Today, business-to-business customers are putting off making contact with potential suppliers until later in their thought process. For B2B vendors, this means neither sales nor marketing may be influencing the decision making.
This, says Patrick Spenner, managing director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, means marketers must get a better handle on the midway point of the sales funnel.
In the classic purchase funnel for B2B, there was typically a clear point where there would be a handoff between marketing and sales of leads, he explains. Now, there is a no man’s land opening up, as companies delay their contact with a sales force.
The Importance of Mid-Funnel
What can marketers do in this situation? One option is to try and “put the genie back in the bottle,” says Spenner, and try to get people to engage earlier. But a more likely scenario is creating a different information-heavy experience mid-funnel for the prospect.
“The big pain point for commercial organizations is that if you don’t interact with your customers mid-funnel, they’re probably going to put into cement what criteria they’ll use to evaluate suppliers without your input—and then you’re dead in the water,” says Spenner. “You’ll probably end up competing on price.”
Recent Marketing Leadership Council research shows that B2B customers may look at up to 10 sources of information about potential purchases prior talking to a vendor. Many of these sources are typically not supplier related. In a survey of 1,900 B2B customers, word of mouth was cited by 72% of respondents, while 62% cited non-supplier blogs and 47% cited trade journals.
Spenner notes that in the B2B research the Corporate Executive Board has done of over the last few years, overwhelmingly they’ve seen that what B2B customers want is insight from companies they can use to run their businesses more effectively. This, he says, means that marketers need to be much more than just a provider of a product or solution.
Grainger Looks Within
Grainger Industrial Supply, for example, looked at how they could be a commercial teaching enterprise for their audience. In doing this, Grainger had to examine why customers should buy from them rather than competitors.
“Asking that question took them to a very dark place, because it was difficult for individuals around the organization to articulate what it was [that made them different],” says Spenner. “We find that this happens in companies with a surprising frequency, because marketers see differences between their products and solutions customers would never notice.”
Taking this teaching approach helped Grainger ultimately change the materials their sales force uses to pitch to prospects, switching from a product-focused presentation to one that centered on a problem that perhaps customers didn’t’ even realize they had, and how Grainger could help solve it.
For example, many facilities’ purchases are small, in-the-moment buys to solve an unforeseen problem. Granger was able to tailor a pitch that would help facilities managers look at the ROI of a small unanticipated purchase—say, door fasteners—and calculate how much they would have saved if they had purchased in bulk.
“Only at the end of the pitch deck does it come back to Grainger’s specific strength and the depth of their catalog,” says Spenner. “They made the presentation more about the customer than themselves. Marketers need to tailor what they do to learn why customers need to buy and respond to their needs.”
Types of Buyers
In the Corporate Executive Board’s survey of B2B buyers, the CEB identified four purchase motivator profiles:
• Number Cruncher: concerned mainly about ROI
• Service Seeker: places the most emphasis on the interaction they might have with the sales rep
• Innovator: wants to know more about how a vendor could help make their organization better
• Risk Avoider: skeptical and worried about what may happen during the implantation of a solution
“As a marketer, if you have marketing messaging in that mid-funnel that speak to each of those four profiles, you're in pretty good shape,” says Spenner, noting that traditionally, marketers focus most on number crunchers and service seekers.
Marketers must also use experiences and information to build momentum towards a deal. “Engage prospects and look at the power of various touchpoints across the purchase funnel, says Spenner. “Conversations with sales, blog posts, Facebook and Twitter postings—all of these touchpoints should be rated on their degree of influence.”
