I talked to her in March about her approach to B2B marketing and how she has delivered some of SA’s most innovative and arresting B2B marcoms, positioning her company as a real thought leader in its field and generating unprecedented positive response from her market.

B2B’s double hard-sell: internal, external

Most B2B marketers have to wear two sales hats: one for their colleagues and one for the market.  With only a few exceptions, I’ve had to sell the marketing function to every senior exec I’ve worked alongside, whether they’re a consulting client, a fellow employee or working for an external vendor or partner. 

I’m not talking about selling them new ideas for a particular marketing activity, I mean selling them the entire concept of B2B marketing: what it achieves for the bottom line and how it does that. If you take them through a formal presentation of the function and its objectives, they’re usually happy to acknowledge that getting the right caps for a golf day and arranging the Christmas party ain’t top of your list. 

Everyone’s a marketer…

When it comes to marketing, it seems everyone’s got an opinion that they’re keen to share – even those who’ve never even met a customer, let alone dealt with a buying decision maker. This is because some of our outputs are such a visible representation of the people we work with and the ‘commentators’ are motivated by a desire to see the organisation thrive. Surely, that’s it? 

But sometimes it’s a matter of letting the baker do what the baker does best and marketers often need to be very firm on this. I wouldn’t dream of questioning someone’s choice of accounting software or suggesting that we shouldn’t use that type of robot welder. Why? Not my field of expertise and I know zip about it. Now, what was it you wanted to tell me? 

Selling to the C-Suite: know your competition

Stubbs’ target market is relatively small and commercially sophisticated. Within current and prospective end-users of outsourced supply chain management, it’s a typical C-suite audience and their attention is in demand from direct competitors plus a whole host of unrelated vendors selling everything from ICT solutions to environmental consulting. 

The audience’s attention is being fought for by so many vendors simply because big buying decisions lie in their hands.

B2B marketers really do need to be aware of this and to recognise that what we are really competing for is the C-suite’s time and their focus.

The big question then becomes: how do we get that time and focus? 

Know what you’re selling

Kate says that Barloworld Logistics are selling the application of original thinking based on a sound understanding of supply chain management: “We sell our thinking, particularly in terms of problem-solving within our field of expertise. We consider ourselves to be real thought leaders and innovators. It’s what defines our whole approach to managing your supply chain. As a marketer, it’s my job to engage buying decision makers on that basis.” 

I was so impressed by how Stubb’s does this that I featured an example on The Long Hello last year. The ‘Puzzles’ campaign with direct marketing agency, Wunderman, struck me as being really arresting, innovative and motivating. 

What really impressed me was that a B2B company had taken such a radically different approach to positioning their brand. I thought at the time that I would’ve loved to be a fly-on-the-wall when the concept was presented internally. Hold on to yer hats, boys! 

Stubbs says, “It certainly raised some eyebrows.” I bet it did …

Relevance and creativity

Anyone who reads the specialist trade and business press is aware of just how dull a lot of its B2B advertising can be. And yet these advertisers are all competing for the same thing: the time and focus of the C-suite in other businesses. 

It’s not that this audience doesn’t have time to focus on things that will contribute to the continued success of their organisation – that’s the very essence of their jobs. 

What they don’t have time for is stuff that they perceive as having no relevance to aiding that success. Big difference. And one which is overlooked by many B2B marketers: why should I take time to focus on you? 

Stubbs is not one of those marketers: “The whole puzzles campaign was driven by the imperative of making you stop, think and respond. As problem-solving innovators, we need to get decision makers focused on our thinking and encourage contact.” 

Campaign results have been outstanding, motivating high levels of direct, executive response. Stubbs says, “It initiated C-Suite contact on two levels. Many executives and their colleagues, friends and families were so intrigued that they wanted the puzzles’ answers or to know they’d got them right. Professionally, it opened doors for our experts to interact with executives who had a highly positive perception of the brand.” 

Building brand relationships

Long sales cycles are commonplace in B2B and Stubbs says that her company typically works with cycles of 18 months. “For our market, managing the supply chain is a critical component of their business. Making changes to existing processes or switching supplier are high-impact decisions which require careful planning and consideration. This takes time.” 

