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

Around July 2008, I started getting mails about how to protect your business in hard times. About how such-and-such could demonstrate how to do all or some of the things listed above. Check the web and you’ll find stacks of stuff on how marketing should respond to a recession – the exact phrase ‘recession marketing’ just got 59,600 results on Google. 

With one obvious exception, doesn’t the list above include the things marketing should be doing all the time? How come there is such a bright spotlight on them when times change? 

Contribute to your customers’ success 

Referring to the challenges faced by SA companies, a prominent local economist, FNB’s Cees Bruggemans, had this to say in July 08 about opportunities in a recession:

Information technology, logistics and other high-technology suppliers may find exceptional opportunities in the current environment if it assists clients to reconfigure their businesses, reducing operational costs.

If a company’s products and services can reduce customers’ operating costs, do they become more attractive in a recession? If so, were they somehow less attractive pre-recession? ‘Business is so good all round that our customers don’t think about their operating costs.’

Most likely, cost-reduction benefits were being overlooked or insufficiently emphasised. At the same time, they were probably not being delivered to the right audiences within the market.

 Get back to basics. Huh?

A lot of talk about ‘recession marketing’ centres around getting back to basics. In essence, this is an admission that B2B marketing has lost its way and has not been performing as an effective business tool. This is probably true: the basics are being consistently ignored.

Perhaps it’s not so much about getting back to the basics as understanding what they are: cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure. CCC and PPP should be driving the marketing function when the good times roll and when they don’t. 

The right message to the right people

Look and listen. Look at what is happening in the market – your market – and listen to what it’s saying. What challenges are customers facing and how do your products and services address them? 

Demonstrating the performance of products and services in the context of current challenges is one of B2B marketing’s key responsibilities. Marketers should always be keenly aware of the contribution their company makes to each customer’s continued success. It’s an ongoing process that is in tune with the constantly changing B2B environment. 

Sometimes the environment is relatively stable and the pace of change is moderate and comfortable. Sometimes the pace and scale of change is far greater. 

This recession has certainly accelerated changes in B2B markets. But it has also polarised the changes in the sense that there is now greater uniformity in the nature of the challenges facing B2B companies. 

As markets contract across the board, more and more companies are looking for the same outcomes. 

Times might have changed, but marketing’s responsibility to communicate the right message to the right people remains constant.

It’s essential to understand what customers are buying, how it helps them and who is buying.

What-How-Who – marketing’s focus on buying – should be determining activities in the first place - in order to deliver the right messages to the right people.

More on the fundamentals of B2B marketing:

The Man in the Chair – well worth watching on YouTube      Getting real in B2B – what do you represent?

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