Sonia Simone of  Remarkable Communication recently posted this list on her blog. Thanks to B2B Social Media for highlighting it. 

Sadly, the concept of customer focus or of being customer-centric has become badly tarnished.

A lot of the blame for this lies with marketers and comms agencies who produce ludicrous slogans that claim devotion to customer’s interests: just think about all the syrupy guff that comes out of the financial services sector.

For companies who want to cultivate customers – rather than harvest them – an understanding of what they want will always boost the bottom line.

Using Sonia’s list, I reckon there’s a really useful exercise here for anyone involved with customers:

• divide the list into five sets of ten
• rank each set of ten in their order of importance
• act accordingly…

Fifty things customers wish you knew. From Sonia Simone of  Remarkable Communication

1. I don’t need you to be perfect, but I do need to know I can rely on you.
2. Telling me what you don’t know makes me trust you.
3. It means a lot when you take the time to thank me for my business or a referral.
4. You don’t need to do all that much to be a superhero. Just do exactly what you say you will do.
5. A friendly voice on the other side of the phone means more than you can imagine.
6. Your employees treat me about as well as you treat them.
7. I don’t mind spending the money, as long as I feel I’m getting real value.
8. My life is really stressful. If you can reduce that stress, you become immensely valuable to me.
9. I want to tell you what would make this relationship better for me. Why don’t you ever ask me?
10. I don’t understand a lot of the messages you send me. Can you make them clearer?
11. My life is very complicated. If you make it easy for me to just buy a simple all-in-one package that I can use without learning anything, I’ll take it and be grateful. (I’ll even pay a premium for it.)
12. I want to trust you, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone.
13. Once you’ve won my trust and loyalty, the truth is you can screw up once in awhile and I will forgive you. If I don’t think you’re taking me for granted, that is.
14.  When I refer my friends and you give them exceptional service, that makes me look and feel smart. I love that.
15.  I spend an awful lot of time being scared to death.
16.  The wealthier I get, the more I like free stuff.
17.  A lot of the time, I secretly feel like a lost little kid. I don’t admit it, but I want to be taken care of.
18.  I’m lousy at admitting I was wrong, but I respect you when you do it.
19.  I like to get little goodies no one else is getting.
20.  I don’t understand how to use your Web site, but I can’t admit that because it would make me feel dumb.
21.  There’s no worse feeling than feeling like I was suckered into trusting you. If I’m screaming at you or one of your employees, that feeling is probably behind it somewhere.
22.  Our relationship isn’t equal and it never will be.
23. I get crazy jealous if I think you love another customer more than you love me.
24.  I don’t have any interest in your excuses. In fact, I usually don’t notice them at all, and if I do, they annoy me.
25.  I find myself endlessly fascinating.
26.  I hate salespeople, but I really like to buy things.
27.  I only like to communicate over the phone/Web/mail and I hate when you try to make me communicate with you over the mail/phone/Web.
28.  I want to buy your product, but I need you to help me justify it to myself.
29.  There’s something in my life I’m afraid of losing. If you can make me feel like you’ve protected it for me, my gratitude will be intense and eternal.
30.  I’ll give you anything you ask if you can help me not feel silly.
31. I want you to do the hard work for me. Even better if I can get all the credit.
32. I’d rather do it the convoluted hard way than learn something new.
33. I’d love to know something about your product that I could use to brag at a dinner party.
34. I have the attention span of a goldfish. Go too long without contacting me and I’ll simply forget you exist.
35. Money is no object when it comes to my obsessions.
36. What you think you’re good at is not what you’re good at. Ask me, and I’ll tell you what you do better than anyone else.
37. I like it when I feel like you’re talking just to me.
38. It infuriates me when you answer the phone while I’m talking with you face-to-face.
39. Embarrassment scares me more than death.
40. I’m lazier than I would ever admit.
41. I’m more selfish than I would ever admit.
42. I’m more vain than I would ever admit.
43. I’m more insecure than I would ever admit.
44. Despite all that, I secretly think I’m a better person than most people. Help me believe that and we’ll be fast friends.
45. I believe I deserve much more than I’m getting.
46. I want to tell you everything you need to know in order to sell to me, but I’m lazy. Make it easy enough and I will. (Especially if you flatter me a little.)
47. I don’t know what I want most of the time. You need to figure it out for me.
48. I mostly daydream about making life better for myself, but I’ll take action to keep from losing what’s mine.
49. I believe that most of what’s wrong in my life is someone else’s fault. Let me keep that cozy illusion and I’ll believe anything you say.
50. It really is all about me.