One way that Barloworld Logistics encourages long-term interaction with the brand is through an annual survey that examines industry trends, challenges and influences. Conducted by Frost & Sullivan, this year’s supplychainforesight focuses on ‘Growth in Adversity’ and addresses the role of supply chain strategy in enabling recovery from recession. 

Almost half of the nearly 400 respondents were CEO’s or senior execs and 23% of the companies surveyed were multinationals with revenues of over R5 billion. It’s real C-suite stuff and is treated accordingly by both respondents and readers. Stubbs sees it as, “An integral part of the brand that positions us as an authority in the minds of senior executives within our market.” 

Brand relationships are a living thing

Stubbs releases the survey with a media briefing just prior to its national launch. “We then host breakfasts in Durban, Cape Town and JHB on three consecutive days. Respondents and the market in general are invited and we arrange for industry leaders to give us their view on supply chains in SA as well as their interpretation of the results.” 

“We support this with reports on our site plus a dedicated site at www.supplychainforesight.com” 

Once the main launch is complete, Stubbs runs industry-specific launches. “This year we had an FMCG & Retail breakfast and an Automotive evening session. These are more focused interactions and typically result in good engagement and discussion. Once again, we invite industry leaders to voice their opinion on the survey results and to give us their view on what is happening in supply chains in SA.” 

Positive response to the brand

Barloworld Logistics received a special merit award at the Logistics Achiever Awards for the survey’s contribution to the industry. Stubbs says, “Even competitors quote the survey and it is frequently used internationally to benchmark the industry. We receive emails and calls thanking us and requests to focus on specific topics in the next survey. We encourage this type of response so that we can include common focus areas in the next survey.” 

Reinforce your relevance

The company hosts breakfast meetings with execs from the same discipline – HR, Finance, Operations – as well as after-hours sessions to introduce new service offerings or ideas for very targeted audiences. Stubbs’ goal here is to strengthen industry networks and brand relationships by facilitating knowledge sharing and engagement on topical issues.

The road ahead?

Stubbs sees it like this: “Continually finding new and relevant ways to engage our audiences. We must understand clients’ needs thoroughly in order to create relevant, interesting messages that break through the clutter. Messages also need to be simple and clear. Find creative ways to facilitate engagement and relationship building that is commercially beneficial for both parties. Focus and relevance is key. And make sure it’s enjoyable for everyone involved.” 

Way to go, Kate.

Wunderman, Johannesburg:
Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director. debi_loftie_eaton@za.wunderman.com

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

Brands mean ownership

We can all recall an ad that lost its link with the brand: “Great! Clever, sharp, funny, hard-hitting. What company was it?” Or, even worse, ‘What was the product?’ No brand: no ownership.

In B2B marketing, branding is about saying: we own this product or service and, most of all, we own the positive contribution it makes to our customers’ success.

It may also be about saying: we own the outcomes produced by its reliability, its short lead-times, its quality, its support, its maintenance and its future development. All of these things are ours: this is what we represent.

B2B branding is the work of building associations between a company’s ownership of the brand and their ownership of what the brand represents. These associations are not created by logos or slogans. They are solely about the associations created in the market around ownership: who owns what and what it is they own.

Strong brands build business

Marketers understand that brands are symbols, something which represents something else. Brands can evoke powerful associations and allegiances. In their most potent forms, we may love them or loathe them - think of national flags and sporting emblems.

Weak brands – those with little or no meaning - are particularly common in B2B as opposed to B2C marketing. When it comes to cans of baked beans, there’s one brand for me. I’ll go beanless rather than break that allegiance. But is the same true for a company buying a baked bean canning-plant?

The answer is yes: a B2B brand can generate such far-reaching, consistent associations of trust, fulfilled-expectations and satisfaction that customers simply won’t look anywhere else – won’t even consider another canning-plant supplier.

Trust, satisfaction and fulfilled-expectations. These are imperatives in your market’s relationship with your brand: that your products will match past experiences or proposed deliverables.

What is your brand?

Think of the brand as a reflection of your company in a mirror. You hold the brand up to the mirror and it reflects everything the company represents. You don’t see the brand staring back, you see the company.

