Questions? (Photo credit: Valerie Everett)

The more change occurring  the more questions arise.  This year is no exception.  B2B Marketers are experiencing ongoing as well as new challenges as we start to hit stride in 2013.   What are the big future questions for B2B Marketers?  Let's look at a few:

How do we generate more leads and keep them?

Survey after survey indicate B2B marketers have this issue top of mind.  Creating demand and filling up a pipeline is loaded with pressure packed environments.  In my qualitative buyer research work, I see shifts in behavior on the part of buyers.  There are unique sets of goals and behaviors emerging in the area of nurturing.  Calling into question how leads should be defined and segmented.  Lead research and unique lead persona development will emerge to help B2B marketers address this most important question.

How do we use marketing automation effectively?

Marketing automation has crawled out of infancy stage and is being more widely adopted.  Many organizations have been in the "let's just get started" phase.  Experiencing the pain of implementation.  The next level question is how to make marketing automation more effective to get better results.

How do we operationalize content marketing?

Content marketing has certainly arisen as one of the core capabilities B2B marketing must possess.  It is causing radical shifts in thinking about the role of marketing and how to build internally.   To operationalize content marketing begs further questions related to structure, roles, and skills.  Presenting CMO's with the daunting task of figuring out how to build internal strength in content marketing.

What do customers and buyers want?

Usually, when this question is asked, there is a tendency to give a product-centric answer.  If you find yourself doing this - then you might want to catch yourself.  Admittedly, this is one of the hardest questions to figure out.  Since no one is guaranteed to be a mind-reader, this will take qualitative intelligence.  To understand how your customers and buyers think as well as what is motivating this thinking, it takes skilled customer research and buyer research.

How do we create seamless multi-channel experiences?

Existing customers and prospect buyers, simply stated, do not want to have to alter how they interact based on the channel.  My theory on this is based on hearing how buyers complain about how one channel works for them but another does not.  The wider the gap, the more disruptive.  Disrupting your customers and buyers - well - is not a good thing.   Here is an example:

"Okay here's what I mean, I go to the website.  It is impressive and I find some good information.  I am thinking this could be a smart organization to potentially get to know.  Of course, I download the white paper and I get the call.  Let me just say they had no idea what they were talking about." (Director, IT Integration and Service)

How do we stop reacting and plan for the future?

There is palpable tension in the air for B2B Marketers this year.  The need to know and the need to get results creates mounting pressure.  When first quarter results may not have been as expected, it is bound to cause some to push the panic button.  It can become a fire drill.  All hands on deck to create the next campaign.  What I believe is happening is buyers are out in front and B2B marketers are trying to catch up.   I advocate having a solid foundation of buyer intelligence to work with.  This means a collective body of research-based reference knowledge like audience personas, buyer personas, mapping tools related to content and buying journeys, and much more.  These give you the perspective you need to know why something may not have worked and to plan intelligently.  Another words - stop hitting the panic button.

How do we build more buyer predictability into B2B Marketing?

Predictive analytics continues to grow.  With limitations.  It holds promise to scale down Big Data and give the ability to predict buying behaviors.  While this may help us to predict how buyers may behave online for example, it may yield little on predicting why.  A capability I am advocating is developing customer and buyer foresight planning.  This type of planning calls for  emerging buyer scenario modeling and mapping capabilities.  Knowing where your buyers may be headed can give you the foresight needed to anticipate future motivations.  In addition, share your foresight and help them envision a future which includes you.

There are many more questions.  It is the nature of business and marketing.  It is the one constant we can count on.  Things will change enough which will beg more questions.  B2B Marketing leadership and success wil be predicated on the ability to answer the big questions.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to the Buyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• The Art of Buying
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• One Way to Know the Ideal Buying Scenarios for Lead Nurturing

A key component of understanding buying decisions is gaining a reality check on how buyers perceive you and whether you match to their criteria.  How well organizations are perceived will serve as one of the primary influences shaping buying behaviors and purchase decisions.

Buyer research can reveal many aspects of what comprises buyer perception.  Buyer experience is now becoming one of the most important factors contributing to and influencing perceptions.  The new digital age is introducing new types of criterion buyers place a value on, which can directly affect their perceptions:

Buyer Experience: previous as well as current experiences can have an enormous impact on how buyers perceive you. Do you think waiting an extra day to return a call was no big deal?  Think again.

Engagement: evidence is building on engagement being a factor in shaping buyer perceptions when making purchase decisions.  What the "engagement experience" tells buyers can make a big difference.  This differs from buyer experience in this way: when you ask customers and prospects to engage - meaning interact - it better not be painful.

Knowledge: the sharing of knowledge and insight is fast emerging as a one area shaping how buyers perceive companies.  Content marketers need to watch for information fatigue setting in with their buyers.  Suffocating buyers with content is not the answer.  On the other hand, if buyers feel like they have to perform a tooth extraction tor pry information from your organizations, then they will move on.

Community: buyers today are getting tuned into joining various communities specific to their industry.  Are your efforts tuned into the communities buyers are at?  Are you contributing to this community - or "selling" and annoying the community?

These are just four factors affecting how buyers can perceive you and your organization.  Based on hundreds of buyer interviews I have done to date - I can say the above directly impact the why and how of purchase decisions.

Now What?

Getting to understand how buyers perceive you can be challenging.  Two ways you can get a handle on buyer perception is:

• Have buyer research performed specifically for perception
• Have mystery shopping performed to get insight on how buyers experience their interactions with your organization

Understanding how buyers perceive you can often be a surprise.  When I have provided insight into buyer perception, I often get the "I had no idea" response.  Given the hyper-competitive digital world of today, this might be one area you should have an idea about.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to theBuyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• The Art of Buying

• 4 New Values Affecting How Buyers Perceive You (tonyzambito.com)
• 5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing (tonyzambito.com)
• Is Your Lead Generation Off-Target? (blogs.imediaconnection.com)

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ernest Hemmingway
The concept of buyer personas, as a means for understanding buyers, has been around now for over a decade.  It is an understatement to say many things have changed in the world of buying and selling since their beginning.

We have witnessed the changing dynamics of the buyer-seller relationship. The dynamics I refer to are buying behaviors and buyer goals.  On the other side of the coin, we see marketing and sales making attempts to adapt.  The concepts of content marketing, lead nurturing, insight-based selling, customer experience, and brand management emphasized.  These practices have been introduced as gateways to connecting with buyers in the new digital age.

Adapting to New Realities

Personas, at their core, were introduced as a tool to communicate the goals and behaviors of users and buyers.  Specifically for informing strategies related to product design and marketing to buyers.  For B2B Marketing and Sales, a clearer picture has begun to emerge around the goals and behaviors of buyers.  Yet, there are many more miles to go.  My endeavor and work with organizations over the past decade lead me to this conclusion:

Personas, specifically in B2B, need to be adaptive to new goals and behaviors of buyers throughout their buyer’s journey.  In addition, personas need to be designed for the new practices, which are developing in marketing and sales.

The term buyer persona has been used universally to an extreme level. The term worked well when buyers relied on sales for their buying cycle for upwards to eighty percent.  We are seeing the inverse today.  Here is where I believe buyer trends as well as qualitative evidence is telling us to go:

B2B personas need to be researched, understood, and designed to meet robust goals and behaviors of buyers throughout the end-to-end buying cycle and brand experience.  In addition, personas need to be designed to enable as well as make more effective new practices, functions, and roles.

Persona Buying Cycle™

As new operational models for marketing and sales develop, there are 5 buying behavior phases of the buying cycle personas must now address:

1. Audience Behavior: the concept of content marketing reaching audiences is more prevalent.  Audience goals and behaviors are distinctly different when not in the market for products or services.  Yet, awareness, insight, and intelligence are an important component of connecting with existing customers and future buyers today.  Content marketing effectiveness is enabled when it can reach many different types of audiences.  Audience personas must now include the likes of industry influences and more.
2. Lead Behavior: one of the fastest growing areas, in terms of emerging practices, is the rise in lead nurturing and lead development.  Buyers have distinct goals and behaviors when they convert from being a part of a wider audience to an interested party.   New forms of lead research and lead personas can create more effective conversions from an interested party to an active buyer.
3. Buyer Behavior: the core persona when buyers have become actually engaged in the process of buying.  Buying behaviors, and buying goals, operate on a different level when buyers are actively engaged in the buying process.  Buyer personas, true their original intent, are designed to enable the buying process between buyer and seller.
4. Customer Behavior: when a buyer becomes a customer, there is a trial period underway.  This trial period consists of a different set of goals and behaviors meaningful to confirmation and customer experience.  Specific customer personas can enable understanding and capabilities to meet customer goals post-sale.  Implementation and customer support teams can benefit immensely from personas designed specifically for their roles.
5. Brand Behavior: brand management is emerging out of the shadows, as a competency B2B companies have to get right today.  Fulfilling the brand promise consistently is one of the hardest jobs of marketing and an organization as a whole.  Customers and buyers have different goals, behaviors, and beliefs, which surround brands.  The goal here is to convert customer personas into brand persona advocates.

