Fear

Pain & Gain – the pivot for messaging

B2B, Fear, Human Brain, Marketing, messaging

Its general human psychology that people avoid pain (fear of) and go for the pleasure / gain. People remember the pain forever or almost forever while they discount the gain. You lose a dollar and your brain will remind you about it for a longtime, but if you earned / won 10 dollars, your brain will discount it by saying it was luck.

This is the same logic why people don’t have a Vitamin C tablet which costs a few cents everyday as a preventive measure but go out and spend thousands of dollars when they get hospitalised. The pain & fear makes them spend the large amounts but the idea of spending a few cents and “gain” the positive of good health.

When you do messaging – whatever kind – an advertisement, a video, a webinar or individual sales – you have to keep these two emotions and their relative importance in the brain , in mind, if you want to get your message to stick to your audience. So while the negative or the message of pain will get more attention, you put too much of negative and it becomes dreary.

In every audience there will be people who are reactive since they are in pain and get your message immediately. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who are proactive and want to ensure that they take care of things before anything can go wrong, they plan in advance. Then there’s a large section of the audience which is sitting in between these two ends. The challenge of your messaging is to take this mass of people to either side of the spectrum so that they buy what you are selling.

Generally its easiest to sell to a person who is in pain or recognises the pain, then the set of people who are proactive. Then you should aim for the audience in-between. In case of B2B if you are selling an ERP software, then the ones whose production is completely messed up on one side, while there’s dead inventory lying on the other side, would be the ideal set of people to target first. The next set of companies to target would be the ones who are thinking in terms of growth and want to ensure that they are ahead of the curve.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

TRUST & FEAR IN B2B – 2

B2B, education, education, Fear, Marketing, Trust

In my earlier post on this topic I spoke of the challenge for a new vendor to enter into an organisation. But there’s a positive side of this story. Once you enter the organisation and do a good job and the customer starts trusting you, then you will stay in that organisation for a very long time. Decisions in organisations are rarely impulsive, therefore they will always prefer to go with the vendor who is an incumbent and whom they trust.

So how do you build trust & reduce the fear-

  1. Ideal situation is when you have enough other customers vouching for your product or service. If they are from the same industry as the prospect you are targeting, even better.
  2. Provide continuous education on what’s new and what they could be missing – there are three things in this sentence. First is “continuous” – you have to be reaching your prospects regularly and creating an impression in their minds, so that when the time comes and the incumbent is not in a position to provide them the service, they reach out to you. The Second item in the sentence is – “What’s new” – keep talking about the new technologies, new case studies etc. so that the customer understands that you are doing a lot of work and others are trusting you. And the last item is on “What they could be missing” – with their existing supplier – this is to create a wedge, start a cycle of dissonance with the incumbent. This could be a simple thing like talking about how at each of your other customers’ premises you provide a dedicated project manager to ensure smooth operations. Now if the incumbent is not providing this facility, then the customer will start getting a feeling of missing on a service.
  3. Always be upfront in what you can do very well and what you can’t do. When you first get a chance – it could be a trial or a Proof of Concept, never do anything in this phase which is not your best item. Only when the prospect gets convinced at this stage, will they decide to move forward with you.

Out of the three points above, with marketing you can systematise the second point and ensure that there is constant education happening for the prospects. This background activity will slowly result in your name becoming more familiar. With familiarity, some amount of trust starts developing. As the trust starts getting built, they may start inviting you to discuss on things which they are coming up with to see if they can accommodate you.

Till next time then……

Carpe Diem!!!

TRUST & FEAR in B2B

B2B, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, Trust

In every relationship TRUST is a very big factor.

In a B2B situation , its an even bigger issue ,because the person who’s going to be your sponsor for whatever your product or service that you sell, cannot afford to fail.

The fear of failure in B2B environments is even bigger than when you deal with consumers. Any B2B environment whether corporate, government or semi government, all have multiple hierarchies involved.

So the person you deal with can’t afford to fail in front of her peers, in front of her boss and her boss can’t fail in front of her (the boss’) peers. The larger the organization the bigger the problem.

That’s one key reason why there’s so much inertia in making decisions in organizations. This inertia causes large organizations to fail in the long run, which is another story.

For a product manager or marketing manager or sales person, its not about how good your product or service is, its more about how much does the prospect TRUST you. Fear falls only when Trust increases.

If you can’t build the Trust, the prospect will go with the incumbent vendor or technology or partner because then at least people will not directly blame her for failure. There used to be a saying in IT circles ” No CIO got fired for choosing IBM” . IBM was the default standard at one time for information technology. They were more expensive than most, but still picked up business because they were trusted.

As a product or marketing person, your primary responsibility therefore is to figure out, how you can build trust around what you “sell”, that will ease the process of getting traction in the market. If you see some of my earlier posts, I have spoken about how education is one of the best forms of building trust.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The B2B sales person’s dilemma

B2B, Fear, Sales, Uncategorized

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!!!