When the CEO holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected when production, finance, sales, distribution and marketing look in the mirror? Rarely. In fact, very rarely.

There are probably as many different reflections in this mirror as there are people looking at it. The brand becomes such a confusion of images that it’s meaningless. No matter what the company is selling, the brand may as well be symbolised by a blue potato eating a camel. 

Market reflections: how B2B brands are created

In B2B, the overall market may include distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies; and support and service providers - as well as end-users. In addition, there may be financial analysts; commentators in the media; regulators; industry associations and user-groups.

Each of these represents a ‘market reflection’ – the way the brand is seen by individual audiences in the market. And it is these reflections that give a brand its identity. Unlike B2C, in B2B, a brand’s identity is created entirely by the market. Not by comms agencies or graphic designers, but by something much more in tune with commercial reality and its latest trends: the market. What it sees is all that matters. In B2B, the market gives you your brand.

B2B markets become confused and uncertain if the reflections are unclear and inconsistent. So people draw their own conclusions. They create their own associations, set their own expectations and decide for themselves how much they trust the brand and what it represents.

Consequence? Ownership of the brand is lost and your credibility is cut to shreds. Sales fall, margins get squeezed and market share shrinks. Bad. Very bad.

Weak brands build business barriers

This loss of brand-ownership and market-credibility is a formidable, ongoing obstacle to building sales, margins and loyalty. It consistently generates perceptions in the market that have no relation to what your company actually represents: ‘Oh? I never knew it could do that.’ ‘I didn’t realise you guys knew anything about this.’ ‘What? You mean you can handle this too? ‘Oh yes, I know XYZ Inc. They sell those potatoes that eat blue camels. Er, don’t they?’

Are they talking about us?

More than ever, market reflections - that diversity of associations made by the market with the brand – are what influences a company’s ability to increase sales, retain customers and protect margins. And this influence is increasing as more lanes keep getting added to the ‘information superhighway’.

For example, there is rapidly-growing interest in social media as a way for people to share their experiences about B2B suppliers and products. And this goes both ways, companies are joining the discussion on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to present their brand-messages and interact more directly with their markets.

So, it’s now more important then ever for B2B companies to ensure delivery of a credible, relevant and compelling reflection of the brand to each audience in their market. As B2B companies become more and more visible to their markets, it has to be true that the brand is your real business.

Be the brand. No, it’s not a cliché. It’s seriass: be the brand

Brand management is not the business of designers and communications agencies. Yup, you heard that one right. It’s not that designers and agencies produce poor or inappropriate work. Quite the reverse. It’s just that they have no influence over how clients build and maintain trust and satisfaction, or how they fulfil customers’ expectations. That’s not their job. As a B2B marketer, it’s yours.

In his book Ackoff’s Fables, the eminent management consultant, Russell Ackoff, describes a problem-solving process he calls ‘idealized redesign’. Although not specifically related to branding, the process is certainly relevant for a company that wants to ‘Be the Brand’:

“Assume that the entity (ie the brand) that has the problem was destroyed last night, but everything else remains the same. Redesign that entity so as to eliminate the problem that faces it. The redesign is subject to only two constraints: first it must be technologically feasible, and second, it must obey the same externally imposed constraints (eg the laws of the land) to which the current system is subject.”

“In addition, it should be designed so that it can 1. improve itself by learning from its own experience, 2. adapt to a changing environment, and 3. be improved by being redesigned again in the future.”

B2B marketers can use ‘idealized redesign’ to define how their brand should be reflected in the market. They can start the process by asking the (rather long) question: what market reflections will attract and retain customers and maintain margins?

The answers will provide a stimulating roadmap for your company’s development as we move deeper into 2010 and a period of slow, cautious growth in B2B markets. The economy may be improving but negative memories of recession will definitely remain and strongly influence B2B buying-decisions.

For marketers, this means it’s essential to generate brand reflections that are not only credible, relevant and compelling but also highly reassuring to each audience in their overall market.

Visit Marketing Mix – South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.

More on brands and branding:

Brands build business      Outcomes make the difference      The Long Hello: building brand-relationships

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

Based on the content of SA’s marketing press, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is only one type of marketing happening across the country: B2C.

