B2B or B2C?
This is neither a Business to Business or a Business to Consumer book. This is a Business to People book. Those are ludicrous pigeonholes anyway. With incredibly rare exception, businesses don’t buy anything–people buy products and services. There are only a few significant differences in B2B and B2C:
- The money the buyer is spending is often not their own
- The addresses work differently
- More people may be involved in the decision process
- The sales cycle could be longer
That’s it. Other than that there really there isn’t a dimes worth of difference. If you can do B2B you can do B2C and vice versa. If you focus on one discipline you can learn 90 percent of everything you need to know about the other in a weekend. Sure, there are refinements such as distribution channels, co-op programs, etc., etc. That’s the remaining ten percent. But refinements have little to no effect on how the core elements of marketing are done to show success.
More significant is the issue of simple or complex sale. People use B2B as a replacement for complex sale and yet there are many B2C sales that are very complex and have most of the characteristics of what is typically considered a B2B sale. I’m going to talk about most tactics from the standpoint of a complex sale, but if you’re selling products with a simple cycle they work equally well (actually, better). There’s just fewer steps.
Complex sale generally means the product or service is expensive, the sales cycle has multiple steps and is longer, more than one person and more than one type of buyer may be involved in the purchase decision. These sales rarely happen completely online, so the action we’re trying to get prospects to take is to respond to qualifying questions and provide a sales lead.
The issues individually play out like this:
Sales Cycle Has Multiple Steps: We talk about the steps of the sales cycle as if they were exactly that–discrete steps. In reality it’s more like moving through a spectrum–red fades to orange which fades to yellow. In our sales cycle it’s more like Pain (a business or personal situation that the prospect would like to rectify) that moves to Awareness that solutions exist, moves to Interest in specific products, moves to Need analysis (consideration of a purchase) moves to Negotiation, where the sales force gets involved. Once the product or service is purchased the process moves to Implementation which can involve adding users, premium services, ancillary products, etc. and then perhaps to Standardization or some form of rollout to other divisions, users, etc. The process might then move into Maintenance through upgrade or replacement paths and into Evangelism or other customer reference opportunities.
Each step along the way requires different kinds of communication to optimize the results and move the prospects through the process. Most of the steps include revenue opportunities and in general the value of the prospect/customer becomes greater as they move deeper into the process.
We’ll take this further when we talk about how sales processes connect to marketing initiatives.
Because the cycle has multiple steps we can’t focus simply on getting the product sold. We need to connect with potential customers and guide them through the cycle. We also need our online and offline campaigns to engage prospects at various points in the buying cycle and guide them into the platform.
More than one person and more than one type of buyer involved in the purchase decision: In complex sales there may be an economic buyer who controls the money and a technical buyer who examines suitability of the the solutions. Both of these have veto power. There are also the Users, who judge whether or not the solution is suitable for them, and the Supervisor, who judges suitability for the wider set of organizational interests.
You gain ground by targeting many of these potential buyers and paying attention to the kind of information they need. Getting the right information to these decision makers makes the sale much easier and shortens the sales cycle. You may need fairly specific versions of all the usual whitepapers, success stories, videos, application guides, etc for each kind of buyer.
As touched on above, complex sales also may offer opportunity for repeated sales, standardization, and organizational deployment. If you are not just driving consumers to a site for an immediate sale in a single visit, then your focus may be on forming a relationship with the buyers and ensuring they understand you are in for the long haul. That you can solve their challenges in the future as well as now. And that your company is prepared and competent to deal with the complexities of their organization. Great products from startups are often limited in the scope of customers they can address by their own internal lack of sophistication. Good marketing can overcome that to some degree. But it’s one more reason why you should measure the success of your leads on the basis of your ability to fully qualify opportunities as well as connecting to all the revenue all the way through the sales cycle. A sales force that is not ready to close business in the Fortune 500 can leave a lot of business on the table. Some relatively simple analysis can demonstrate exactly where it is being left. For example, if you have enough customers you can just graph them by customer size. I bet you a good Oregon Pinot Noir that you’ll find a big hole somewhere. Usually in medium sized businesses, but your mileage may vary.
Marketers specializing in complex sales are generally well behind marketers doing simple sales in adopting new online methods and applying them to optimize offline marketing. The simple reason is that marketing in support of complex sales keeps more balls in the air and requires that a lot more moving parts be modified to adopt something new. But once the market demonstrates the value of an approach it is grabbed up quickly. When you apply the approaches in this book and experience great results you should understand that part of the reason is that you won’t have much competition. That won’t last. Roll successful programs out quickly and gain all the ground you can.
B&J has been preaching for years that the marketing strategy must match the customer’s buying process. Many companies have adopted this for their offline marketing, but not as many extend it to search marketing strategy and tactics.
The Sales Cycle Could Be Longer: You also need to adjust your analytics to the sales cycle. In a simple sales the analytics connect “click to sale” immediately. With a complex sale you need to connect clicks to an eventual sale extending to weeks or months and customer value that can extend for years. You also need to adjust program test times. You won’t see much results from a short program if your sales cycle is several times longer than the test. You can get away with something like half your sales cycle and extrapolate.
In complex sales the person you first contact may not be the eventual purchaser. When you are doing the analysis you need to account for that. The more that you are staying in touch with the prospect and extending your communications to the other decision makers the easier it will be to make that connection. The sales force might call foul if you make contact with someone at a large company, and then claim success when someone from the company buys six months later. The more you mature leads before handing them off, the fewer arguments you’ll have.
If I were allowed to define the job of marketing I’d say it is to find, stimulate and join conversations. Those conversations are not about the features of your product, they are about the needs of your prospects and customers. You should be making it easier and easier for prospects to engage with you and your company. You should start conversations, join conversations, welcome conversations–and then you should Listen
Continue to Chapter 4: