B2B marketing and sales: bridging the divide
The graphic below is from Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm, and illustrates how new technology is typically adopted by the market.
The bell-curve can also be used to develop synergy between marketing and sales, creating a united approach to customer-management – building sales, margins and loyalty
Where do I sign?
Although it’s concerned with the marketing of new technologies, the principles of the Adoption Lifecycle can be used by the marketing and sales functions to increase the relevance of their messages and position them more accurately. The goal is encourage customers – as quickly as possible – to ask that key question: where do I sign?
Building a sales platform by identifying and fulfilling demand: the right message to the right people
Just as customers can be categorised according to their position in the funnel, they can also be positioned within the adoption lifecycle according to their perceptions and usage of your products and services.
For example, Innovators do not make buying decisions based primarily on a product’s track record, case studies or WOM recommendations. Their ‘independent’ decisions will be influenced more by how a product can contribute to their continued success and how strongly they trust a supplier’s ability to deliver on their promises.
In contrast, the buying motivations of Early & Late Adopters are more likely to be influenced by examples of successful adoption – by others – combined with a supplier’s demonstrable ability to deliver proven results.
By analysing the customer-base in this way, marketers can provide solid support to sales by ensuring that each category of customer is being targeted with messages that are relevant to their position in the adoption lifecycle.
Live the brand: moving from cliché to results
If marketing and sales synergy is about the two functions working in unity to achieve improved commercial results, then it’s important that there is no diversion between expectations and experience at the customer interface. If an element of marketing is to create customer-expectations, then the sales function has to deliver matching customer-experiences: you gotta walk the talk…
But you have to walk it on a tightrope because there are two challenges in walking the talk: over-promise and under-deliver; under-promise and over-deliver.
The consequences of over-promising are pretty easy to understand: loss of trust in the brand; damaging WOM; erosion of brand-loyalty; falling sales and lower margins.
But under-promising is equally dangerous – delivering more than you are being paid for is not a sound commercial model: margins are not optimised; and customer expectations and market perceptions are artificially lowered.
If the sales function can’t fulfil customer-expectations precisely – to build volumes, margins and loyalty – marketers need to find out why. And the only way to do that is to talk to the sales people and their single, external audience: customers.
Marketers have to talk to the market. Writing in Marketing Magazine about the core skills of great marketers, Mark Ritson sees this as, “the fundamental starting point for any great marketer: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or ‘important’ you consider yourself.”
Live the brand: move away from the cliché by monitoring and managing customer expectations
Customer expectations are tricky things to manage: people see things in different ways. Innovators and so-called Laggards have very different perceptions of a product’s potential to contribute to their success. If they are in your funnel or bell-curve the sales function has to manage interactions with them all. And so does the marketing function in terms of the relevance and positioning of its messages.
B2B marketers need to be certain that their messages are not only relevant but that they are also realistic – that sales can deliver on the expectations created by marketing. If marketers insist on delivering messages that make ludicrous claims – ‘With us, anything is possible’ – then it’s small wonder that sales can’t deliver a matching customer-experience.
Equally, the entire sales function – the management of customers – needs to be performing at a level where it is delivering on realistic expectations that marketing creates amongst customers. A set of compellingly credible messages can easily be diluted and devalued by unprofessional interactions with customers – whether it’s happening at reception, in accounting or in after-sales support.
Read more about:
Marketing united - integrating marketing with other core functions
Market reflections – managing brand perceptions
B2B marcoms - using funnels for relevant targeting
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
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