b2b messaging

Messaging – Answering the Questions of a prospect

B2B, education, education, Marketing, messaging, problem solving, Questions, segmentation, single target market

In yesterday’s post I spoke about the pain (fear of) and pleasure (gain of) and how you can use it to get your message to stick with a prospect.

I have written multiple times earlier on the idea of a Single Target Market and how you can niche a segment further based on usage. This comes in useful when you want to build your messaging.

As an example you niched your B2B market by industry, then you further niched it by revenue. Now if you niche it further based on whether you are targeting prospects who intend to buy your kind of product or service for the first time or are you targeting prospects for whom this is a replacement. Another could be a backup to the main product for insurance purposes.

Once you have chosen the usage, you can now get into the shoes of the prospect and think what could go on in their mind. If its a first time buyer – you could help that company with messaging entered around evaluating your kind of offering from an unbiased angle. On the other hand if its a replacement market that you are targeting, then you could talk of how the technology has changed and how by replacing the old technology they could get more benefits.

Based on the usage criteria, the team of people to whom you will send the message, will also change. For the replacement market in the industry, you may need to talk to the operations or maintenance folks, while if its for the first time usage you may need to talk to the project folks. Each of these folks has a different “view of life” and hence the problems that you address and the education that you have to do is different.

You need to know your end game and then work backwards such that you have a delighted customer. Its only when you delight a customer can you hope to get referrals and move further to dominate that market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

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!!!

Follow-ups – how much is good?

B2B, follow-up, Marketing, persistence

One question that I get very often from my team is – “if we send so many follow-up emails, won’t the prospect get offended and unsubscribe”. We deal in B2B customers and therefore the general audience is never large, so they are scared that they may lose one prospect from the small set of prospects.

If your follow-up is – just wanted to check if there’s any update for me – then yes – its irritating and people will get offended and not bother to pick up your calls or unsubscribe from your mails in the future.

But if the mail or call has value then they will look forward to receiving your mails or calls. If on the other hand, if inspite of the fact that you are sending them something of value and they still unsubscribe to your mails or stop taking your calls, then it’s a good sign. They would not have become a good customer for you anyway.

Since our time is extremely valuable, it’s extremely important that we eliminate the people who anyway don’t value our services. You should look forward to delighting people who value your service not to people who don’t value it. That’s a wasted effort.

How do you create value in your communications – you share case studies of how you have helped others. You share challenges, that other customers had, that you helped solve. You could have created some new setups/solutions, found a new way to sanitise the rooms. With B2B prospects, there’s a lot of ways you can create messaging.

If not, you can share industry news that you found, or send them a book. But you have to be persistent in reminding them of your presence because, they shouldn’t miss out on talking to you when they actually have a need.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my 7 point checklist for B2B markets, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

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Education to build Trust

B2B, education, education, Marketing, Trust

In the last two posts I had written about building trust and reducing fear in the B2B marketplace.

One of the best ways to build trust is to educate the customer. But you can’t educate the customer if you cannot think like them and understand the conversation going on in their mind (Robbert Collier said that). Only if you can understand the questions they could have, when wanting to buy something for which you have a product / service , will you be able to educate them.

In B2B scenarios typically cycle times are quite large, especially for things which are part of a plan. There are some things which are needed because of some emergency and get done quickly. Otherwise the work on a B2B project could start about 3-6 months before they actually place an order.

Depending on the size of the companies you are targeting, the level of the person who would be looking for the information will change. Also in very large organisations, they may actually employ specialised consultants for helping them on certain decisions in choosing vendors.

The other challenge is that until you have some amazing new Hitech gizmo, chances are that they may already have a vendor providing those product or services . If that be the case, then the kind of education that you will need to provide also changes.

Today information is available freely to everyone. Large companies employ hundreds of employees, some of whom can be tasked to do the research and fetch the information. What is needed by the leaders is actionable guidance. This makes the task of educating a B2B customer tougher.

If you provide products or services that are widely available and the customer already has an incumbent, then your education should be directed more towards educating for creating dissonance. Typically all the issues that you have seen customers face before they started using you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!