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

Mapping audiences and their connectivity within a ‘sphere of influence’ is the first step in creating a marcoms strategy that gets the right messages to the right people 

Using the sphere to motivate buyers 

Marketers can use the sphere of influence to target the bullseye – the centre of the market that contains buying decision makers – BDMs. 

Our goal is to ensure that each audience has a positive influence on the centre, that their opinions will confirm the validity of our brand messages and motivate consistent buying decisions. 

It’s about driving accurate perceptions of the brand into the place they matter most: the world of BDMs. 

Populating the sphere 

The graphic highlights some of the audiences typically found in B2B markets. It could certainly contain others, such as wholesalers and agents; the general public; and special interest groups or lobbies. 

Any audience within the overall market that influences the centre – either directly or indirectly via another audience – should be included within your sphere. 

Having populated the sphere, it’s useful to look at how the audiences are connected and how they might influence one another. 

Assessing the significance of the influence 

To understand this, marketers need to be talking to the centre – the BDMs within the customer base. As mentioned in other posts on The Long Hello, marketers need to get out and about amongst these people and find out who is influencing their decisions and why this matters. 

This is important because customers are not identical – buying motivators will vary from one customer to the next. There will certainly be some generic, commercial influences in terms of the Five Factors of Value, but there will also be some (surprising) variations in the degrees of influence exerted by different audiences within the overall market. 

All of this information can be mapped-out on the sphere. You may find that individual customers warrant their own sphere – a dedicated map that details how buying decisions are influenced and made within that particular company. 

Who’s influencing the audiences? 

Just as marketers need to know who’s influencing BDMs, we also need to know how brand perceptions are being created within individual audiences. There’s more ‘fieldwork’ for marketers here in terms of meeting these people and building an ongoing understanding of how they relate to the brand. 

In particular, marketers need to be alert to any variance between brand perceptions and brand messages. If the two are not aligned, then you need to act in order to adjust this imbalance by using the appropriate tools in marketing’s portfolio. And these soundings and adjustments need to be taken on a continual basis in order to ensure that perceptions in the overall market are in line with the brand messages you are delivering.

Related posts:

Managing brand perceptions

Brands build business

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

The minibook addresses key issues that anyone working in marketing may face with B2B brands. It’s easy to understand and uses clear examples of the challenges and solutions in a logical order. 

B2B Marketing for Dummies ends with Ten Top Tips for success in B2B marketing:

Be patient. Remember that people in business don’t buy on impulse – they carefully consider purchases and consult multiple stakeholders. 

Consider your Web of Influence. Always create a map of your market to help you make the best B2B marketing decisions. 

Be thoroughly strategic. Establish how your brand distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with a brand planning process that leaves no question unanswered. 

Be focused. Create a strategic proposition that makes your brand irresistible over the competition. 

Prioritise your market. Use the Web of Influence to pinpoint the decision makers who’ll give you the best return for your marketing investment. 

Be choosy. Don’t waste time and money on marketing placed in the wrong channels. 

Be positively different. Show people their working world in a way they’ve never seen, and they’ll want to know more. 

Have multi-dimensional ideas. Remember that you need to satisfy many different stakeholders, so you need creative ideas that are flexible. 

Make the most of your website. Ensure that your site caters for all of your customers and tracks their activity so you can use that information for constant improvement. 

Tap into social media. Don’t get left behind – use social media networks to influence your markets! 

B2B Marketing for Dummies was produced by IAS b2b Marketing and John Wiley & Sons, publishers of the ‘For Dummies’ guides. Download a copy at http://www.b2bfordummies.com/

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. 

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

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