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Back to The Long Hello - making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

This means it’s essential to generate brand messages that are not only credible, relevant and compelling, but also highly reassuring to each component of your overall market.

The following extract is from an article by Cees Bruggemans, Chief Economist of First National Bank. Register for his free e-mail articles on www.fnb.co.za/economics

The outlook for 2010 should production-wise see a steady recovery in manufacturing activity, probably increasing at a pace of 5% plus. Domestic motor vehicle sales are projected to grow by 7%, with subsidiary parts of the motor trade (used cars, parts and accessories) showing even firmer recovery.

Car exports should gain 30% and total vehicle production should grow by 17% in 2010, importantly supporting manufacturing output gains. 

Mining, retail sales, building activity and electricity are more difficult to call. Given global recovery trends, mining volumes should rise strongly unless held back by sector-specific reasons. Electricity output should follow in its wake. But it is not obvious how strong these tendencies may prove to be. 

Residential building activity should show some gains off very low base levels, even as non-residential activity for now keeps tailing off. Construction should benefit from large turnkey projects (power stations, road building) but one wonders about political tensions at local government level further disrupting activity levels as the political cycle moves from one set of elections to the next.   

Along with steady gains in government employment levels, and a more modest revival in private service activity generally, household incomes should be rising this year. This should underwrite an upturn in retail sales volumes, even if mostly jobless growth for now may remain a drag on non-durable consumption recovery. 

Overall, one is pressed to assume growth modesty, if only because there is so much to be modest about. 

A more vigorous recovery profile would require a quicker uptake in business risk-taking, a greater appetite among banks to grant credit and for consumers to increase their debt uptake, and a faster revival in job growth, with fewer sector-specific (mining, construction) drags. 

Yet such renewed vigour is to be shown rather than assumed, even if the typical cyclical turn from recession to recovery is with us. And thus we do well to allow for a slow GDP growth coach in the 1.5%-2.5% range, until ‘surprised’ by greater vigour. Hopefully it won’t keep us waiting too long. But then again who can say? 

It perhaps does create scope for some more policy support, provided some growth sacrifice isn’t deliberate policy in order to keep the private debt bulge, import bill and inflation bias contained longer term within more acceptable ranges than encountered during 2004-2007.

Then again the economy looks far from entering another outperformance binge shortly, and at least the debt bulge and import bills should remain naturally contained for the time being while the ‘new’ credit and consumption disciplines and fixed investment hesitancy prevail.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Promoting the business, professional and technical magazines published by McGraw Hill, the message is as fresh and relevant today as it was fifty years ago: sales start before your salesman calls.

In July this year, the Business Marketing Association staged a ‘live’ version of the ad 

‘The Man In The Chair – Live’ is well worth watching because it tells it like it is: B2B customers and markets need to know about your company, what you are selling, how it will help them and why they should believe you. And all of that comes before even considering to buy from you. 

The graphic below is from a whitepaper by Tippit Inc and it illustrates the phased nature of the B2B buying process. It’s such an important graphic for marketers because it provides a roadmap for developing and positioning marcoms that are relevant for each phase in the buying process - ranging from initial awareness through to purchasing and beyond.

Working with funnels

The concept of marketing and sales funnels is not new: essentially they are a development of AIDA and the Hierarchy of Effects which categorise the buying phases as: Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Desire/Conviction, Action/Purchase. Nowadays, its usual to add something like ‘Support’ and ‘Retention’ to account for maintaining loyalty in the post-purchase phase.

