Making B2B marketing work
The PQRS&T in B2B marketing
Price, Quality, Response, Service and Time.
These are the Five Factors of Value. That may not sound very significant, so let me put it another way:
They are the five reasons that make customers buy, the reasons that deals get done. The five buying motivators. The Big Five.
This Big Five are particularly important in the B2B environment, where one company is buying from another company. Where products and services will have much higher prices than in the retail or consumer sector.
Sales cycles will be longer and more complex. There may well be many people involved in the decision to buy. The competition is likely to be actively looking for your deals and challenging you directly: chances are, your competitors are also talking to your customers. And if they’re not, they should be. Just as you should be talking to their customers.
So what are your B2B customers buying from you?
What is going to make customers get the money out of their account and into yours? What really makes them buy? What do they Value?
What is Value?
PQRS&T is just an easy way to remember each of the Big Five. The things that make companies buy things.
What’s more significant is the order of their importance to customers:
- Response
- Service
- Time
- Quality
- Price
Some people are surprised to see Price coming last on the list. Surely, Price should be at the top, ranking as the most important of the Big Five? Well, it isn’t.
As an example, think about the relationship between Time and Price. At some point in the timeline of supplying customers, Time becomes more important than Price. In simple terms, you might have the cheapest product, but if you don’t have any stock then you can’t supply. And if you can’t supply, you lose the sale and you lose the customer. Perhaps for ever. Bad for revenue, bad for margins, bad all round.
The importance of Response
In order to develop an understanding of Value, each of the Five Factors has some pretty specific definitions.
For example, Response is defined as:
- Continual communication with customers: listening to how you affect their success
- Identify and meet changing customer needs
- Speed of problem solving and solution delivery
Given the fact that Response is at the top of the Big Five and is therefore ranked as the number one buying-motivator, it’s important to consider your company’s performance in these terms.
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 other important question here is this: Who is responsible for managing and developing Response?
My suggestion is that the answer to the last question should be: the marketing team.
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
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