Inform stakeholders about how the purchase will affect their day-to-day jobs
Go to a modern animated children’s movie, and you’re sure to find lots of jokes, symbols, and even entire subplots that are completely incomprehensible to the preschoolers. They’re there for the adults, who are the financial decision makers and end users of the movie. The filmmakers are acting on a concept that many B2B vendors underutilize: There are multiple constituencies involved in the purchase and consumption of a product, and you have to cater to all of them.
You’ve carefully segmented your target market— an important step in focusing resources and defining go-to-market strategy. Segments, industries, and geographies don’t make purchase decisions, however. Neither do companies. People do. They make these decisions with both company objectives and their own personal interests in mind.
Erik Frieberg, a seasoned Silicon Valley marketing executive, described a corner-turning experience at Escalate—one of the first online e-commerce companies. Escalate was pursuing a big opportunity with a big-name customer, Williams-Sonoma. At the first hard-won customer meeting, the rep discovered a surprisingly large variety of people in the room. There were sales and marketing people with lead generation objectives, and the director of customer service wondering how to simplify customer support. There were merchandise managers concerned about how to showcase products, and web developers evaluating the technology. The pitch that had been prepared by marketing didn’t begin to address such diverse priorities. Instead, the rep focused on each individual in turn. It worked, and Escalate adopted what is now called “audience marketing.” The change helped Escalate break into new accounts and shorten sales cycles.
Nothing beats face-to-face interaction with real customers and real users to build awareness of customers as individuals rather than segments or profiles. Override salespeoples’ desire to “protect” their accounts and insist that engineers, support personnel, and marketing staff visit customers. Ask them to observe what happens day to day and to interact freely with the people they are observing. This firsthand exposure will reveal both the business and personal interests of the people who influence whether and how your products and services are used.
The currently popular term “audience marketing” is unfortunate. It implies that the focus on individual needs stops before the sale. Product design, the sales process, financial terms, and after-sales services or support should also meet individual needs. Help buyers and end users understand how they, specifically, will interact with the product and with your company and how the purchase will affect their day-to-day jobs.
Designing audience needs directly into the product is the most tangible way to create relevance for multiple stakeholders. Application performance management solutions from CA Technologies, for example, monitor the details deep within mission-critical applications in order to identify potential performance issues. They include interfaces for multiple stakeholders: one for system administrators to monitor performance, one for application support managers that pinpoint problems, and a third for business managers and executives to track overall performance and business impact. CA also has sales and marketing tools for a wide range of people involved in purchase decisions. Whether a CA sales rep meets with a developer, a system administrator, or the vice president of customer service, they have the story and the product relevant to each one.
Catering to individual needs and interests is especially critical when selling into a fat organization because each person is likely to have a bigger stake in the purchase decision and a greater influence on it. Understanding the perspective of each stakeholder speeds up the sales process, but it also speeds up adoption and acceptance after the purchase is made. This in turn accelerates the benefits the customer gets from the product.