The shape of a funnel will vary according to two main factors: the amount of buyers in the market; and the timescale of the sales cycle. Markets with lots of buyers have funnels with wide openings or mouths – so that you can ‘pour-in’ lots of potential buyers:

 Time

From a marketing perspective, Tippit puts it like this:

The funnel is the most commonly used metaphor to describe B2B sales cycles. But funnels come in dif­ferent shapes and sizes depending on the nature of your target market. For example, the complexity of a purchasing decision guides the frequency and breadth of interactions between buyers and sellers. This, in turn, determines the shape of the funnel.

To be a successful marketer, it’s important to understand how certain variables shape the funnel, and what type of funnel governs your market. This understanding can help marketing professionals like you choose the most effective set of marketing tactics for your organization’s goals.

Using the funnel to segment marketing messages: the Perception Cycle

In the Tippit whitepaper, ‘buyer activity’ is categorised or segmented as follows: 

• Browsing
  information gathering as normal part of job
• Downloading
  business opportunity or challenge identified
• Project
  business case for the product or service established
• Shortlist
  qualified vendors selected
• Decision
  purchase is made

Marketers can use the categories to segment the type of messages that are most relevant in the perception cycle.

The perception cycle is the market’s process of acquiring information that builds associations and opinions about a brand and what it represents.  

First impressions

In the ‘awareness’ phase, buyers are gathering information that begins to build their knowledge about a subject and its related products and services.

They are starting with a blank canvas and are forming opinions and perceptions. This process of discovery is a critical point in the perception cycle because first impressions really do matter.

This is a major opportunity for marketers to influence first impressions or to shift initial perceptions that have not yet become entrenched. For example, someone searching the web is likely to fall into the ‘awareness’ category, as opposed to someone who goes straight to your site because they already know of you – perhaps from an ad they just saw. 

Will a Google search find you? And if it does, what will they find there? Will it be relevant and what further action will it motivate?

Most importantly, will it keep them in your funnel?

In the funnel: five-by-five

Wikipedia defines the term ‘five-by-five’ as: ‘a signal that has excellent strength and perfect clarity - the most understandable signal possible.’

As the funnel narrows – not everyone who is ‘aware’ converts to a buyer - the relevance of marcoms messages and the accuracy of their positioning need to be increased.  

Equally, as the funnel narrows, the influence of those still in the funnel increases: at some point, the influence will be sufficiently strong to sanction the purchase. Some people will only fully enter the funnel at an advanced stage of the sales cycle – perhaps towards the end of the Project and Shortlist phases once their colleagues have already completed the processes of Awareness and Consideration.  

Very often, these late-entrants hold the purchasing authority. They might be guided by the opinions of others, but they will still draw their own conclusions and make their own judgements – as decision-makers, that’s what they do.

At this point in the cycle, the relevance of your message is critical. Excellent strength, perfect clarity and the most understandable signal possible: concise and compelling.

Relevance and positioning: what are you saying in the funnel and how are you saying it?

Two earlier posts, Building brand relationships and B2B buying: What? How? Who?, focus on identifying audiences within B2B markets and how to create relevant messages for them.

Having established the various audiences in the funnel, it’s a relatively easy task to identify how to communicate with them across the marketing portfolio: in essence, a detailed knowledge of each audience within the overall market will provide guidelines for the most effective means to communicate with them.

It all comes back to relevance: relevant message, relevant medium – five-by-five.

Working your way through the marcoms funnel

By their nature, B2B funnels are much narrower than those in B2C. However, not all your products and services will necessarily fall into the same-shaped funnel. As a generalisation, B2B tunnels will become narrower as the complexity and cost of your products and services increases.

Here’s what Tippit has to say about managing communications in narrow funnels:

Target hard-to-reach buyers
Hone in on key buyers in decision committees by profiling the organization. This means get­ting resourceful and creative to uncover and connect with influencers who would benefit from your remarkable content and, ultimately, your offerings.

Create and distribute remarkable content
A library of marketing assets is critical for complex and expensive purchases with long sales cycles. Your content must educate and convince buyers that your solution is proven and makes sound business sense to them and others in the decision committee.

Execute a multi-channel pursuit
Engage buyers with a combination of communication techniques (online retargeting, email, and phone all work well). Use multiple touches to deliver to sales a verified list from within a hard-to-reach target.