Perhaps this is because marketing peeps don’t get the concept of B2B and choose not to play there. Can it be that B2B just isn’t that well understood by a broad enough range of marketers?

Or, is it because B2B companies themselves don’t see the value of marketing as a profit-generating function and therefore don’t pay it much attention? That view was endorsed for me a few weeks ago when a highly intelligent MD – with a postgrad degree in marketing, noch al – asked me what B2B meant. Er, well, it means Business-to-Business, as opposed to Business-to-Consumer… 

There’s also a view among many marketers and agencies that B2B is boring. That it’s somehow more fun, interesting and challenging to be marketing washing powder or fast food rather than autoparts or earthmovers.

B2B and B2C: what’s the difference?

This type of thinking – that somehow B2C is dead sexy and B2B is dead boring – strikes me as odd.

Fact is, business marketing is certainly very different to consumer marketing. For me, there are two Big Differences that make B2B much more fun, interesting and challenging than B2C. 

The first Big Difference comes from this pretty accurate generalisation: B2C deals with frequent, low-price purchases; high volumes; simple products; and rapid sales cycles. 

For the vast majority of our purchases, when you and I buy things there’s not a lot at stake and we don’t give it much thought. A recent minibook, B2B Marketing for Dummies sums this up very neatly: 

 “You don’t bring in a consultant to help you choose the right toothpaste; you make a decision in seconds and go for it – I’m backing crystals over stripes and blast the consequences! Consumer marketing experts contend with that level of customer involvement in a world full of fast-moving consumer goods and we wish them well.”

In complete contrast, B2B generally deals with infrequent, high-price purchases; low volumes; complex products; and long sales cycles. 

A global car manufacturer doesn’t say ‘These brakes from StopQuik are really neat – we’ll buy ‘em for every car we make.’ (Well, hang on, maybe Toyota did…) 

If you’re buying four earthmovers at R25m a piece, you’ll go through a much more involved process than, say, when buying your next car. And there will be many more people in the decision making process. 

The second Big Difference: the fact that many more people will influence the buying decision. In B2B, end-users – the people who buy and use your products – are only one part of an overall market that may contain many different elements: distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies or professions; support and service providers; financial analysts; commentators in the media; standards boards and statutory regulators; industry associations; user-groups; and the general public. 

Because the B2B marketing function is targeting companies as opposed to individual consumers, there are also different influences within an end-user’s organisation, each with their own distinct requirements that need to be fulfilled by your products and services. 

In B2B, each component of the overall market is an audience for marketing’s messages. The diversity of the audiences means that you can’t have catchy, one-size-fits-all brand messages. ‘Brighter than bright’ may work for BriteRite washing powder in supermarkets, but ‘Just dig it’ won’t help you sell earthmovers in the world of mining or civil engineering. 

B2B brands have to work harder, accomplish more than B2C brands

A B2B brand has to build positive perceptions across the full range of audiences who influence business buying decisions. This is a complex task. You need a clear understanding of the market’s composition and you need to create and deliver messages that are relevant to each audience in the market. At the same time, the brand has to be cohesive, it has to have unity. 

Even though there needs to be a variety of relevant messages, they need to be perceived as part of a single brand. To do this, B2B marketers typically create a few Core Brand Messages that concisely highlight the key features of their products and services. 

A product or service has a fixed set of features. Until the product or service is altered, the feature-set stays the same – and so do the core brand messages. But what does change are the outcomes produced by the features for different audiences. B2B marketers look at how these features translate into outcomes that are relevant for each audience within the market. 

Influencing market perceptions: relevance, relevance, relevance

Having defined the market’s audiences, B2B marketers need to ask some questions in the market: 

• how does the brand reflect itself to each component of the market?
• how relevant are your marcoms to these individual components?
• what needs to change in order to achieve a consistent, positive perception of the brand? 

Relevance is crucial because it builds credibility and confidence. And relevance is all about outcomes - the outcomes that are produced for each component of the market: what does this brand do for me?  

