As the head of our organization I have a unique if not sometimes bi-polar existence: I sell to B2B buyers and yet I buy B2B products and services. Jumping from one role to the other provides great insight, helping us to further define how we interact with our customers.
To echo the sentiments from my friend and respected colleague Craig Rosenberg a.k.a The Funnelholic, it can suck being a B2B Buyer. However there are two sides to every coin. Being a B2B buyer also means that I’m in charge of driving the buying process. And as a buyer, there are certain things that I want from a vendor, and other things I just don’t care about. The problem is that too many vendors don’t seem to understand which is which. So, to help, I offer my top 3 things your buyers don’t care about, but that should be important to you.
1. The Buyer Doesn’t Care if Your Marketing and Sales Teams are Aligned
For all the reams of information that have been published on how to align marketing and sales, you would think the problem would have been solved by now. However it still exists in many organizations. Yet, the truth is that your buyers couldn’t care less. What they DO want is to buy from an organization that understands their needs, their challenges and has a firm grasp on how to help them meet those needs and challenges. Marketing-sales alignment is the key to getting there, and that’s why alignment should be important to you.
In order to engage in this Buyer 2.0 driven market, organizations need to go beyond just generating leads. Effective, planned management of leads (i.e. relationships) along every stage of the pipeline is the key to successful conversion and maintaining of the buyer. This “relationship management” requires a defined content strategy that maps to the buying cycle. The content strategy and buying cycle definition cannot be created by marketing or sales alone. It has to be developed by both…together.
While the buyer may have an indifferent view towards your internal alignment, it’s imperative as a vendor that collaboration occurs. To do so takes a unified approach on process development, content strategy and common revenue goals. If you want the buyer to feel that you understand their needs, then alignment must be important to you!
2. Buyer’s Don’t Care What You Have to Say
We have all been in those cocktail party conversations where we have our mental clock counting the seconds until it ends. While we appear to be listening and engaged, all we’re really hearing is Charlie Brown’s teacher on the Peanuts cartoons: “Wah wah wah, wah wah wah”. Truth be told, this is often what your customers hear. Why? Because the wrong content is delivered at the wrong time. To quote Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua, “Prospects come to our site and say ‘Hi’ and we respond by saying, ‘Read my white paper!’ ” (Insert “Wah wah wah, wah wah wah” here!)
Prospects don’t care what you have to say. What they DO care about is if what you say matches what they want to hear. If they are going to spend their budget wisely, they are going to do it with an organization that “get’s” them.
To that end, you should care a great deal about what your customers are saying, how they are saying it and when they are saying it. By listening to them, you’ll be in a much better position to respond with content that is meaningful to them. This can be the difference between winning a customer and losing one.
3. Buyers Don’t Care What Their Lead Score Is
I know this point will win big points with the marketing automation haters out there (You know who you are). At the risk of being facetious, let me tell you, a buyer is not worried if they took the right number of actions on your site, or if they fit an exact profile you have developed. They don’t need a scorecard to help them chart their buying journey. When their ready to buy, they’ll let you know. They won’t rely on their assigned score. Besides, buying patterns run hot and cold and often times there are unseen events that occur that cannot be tracked, managed or scored.
So, should lead scoring be important to you? Well yes, but that’s not all. Lead qualification and scoring is but one component of the “getting to know you strategy,” but it should not stop there. Buyers are fickle, so it is imperative that organizations do all they can to get to know everything about their ideal buyers. They should develop buyer personas, define the buying cycle, and mine internal data from groups like customer support. They should then use this information to provide a better buyer experience. The more you know your buyer and deepen the understanding (yes it’s a continual dynamic process), the better you will be at engaging, winning and retaining. What should be important to you is understanding everything you can about your customer.
The world of B2B marketing will continue to change. The new buying process will be led by the buyer who will grow increasingly demanding, stay fickle and refuse to fall into a predictable pattern. It is for these reasons that B2B vendors must care about aligning, listening and knowing.