Managing the ‘perception cycle’ for higher ROI

B2B marcoms are a cycle of interactions with your market that should be carefully balanced so that the right message is getting to the right people at the right time.

By thinking in terms of a funnel, marketers can raise ROI by increasing the relevance of their messages and targeting them more accurately. And this approach certainly brings structure to managing the five basic principles of creating and presenting marketing communications: what, who, how, when and where.

Click on the link below to download the whitepaper from Tippit Inc

What’s the Shape of Your Funnel? Why funnel shape means everything in B2B marketing

Read more on creating and positioning marcoms:

Market reflections: managing brand perceptions

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - results-driven marcoms     

Marcoms: Outcomes are the differentiators - how outcomes create ‘Value’

Preventing price pressure - the influence on ‘Value’ on B2B buying

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

One reason why marketing doesn’t always pull its weight in B2B is that there is often such a strong emphasis on relationships with customers. Developing and sustaining these relationships can shift attention from managing the brand’s relationship with the overall market. And this can undermine the potential to strengthen sales, margins and customer loyalty. 

B2B is all about relationships. Isn’t it? 

Yes it is. But which ones? The ways in which a B2B company is regarded by the market as a whole can have a powerful influence on buying decisions. 

The impact of this influence on buying decisions is proportional to the complexity and cost of a company’s products and services. As complexity and cost rises, so too does the influence of the overall market. 

Looking beyond the sales relationship 

Galen de Young of prominent American agency, Proteus B2B Marketing, says, “Growing your existing business with a particular customer or client may very well be about cultivating the relationship, but getting customers in the first place is not.” 

“Relationships with prospects will almost never swing a sweet deal your way. If your ability to get in the door – to get to the table – relies upon your relationship with the prospect, you might get the job if your price is the same as your competitors’. If your price is higher, your prospect might say he’ll give it to you if you can get your price in line. Is that really what you want?”

Looking at the market as a whole: the world beyond customers 

An earlier post looked at the commercial significance of ‘market reflections’ and how these can be positively-influenced by consistent, relevant brand-messages. In addition to direct customers or end users, B2B markets often contain many components:

• distributors and wholesalers
• overall solution-providers
• specialist consultancies or professions
• support and service providers 
• user-groups
• financial analysts
• commentators in the media
• standards boards and regulators
• industry associations and the general public

Each of these represents a market reflection - the way the brand is seen by individual components of its market.

Brand-based relationships: opening doors, protecting margins, maintaining loyalty

The idea of ‘The Long Hello’ is to cultivate market reflections that continuously reinforce consistent, positive perceptions of your company. 

And this positioning can only be achieved through marcoms that deliver brand-messages that are relevant to each component of the market.  In terms of the results this approach delivers, Galen de Young from Proteus puts it this way: 

Properly positioned companies don’t have to sell. They merely have to facilitate the buying process.

“If your company is well positioned in the marketplace – if it’s seen as being one of the leading suppliers of specific solutions and a company for which there are few credible substitutes in the market – you’ll not only get to the table quickly and easily, you’ll be proactively invited.”

“You’ll also protect your margins. Profit margin is a function of positioning. Properly positioned companies don’t play the low-price game. They don’t have to. Their prospects see them as having something different. Their prospects don’t have to be convinced; their prospects want to buy.”

Read the full Proteus article

Related posts: 

Recession marketing. No such thing?      Brands are dead. Brands are more important than ever

Marcoms: leveraging B2B’s buying motivators      PR & B2B. The perfect couple

Marcoms: outcomes are the differentiators

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

These are the criteria that influence and motivate B2B buying decisions. This extract from an ealier post looks at analysing how products, services and processes create Value in relation to each of the Five Factors.

It is a simple approach, but it produces bottom line results: marketers can deliver fact-based messages that go to the heart of what B2B markets are really buying.

Analysing Value

Begin by choosing a product or service and the way in which it is supplied. Then start a review of your selection in relation to the definitions for each Value Factor – as listed a little way below.

This review should include a performance-ranking of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘poor’ and 5 being ‘exceptional’. By exceptional, I mean being at least equal to your competitors or better than them.