For example, high levels of reliability that cut your earthmovers’ downtime is a message for a sales director at a road-builder – we can do the job quicker and at a lower cost than our competitors. But reliability is also a message for the road-builder’s FD – lower cost-of-ownership and higher ROI (return on investment). 

Earthmovers with low carbon emissions might not be a compelling message for the operations director, but will sit really well with the environmental media and the consultants conducting an environmental impact study on that proposed new superhighway. And so it goes on: matching messages to audiences by creating the right message for the right people. 

B2B marketers: much closer to the market?

For me, this is another of B2B’s big attractions: there is a real need – and practical opportunity – for on-going contact with people from different audiences within the market. Discovering how they benefit from a product or service is real hands on, person-to-person stuff and it gives B2B marketing a breadth of appeal that is perhaps absent from B2C.

Visit Marketing Mix – South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.

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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/

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Relevance, Synergy and Creativity should be key components of B2B marketing in 2010

Generally, marketers can get more bangs for their bucks during a recession because as marketing-spend falls, suppliers are increasingly pressured to cut prices in order to make sales. To capitalise on these opportunities, marketers need to be focused on:

• highly-relevant messages that are accurately-targeted
• increased synergy with their company’s other core functions
• more creativity to ensure ‘front-of-mind’ positioning in the market

Perhaps surprisingly, B2B marketers are aided by a recession in a number of ways: cheaper advertising rates and opportunities to move up a level in terms of premium media; less noise and clutter coming from the competition; and cut-price everything – from printing and photography, to exhibitions and promotional ’swag’. 

RELEVANCE: creating results-driven marcoms 

Although elements of the world economy are coming out of recession, 2010 will probably be a very cautious year for B2B – the lingering memories of the worst times will strongly influence buying motivators as markets either remain static or only begin to recover slowly.

Marketers need to be sure about the clarity of their messages and that these messages are serving marketing’s two, bottom line objectives: cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure – CCC and PPP. Messages need to be relevant to all components of the market and they also need to be relevant in terms of increasing sales, margins and customer loyalty. 

To achieve this two-fold relevance, marketers need to be particularly clear about the type of responses that are needed from their various audiences. 

It might sound obvious, but the starting point for creating relevant messages is to identify the results that are needed for CCC & PPP and then to tailor the messages accordingly for each audience. Equally, it’s important to understand the composition of the market – who your audiences are – and what will motivate their positive influence on buying decisions.

Read more about creating results-driven marcoms:

Using funnels to create relevance and accurate positioning      Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators

Recession marketing: no such thing?      Building brand relationships: ‘The Long Hello’ 

Getting real in B2B markets      Mapping audiences in B2B markets

SYNERGY: harnessing marketing with other core functions

No man is an island. And, in the same way that we are interconnected as people, marketers need to be sure that they are fully-connected with all aspects of ‘customer management’ – typically including sales and support, production, finance and distribution.

The purpose of these connections is to ensure that customer-expectations are matched by customer-experiences. It’s a common complaint among marketers that the brand gets let-down at various points of contact with customers.

There may be many reasons for this, but my gut-feel is that too many marketers inhabit an ivory tower that has no relationship with the day-to-day activities of working with customers – in essence, they create expectations that the business cannot fulfil. 

The solution to this problem? Marketers must spend time with customers and experience the interactions for themselves. And having made this a habitual process, it’s no good trying to drive square pegs into round holes: if the business really cannot deliver on the expectations created by marketing, then marketing better change its messages… 

Read more about marketing’s synergy with other functions: 

Marketing united      Marketing and sales: bridging the divide

CREATIVITY: innovate to differentiate

Given the diversity of audiences within B2B markets, you could argue that there are more opportunities for creativity in B2B than there are in B2C. For me, these opportunities are extended even further by the diversity of outcomes produced for the overall market by B2B products and services.

Once marketers understand what their messages are for each audience, creativity is important in formulating those messages in ways that are relevant, arresting and compelling.

And it’s not just about creativity in terms of design: creativity is also needed in targeting and the mechanisms that marketers use to deliver their messages.

The commercial goal that should motivate this creativity is to forge brand-perceptions that assist in positioning your products and services as being the most likely to contribute to customers’ success.  

