s generated who demonstrates some interest in what your company offers.

An “MQL” (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a “Lead” that fits your target persona criteria. This means they exhibit the characteristics (type of company, size of company, geography, level of decision-maker, etc.) that are similar to that of your current customer base.

A “SQL” (Sales Qualified Lead) is an “MQL” whose behavior or characteristics warrant the immediate attention of a salesperson (i.e., a decision-maker of a target account who views one of your recorded webinars).

Answering the questions outlined in the steps above and understanding the conversion ratios between each category will help you determine the quantity of the various lead types (Lead, MQL, and SQL) that will yield the number of proposals and closed deals required to drive your revenue goals.

With such clear objectives it will now make sense to plan the tactics and campaigns that will drive the required marketing output. Where will the new leads come from?

• The outbound prospecting of your team
• Referrals
• Brokers
• Networking events
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Digital ads
• Inbound marketing/website

This process of reverse engineering not only aids in setting attainable marketing objectives but also allows each aspect of the calculation to serve as ongoing key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the year. By tracking and comparing your conversion rates against historical and benchmark data, you can continuously refine your marketing strategy and develop a pragmatic ROI model for future marketing investments.

By investing in expertise, tailoring solutions, educating the market, highlighting benefits, showcasing success stories, and finding unique and personalized differentiations, PEOs can position themselves as indispensable partners for businesses seeking to navigate complex regulatory landscapes with confidence.

With proper planning, you can keep the sales momentum through the “perceived” slow times. The key is to be consistent, and you will keep the sales momentum going with a healthy pipeline of qualified opportunities.

As with mastering anything; a golf swing, a musical instrument…any worthy endeavor…training should be continuous and repetitive. The following is an outline of a 30 – day training plan – the operative word here is outline. You will need to make it your own, in content and timeframe – the goal is to help you with the heavy lifting of designing your own plan to increase engagement.