Here’s an example for the first definition under ‘Response’: if you think you beat the competition in listening to how you affect customer’s success, then you score a 5.  But, you need to support your ranking with a credible statement as to why you should score a 5 – as to why you excel… 

To help get the process started, here’s the type of questions you should perhaps be asking in terms of ‘Response’: 

• How do you identify and then meet your customers’ needs?  
• Who manages your communications with customers and what are the results of this communication? 
• In terms of customer expectations, how do you rate yourselves at fixing problems and delivering the outcomes the customer wants? 
• How does your performance in these areas compare with your competition? 

The Five Factors of Value:

1.  Response

• Continual communication with customers: listen to how you affect their success
• Identify and meet changing customer needs
• Speed of problem solving and solution delivery 

2.  Service

• Accessibility: an open and reassuring organisation
• Clear product information and project status
• Pro-active and innovative 

3.  Time

• Competitive lead times
• Dependable
• Consistent delivery format 

4.  Quality

• Consistent products, services and processes
• Meets the brief or specifications: fit-for-purpose
• Achieves the customer’s operational goal 

5.  Price

• Competitive
• Rational
• Structured 

My suggestion is to begin by involving your sales team in the analysis. Then, once you have built a series of rankings and supporting statements, begin broadening the evaluation process to include opinions from other core functions such as finance, technical, production and distribution. 

It’s an enlightening process and is the first step on building an understanding of how to accurately address B2B’s five buying motivators.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

All marketers understand the need for getting the right messages to the right people. What’s not so straightforward is defining the messages and who should be getting them.

Marketers need to be looking at what their market is buying, because B2B marketing is not about selling, it’s about buying.

An incisive approach to defining relevant and motivating messages is to identify how B2B products, services and processes contribute to customers’ success. As marketers wishing to understand buying motivators, we need to look at what is being bought, how it affects customers’ success, and who is buying it: the What-How-Who of Buying.  

What motivates buying in B2B? Fear?

A lot has been written about how fear is a key buying motivator in B2B – fear of not making the right choices and the subsequent consequences for those involved in the buying decision. The old adage that it’s safe to buy IBM is often trotted out to support the argument that, in B2B, fear is the key. And this is further supported by the idea that minimising fear by minimising risk is a key element in successful B2B marketing.

Surely, this can’t be true in the age of the information superhighway, where customers and user-groups are swapping experiences and opinions on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? Given all the information that is available about B2B companies and their products and services, I’d agree that confusion may be present in the buying process, but I’m finding it hard to accept that fear is still a factor.

No. Fear does not motivate B2B buying – Value does.

Communicating the Value produced by products, services and processes is a sure-fire way to differentiate a B2B company from its competitors. It’s also a guaranteed way to cut through confusion in a rational way that will motivate the market to listen and to buy. 

In B2B, Value comprises Five Factors: Response, Service, Time, Quality and Price. These are the criteria that influence and motivate B2B buying decisions. In order for marketers to address these criteria – to start ‘talking’ to the motivators – we need to analyse how products, services and processes deliver Value in relation to each of the Factors.

How to start analysing Value

Begin by choosing a product or service and the way in which it is supplied. Then start a review of your selection in terms of the definitions for each Value Factor, as listed a little way below.

This review should include a performance-ranking of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘poor’ and 5 being ‘exceptional’. By exceptional, I mean being at least equal to your competitors or better than them. 

Here’s an example for ‘Response’: if you think you’re better than the competition in listening to how you affect customer’s success, then you score a 5. 

But: you need to support your ranking with an honest statement as to why you should score a 5… To help get the process started, here’s the type of questions you should perhaps be asking around ‘Response’:

• How do you identify and then meet your customers’ needs?
• Who manages your communications with customers and what are the results of this communication?
• In terms of customer expectations, how do you rate yourselves at fixing problems and delivering the outcomes the customer wants? 
• How does your performance in these areas compare with your competition?