This positioning needs to be front-of-mind across the market. It needs to cut through all the sameness and clutter and to clearly and continuously highlight what sets you apart from the competition.  

Read more about the commercial importance of creativity:

Creativity in B2B marketing: are you serious?      Brand positioning: a quick case study

Sappi pays the ref: World Cup 2010 

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

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

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

In the rush for instant marketing gratification, don’t trample the rules!

By Tim Hazlehurst
IAS b2b Marketing

Now that the B2B marketing chips are down, it is easy for marketers to be drawn into tempting but subjective routes that are offering sales salvation when the board is desperate for results.

A lot of people (Bob Lauterborn, Jack Trout and Michael Treacy etc.) spent a lot of time researching, identifying and highlighting certain fundamental rules. Rules about the marketing process. Rules that can be accelerated but not ignored! 

Technological and tactical advances can lead you astray

I’ve seen communication tactics evolve from the commercial traveller with the Bell and Howell presentation, through video and direct mail, to the wonders of the digital age. All of them have created tremendous opportunities and made our discipline more sophisticated and enjoyable.

But the rules of engagement are still the same!

So, when you are bombarded with better tactical solutions from providers (often with vested interest as it’s where they specialize), such as: 

• Demand generation
• Online rather than offline
• e-mail campaigns
• C R M solutions
• Lead Nurturing
• Data Management

… all promising the business uplift you crave, don’t forget the established, unchanging rules!

1. The Rule of Brand Strength

There is a direct correlation between your Brand Strength and your ability to attract and convert enquiries

It may be more efficient now but, through many years’ measurement and experimentation, we have proven irrefutably the correlation between attraction and conversion and your brand strength.

2. The Rule of Relevance

In the early 80s I wrote a paper called “The Face in the Crowd”. We had proved that segmented direct marketing produced 3x more response than non-segmented. Since then, every technological development has enhanced the opportunity/ability to enter into meaningful dialogue with your clients and prospects to enhance your brand strength.

And when you appreciate that “Your Brand is the Sum of your Contact” you understand why planning and integrating ALL your contact is crucial for maximising your relationship building.

3. The Rule of the Relationship Timeline

The lure of leads can drive logic out of the process. The process is to coax prospects along a relationship timeline which can be accelerated but not circumnavigated.

Of course the timeline operates differently for repetitive, comparatively low cost specifications and purchases, to infrequent capital purchases, but it operates nevertheless.

I always asked prospective clients’ Sales Directors how long their company’s timeline was and the average answer was 1-2 years… “So why do you send your sales people to call on a prospect whom you have never been in contact with before and why are you disappointed when they don’t sell!” would be my follow up remark – which won me begrudging respect more than it did friends!

4. The Rule of the Sales & Marketing Disconnect

It always exists. Sometimes to the complete detriment of the Relationship Timeline. Sometimes below the surface. But an Integrated Contact Strategy understood and enthused about by all the brand’s touchpoints is the solution to minimising this disconnect.

Make sure the CEO champions this.

5. The Rule of Process Efficiency

The secret of optimum lead conversion/market share gain/business growth (call it what you will) is about minimising the timeline. This is where picking the right tactical mixes to suit individual audiences (based on constant evaluation of individual’s contact preferences and dialogue mix historic performance) is crucial.

But beware going to a Bow and Arrow maker and asking them what weapons you should use for your next attack!

6. The Rule of Creativity

Nothing minimises the Timeline more than stunning, relevant and engaging creativity. Using Creativity reasoned out in accordance with these 6 rules of B2B Marketing delivers the maximum results.

And a thought on the current environment: it would be easy for the under-pressure Marketing Director to opt for lower-cost lead generation solutions but the sobering fact is that buyers and specifiers are craving more sincere, genuine relationships, in addition to lower cost and higher value.

Who can blame them? Their needs are as great as yours.

Stick to the rules to succeed (or survive). 80% won’t. But then, as a rule, only 20% truly succeed anytime.

Read the original article at B2B Marketing Magazine Online

More on B2B fundamentals:

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

The WOMsta Monsta – Social Media and B2B     

In B2B, outcomes are the differentiators - outcomes make the difference

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