A key piece of advice in B2B sales is that “businesses don’t buy solutions, people do.” It’s hard to argue; the idea that you should appeal to individuals at a personal level seems logical.
So marketing teams should build personas of their buyers, and personalize the content and collateral they create for them: find the customer who fits the right persona, engage them with the right content, nurture them and make them feel connected to you as a supplier. Then pass that lead to the sales team and watch the money roll in.
The problem is that in today’s B2B marketplace, personalization can actually make customers less likely to buy, not more likely. As the first and second posts in this series explained, it’s not people that buy B2B products and services but groups of people. And group behavior tends to make humans settle for the least confrontational conclusion, the one that requires the least change from the status quo, if any at all.
Personalization strategies will only make the individuals in those groups believe more strongly in their own point of view, and less willing to compromise on anything but the least radical course of action. And that is unlikely to result in any kind of big purchase decision.
Why Demand Generation Efforts Aren’t Working
As the CEB research on B2B sales and marketing makes clear these dysfunctional customer buying groups are made up on average of 5.4 people, all with competing perspectives, priorities, and objectives. But not only are these groups bad at making good decisions, they are also typically only 37% of the way through a purchase decision when decision-making conflict peaks in the group. In some cases this stalls or, worse, kills the deal all together.
What compounds the pain for B2B sales and marketing teams is that the same group of customers don’t tend to meaningfully engage suppliers’ sales reps until they are, on average, 57% of the way through the purchase process.
This gap between the 37% and 57% waypoints in the buying process should make any demand generation managers reading this very nervous indeed. Deals are breaking down on your watch. If you can’t help these buying groups make good decisions, you won’t just lose deals, you won’t even know they exist.
Why Personalization Doesn’t Work
And it certainly doesn’t help to tailor marketing content and collateral to appeal to the individual goals and motivations of each of the members of the buying group. All this does is cement each individual’s belief that their aims and goals are the right ones, and not to concede any ground in the group discussions about whether or not to purchase a particular supplier’s product.
Imagine a group of managers at a company discussing a product to help them access and analyze the data in their CRM system. A marketing manager might be excited about the chance to segment her customers more accurately and find new opportunities for the sales team, and a risk manager might be excited about the chance to control employee access to customer data.
If the supplier then provides collateral for the marketing manager that shows all the options for using customer data in new ways, and shows the risk manager how to control employee access to minimize the risk of data leaks, all it will do is cement the marketing manager’s belief that the firm should give employees more scope to play with customer data, and convince the risk manager that the firm should minimize employee access to customer data. Hardly a recipe for consensus.
Four Steps for Demand Generation Managers
Situations like this – and there are literally thousands of them happening all over the globe – call for a new approach from demand generation managers. The full details on what needs to change are in the Challenger role guide for demand generation managers, but it boils down to four key things:
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- Profile and target mobilizers: You need to win over the skeptical, ambitious customers that have the credibility to help create consensus and secure buy-in among their colleagues – you need a mobilizer.
- Mobilizers are those in the buying group who have the skill and will to encourage new thinking and build consensus around that course of action.
- Engage mobilizers with commercial insight content: As they’re skeptics, mobilizers’ attention is hard to earn. Use of commercial insight is the best way to do this — disruptive ideas about the customer’s business that leads mobilizers to revisit their basic thoughts, assumptions and beliefs about their own business. Commercial Insight is not the same as thought leadership.
- Help mobilizers to connect individuals in the group to one another: Build online mobilizer toolkits that coach mobilizers on how to engage other stakeholders.
- Arm them with the scripting, guidance, objection handling and business case fodder to be effective consensus drivers. See the previous post in this series for details on Mobilizer toolkits.
Motivate mobilizers to fight the good fight: Identity value is any aspect of a supplier’s offering that changes how buyers see themselves and boosts buyers’ self-esteem.
It’s a woefully underused (or misused) tool in B2B marketing. Partner with your content marketing, product marketing, and marketing communications colleagues to include identity value into your communications.
Article From: www.cebglobal.com