The Five Factors of Value:

1.  Response

• Continual communication with customers: listen to how you affect their success
• Identify and meet changing customer needs
• Speed of problem solving and solution delivery

 2.  Service

• Accessibility: an open and reassuring organisation
• Clear product information and project status
• Pro-active and innovative

 3.  Time

• Competitive lead times
• Dependable
• Consistent delivery format

 4.  Quality

• Consistent products, services and processes
• Meets the brief or specifications: fit-for-purpose
• Achieves the customer’s operational goal

 5.  Price

• Competitive
• Rational
• Structured

My suggestion is to begin by involving senior sales people in the analysis. Then, once you have built a series of rankings and supporting statements, begin broadening the process by canvassing opinions from other core functions such as finance, technical, production and distribution. 

It is a simple approach, but it produces bottom line results: marketers can deliver fact-based messages that go to the heart of what B2B markets are really buying.

It’s also an enlightening process and is the first step on building an understanding of how to produce marketing messages that constantly address B2B’s five buying motivators.

The results will also start to generate guidelines as to the audiences that should be getting these messages.

Read more about Value in B2B marketing:

How Value protects margins      Marketing is not about selling, it’s about buying

Outcomes make the difference      The commercial power of brands in B2B

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

In terms of the Five Factors of Value, Price is ranked as the least influential of the five B2B buying motivators. It’s also the component of Value with the most straightforward definitions: Competitive, Rational and Structured.

So why all the fuss, so often, over Price?

Very often, this exclusive focus occurs when customers see nothing beyond Price and Price alone – when they aren’t seeing any contribution from the other four Factors. This doesn’t necessarily mean that contributions are not being made in terms of Response, Service, Time and Quality. More likely, these contributions aren’t being highlighted and accurately demonstrated.

They won’t pay for what they can’t see.

 B2B products and services are typically a complex mix – many pieces go to make up the jigsaw. Often they are surprisingly complex and each piece of the jigsaw should be making a demonstrable contribution to customers’ continued success.

Even the most seemingly straightforward products and services can turn out to be much more involved than they appear at first glance. But all too often, this is where things stop: at first glance.

Roadblocks and deadlocks

By only allowing customers to see a partial reflection of the entire jigsaw, it’s entirely reasonable that they only expect to pay a partial amount of the asking price.

This creates a roadblock for sales and margins and is what often sours and then deadlocks negotiations – options become limited to losing the sale or cutting the price. Hopeless.

Of course there are other ways to handle this like doing the deal and then under-delivering – the Trap-and-Torture method. And it certainly helps to know that this is what less scrupulous competitors might do.

Breaking the communications barrier

B2B marketers need to position their products and services in such a way that the whole jigsaw can be clearly seen and fully appreciated. An earlier post on brands deals with this in more detail, but in summary, it’s vital that all elements of the market see the relevance – to them – of your products and services.

To achieve this, marketers first need to be confident that they have a detailed understanding of the outcomes that are being produced for the market.

The second task is to ensure that outcomes are being convincingly broadcast to the right people via the communications ‘portfolio’: 1-1, PR, events, advertising, direct, digital and collateral.

If Price still remains the customers’ sole focus, then marketers need to analyse why the outcomes produced by their products and services are not considered Competitive, Rational and Structured.

More on Value and buying motivators:

What is Value? - the five buying motivators in B2B

The role of Value in B2B marketing - the influence of ‘Value’ on B2B buying

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - developing marketing communications for bottom line results

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

As individuals, we are not necessarily very good at describing ourselves. Because we often take them for granted, we tend to think that our experience, abilities and skills are either somehow self-evident or not particularly significant to those around us.

The same goes for companies. How a B2B company contributes to its customers’ success is often taken for granted – to the extent that the Value produced by its products and services is often ignored.

Drowning in a sea of features

Very often, outcomes are overlooked because too much emphasis is placed on the features of B2B products and services. Take a look at a selection of B2B brochures or adverts and what you will typically see is a collection of feature-lists. 

For products, the main focus will be on listing their physical composition. There may well be some product shots or pack shots that carry the product’s name and even its part number. For services, there will be more lists that describe their nature.

Over time, the lists tend to become longer as increasing layers of features are added or new ones build upon the older ones. And outcomes – what customers are actually paying for – become more and more obscure. 

Rescued by outcomes

For marketers to discover the outcomes being created by products and services they need to spend time listening to customers. If a customer says that a product’s reliability is important, find out why. What are the outcomes that reliability produces?

