Selling and marketing teams in the B2B world (or business to government world) need to acknowledge some fundamental truths about the way the B2B buyer buys.
B2B products and services are usually complex. There are likely to be multiple influencers in the decision making cycle, it may be a protracted discussion and your value proposition is likely to be complex. Pricing of products is rarely simple there may be a range of options. Purchasers do a great deal of research before they buy often on their own and without reference to you.
In addition to this B2B buyers take a journey through a series of sequential "decision gates" to go from a state of inertia and a lack of awareness to the eventual purchase decision.
It looks something like this.
Buyers start off blissfully unaware they even have a problem however something occurs in their organisation and that state changes; they start becoming aware they do indeed have a problem. They show interest in fixing this problem, they define a specific need and they start looking for suppliers who can solve this problem. Eventually they select your firm's product or service and become your customer.
This is a deliberate cognitive process.
Buyers can start their buying journey at different times and progress at different rates, but above all buyers don't skip steps in this journey. Of course sometimes these steps may occur rapidly, perhaps even within one meeting, but buyers consciously move from stage to stage and state to state.
So what implications does this have for sales and marketing organisations?
1) Sales and marketing teams need to be aligned around the one same buyer's journey.
2) Sales and marketing teams need to know where their buyer is on this journey if they are to market and sell to them effectively.
3) The tools and tactics you develop to engage with buyers and move them through the stages of the buying cycle need to be specific to that stage. Clearly your buyer has different needs at the "shown interest" stage than the "may purchase" stage.
What rewards will those organisations receive if they tackle these questions effectively? In other words, is this a problem worth fixing?
Well research from a global study of 1800 firms around this topic of sales and marketing alignment, produced by Math Marketing and Eloqua, concluded that firms who were aligned:
1) Had 5.4 percentage points more of growth than the industry
2) Closed 38% more deals
3) Turned over 36% less clients
Find a piece of scrap paper and just work out what that would do to YOUR sales figures if you could achieve those numbers! The opportunity for your firm if you get this right is huge.
Let me know your thoughts on this article and the concept of alignment and the buyer's journey!