The B2B sales person’s dilemma

Over the years while directly being involved in sales myself or leading a sales team, I have realized, it’s always difficult for the sales guy to ask who else is in competition in the account where he’sselling.

Most weak sales people live in this LA LA Land . I still get sales people telling me that the “customer is only talking to me”. It’s actually a dilemma because the earlier you realize that you may not get the order you are scared because you don’t know what you will put in your prospect sheet.

When I was in my early years in sales, I did not have a large enough prospect base most of the time. Now because of that I always had the feeling that I did not have the luxury to lose an order. Due to this I would try to please the customer in every which way hoping that he will not call my competitors to discuss the requirements.

Some of the smart prospects actually used to give me the assurance that they would not discuss with any other company. But when we were called for negotiations, I would realize there were so many players and I didn’t stand a chance.

These failures taught me a few lessons- the first being – never believe that only one person’s decision will be important in a B2B sale. There will Always Always be multiple people involved in a B2B sale.

The second fact is that, there can never be only one company with whom they are discussing for the solution. Due to the success of your marketing you may be the first people they call for a discussion, but be sure they will call others, if only to get you to bring your price down.

The only time when the above may not strictly hold true is when you are building something for them at your cost…..which may be rare because of compliance issues.

Which then means that you should make it a point in every meeting to check out who else is in competition. There are various ways to do it and we can have a separate post on that.

Its better to be clear about your competition in advance and plan your sales accordingly, rather being thrown a curve ball, at the order you had committed was 100% probable and blaming the prospect for underhand dealings or sudden relative of the CFO appearing.

Sales is a very methodical process and you can’t wing it. The people on the other side of the table are seasoned buyers who deal with sales people all day. They also appreciate a professional preparation.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a key aspect in B2B marketing – 3

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, segmentation, single target market

I have written in the last two posts about the key importance of persistence in B2B marketing.

Now the advantage of B2B is that you can generally get a database of contacts. So if you have segmented the market well and you have a clearly defined Single Target Market, then you can go and buy it from multiple sources.

What’s important are 2 aspects viz. The age of the database- how old it is and second figuring out if the designation and function is matching.

A lot of times designations can be deceptive in terms of the power equations within the organization.

Generally larger the organization, lower is the level of the people who will be entrusted with the responsibility for doing the research and identifying vendors, creating comparison sheets etc.

So not only do you identify the the key decision makers and send messages, you also need to identify the functional people who could be responsible for doing the evaluation. You will need to influence multiple people.

So your first step would be to verify the accuracy of the database because more than 50% of your success will be determined by the quality of your database. Incidentally this would be true whether you are looking at B2B or consumer markets.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing – 2

B2B, Customers, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, Triggers

In yesterday’s post I had mentioned Dean Jackson’s philosophy on 100/1000 leads – where 50% of them will change the incumbent in the next 3 years. The only challenge is that we don’t know which ones will. Its a game of patience int he B2B space.

Changing an incumbent need not be the exact category of what you sell. The “incumbent” in the B2B space is about how the customer presently gets the job done.

If presently someone licks a stamp on their tongue before sticking it on the envelope, then this is the incumbent , if someone is trying to sell a franking machine. Now until the person whose tongue is used to lick the stamp quits for a better job ( a trigger) or someone in the company realises that keeping this person only for the “licking” is an expensive option (another trigger) your messages for the franking product or services will not work.

However whenever a trigger takes place with respect to the incumbent, if you are present in front of the customer, then you become the first person they will call.

So you need to have the persistence and marketing stamina , to ensure that you are in front of the stakeholders on a regular basis. In case of B2B this is one way you build your brand. The other aspect is to make your messages “instigating” the dissonance. Slowly hammering away at possible problem areas.

Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this persistence story.

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence

As a marketers we generally like to send out a message and expect to get a response. Very few times you will get some response, but in most cases it takes a long long time.

Earlier I used to hear numbers like 7 to 12 contacts before a contact will respond. So people used to talk about running multi touch campaigns between email, voicemail and cold calling. However especially after Covid struck and a lot of people were working from home, the primary means of connecting has been email or to a certain extent Linkedin.

While I don’t have statistics on how many touch points you need to have before a response is received I got some research done on different geographies for response to emails. On an average its taking more than 20 email messages to be sent (these are cold emails) on different service lines before a given service line attracted a response.

Now this is a critical aspect if you are getting into the B2B space. As I have mentioned multiple times earlier in different posts, B2B buying is not impulsive so even if the message is interesting, you may not get a response. The second aspect to be kept in mind is that identifying the right person in the hierarchy who can act on the message. Designations can be deceptive.

So you need to have marketing stamina to be in the game for the long haul. As Dean Jackson says – look at it as a 3-5 year project. Out of a bunch of 100/1000 leads at least 50% will change their incumbent vendors. You only don’t know which ones will. Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!