This presents opportunities to create marketing messages accordingly. Identifying how contributions are being made to customers’ success means that links can be built between features and the outcomes they produce.

Relevance. Relevance. Relevance

Are the outcomes the same for all customers? That depends on the similarities between their businesses. Reliability will mean different things to different people. For example, the ways in which a VAR benefits from reliability will differ from the benefits to an end-user.

In B2B, market reflections alter according to who is looking at the brand. In B2C, USPs can be honed down to a single, sharp slogan: ‘Whiter than white’. B2B can’t do that in such a catch-all way because one size does not fit all.

Many brands claim ‘reliability’ as an attribute, but do they all communicate its relevance to each component of their market?

B2B branding is not the same as B2C branding

For a start, credibility is more important in B2B. ‘More reliable than reliable’ is not a good approach…

Distinct messages concerning ‘reliability’ should highlight its significance to specific people, clearly explaining the contribution that reliability makes to them.

This may mean that there are several marketing messages related to the notion of reliability. Fair enough, because this creates credibility right across the market. The brand is no longer simply claiming ‘reliability’: it is now positioning itself in a united way that addresses all the reflections within its market.

More on brands, branding and positioning:

The Long Hello: building relationships with brands     

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - results-driven marcoms

Brands are now more important than ever - branding and brand ownership

Positioning brands in B2B markets - a quick case study

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

1. What are customers buying?
2. How does buying contribute to their success?
3. Who is buying?

These are the must-knows that determine tactics in B2B marketing. Cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure – CCC & PPP - provide the strategic direction, but What-How-Who drives implementation.

1. WHAT are customers buying?

Customers are buying outcomes. They are buying outcomes that make a positive contribution to the continued success of their business.

All too often, the marketing focus gets shifted from buying to selling. ‘We sell every variety of nuts and bolts.’

Ok. So, presumably it works like this: There is one gigantic pile of all sorts of nuts, and another huge pile of different bolts. Customers come and get all the nuts they need and then find the matching bolts. Right?

Maybe not. 

In terms of customers ensuring a positive contribution to the continued success of their business, it’s fair to say they are also buying:

• Matched and packaged nuts and bolts
• Adequate stockholding
• Structured discounts
• Nationwide deliveries
• Technical advice and customer training
• Accounting services, credit facilities, stock monitoring
• Warranties

Already it’s clear that they’re buying a lot more than more than just nuts and bolts.

2. HOW does buying contribute to their success?

To answer this question, marketers need to know how their products and services are being used by customers:

‘If these bolts fail, the wings fall off…’ ‘If you don’t have any of these nuts and bolts, we can’t put the wings on. This means we can’t sell the planes…’

Pretty important bolts. Pretty important contribution, too, if they never break, are always in stock, if technicians are expertly trained how to fit and test them, if they are guaranteed to consistently conform to certain specifications, if you can supply them worldwide and track their usage and life-cycle.

Discovering how the contribution is made highlights the Value created within the customer’s business.

Listen up

Listening to customers is the fastest, simplest way to discover this. Meet them, ask them questions about how you are creating Value in their business. A sales team can provide a lot of insight here because they should understand each customer’s business. But marketing needs to develop its own perspective.

Marketing needs this perspective to see the customer in the context of the market.

3. WHO is buying?

The market can exert powerful influences on buying decisions. In B2B, although customers might be buying outcomes, market reflections have to be considered.

The market is not just made up of customers. It may include distributors, overall solution-providers, specialist consultants and support providers. In addition, there may be user-groups, analysts, the media, statutory regulators and industry associations.

Who is buying? The answers to this question are so important because they pinpoint the targets for marketing communications – they provide that all-important focus. Gotta be talking to the right people.

Bringing it all together

Understanding the ‘What’ and the ‘How’ provides crystal clear guidelines for the content and format of these communications.

‘Who’ ensures that marketing is addressing the right audiences within the customer and within the market.

And this means that marketing can maximise the impact of its communications in terms of its two objectives: cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure.

Cultivate consistent customers, prevent price pressure – CCC & PPP: the two objectives of B2B marketing

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line