A recommendation for forward-thinking marketing and sales leaders is to begin thinking in terms of the Persona Buying Cycle™ versus a singular focus on a buyer persona.  One certainty is the buyer’s journey not only begins before buyers think of themselves as a buyer, but also extends beyond the purchase.  Having a common visual and story of how buyer’s goals and behaviors change throughout the buying cycle is compelling.   We are also seeing activities, functions, and roles widen in marketing and sales in response to changing buying behaviors.  The Persona Buying Cycle™ is a natural extension to address both of these developments.

Positive Outcomes

Creating B2B personas through the lenses of a Persona Buying Cycle™ help bring these positive outcomes:

• • Make personas relevant throughout the major touchpoints of the end-to-end buyer’s journey
  • Make personas more practical to each functional team interacting with audiences, buyers, and customers
  • Make demand generation, lead generation, opportunity management, and customer experience more effective
  • Provide a common communications platform for understanding buyers
  • Foster alignment between marketing and sales by mapping to specific buyer goals and behaviors

In a dozen years, we have seen the then straightforward buyer-seller dynamics become more complex.  How B2B views the use of personas, from a pragmatic standpoint, now must adapt.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to the Buyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• Marketing is in the Throes of a Buyer Revolution
• The Art of Buying

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle (tonyzambito.com)

In the pre-digital days there really wasn’t a need for brands to produce more than the ads that went on traditional media. Now they need to produce an almost constant stream of fresh content to keep up with digital channels and social media. For most companies it’s a pretty tall order because making content is a completely different business from what they know. And it gets even harder when so much of the content that they now need is video.

Since cheap bandwidth has made high-quality video so easy to get, people want more and more of it. Projections have video representing over 85% of all Internet traffic in a couple of years. So brands need to make lots of videos. The problem, of course, is not just the quantity, but how does a brand make videos that are good enough to stand out? While cameras and equipment are cheap and easy to get, creativity and know-how are still in short supply. Of course, what makes a video good is in the eye of the beholder, but most of us know bad video when we see it, and the last thing any brand needs is to be spreading bad videos.

So the challenge is for companies to put in place the capability to produce lots of “good” videos, consistently over time. The problem is that because the budgets are much smaller, it’s not like producing TV commercials, which brands have a lot of experience with. According to the 4A’s, the average cost to make a TV spot is over $300,000 -- but for video content, that may be your entire budget for the year.

The big question is -- do you try and do it in-house or hire pros? While you may need a lot of videos, you may not need enough to justify the large expense of hiring a full-time team. So another approach is to hire an in-house video producer whose job it is to put together freelance teams for each production. This is not a creative person, but a video project manager, and you still need to be doing enough work to justify a full-time person.

For most brands the answer is to hire pros. The advantage, of course, is the wide range of talent and capabilities you can access. The problem is how to keep the costs down. Most agencies focus on developing the creative, and then hire a production company for the execution. As a result, the costs mount quickly. Some TV production companies do creative, but their focus is really on the production and they are rarely able to develop the creative or the strategy for the video, which is critical. So that leaves companies and agencies that specialize in video content for digital channels.

The ideal is to have digital content strategy, plus creative, plus production under one roof. A company that can do all of that -- and that is set up to produce a lot of video content over time, cost-effectively -- has found the perfect solution. Of course, the videos still have to be good in the eye of the beholder, which to start with would be you.

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1 year? 6 months? 3 months?  How low can you go?

Join us as a top HR Director, Recruiter, VP of Sales and Agency Group Director debate just how short a job stint can be before it affects your career in Digital Media.

The Dos and Don’ts of Entertaining

Take a walk on the wild side with some of the best-known sales professionals on the digital party circuit as they give their “rules of the game.” Sellers of both sexes give their tried and true mantras for thriving and surviving during a long night out entertaining. Do flirt, don’t sleep; Do sip, don’t gulp; talk shop only if “shop” means late night karaoke. This panel could get crazy! We certainly hope so...

Entitlement is a God Given Right!

Sure to be an eye-opening conversation with four Millennials in their first job out of school.  See what a day in the life of the industry’s future is like first-hand as they navigate lunch and learns, pivot tables, CPMs and beer pong.  Is life like a Girls episode?  We will see.

Crowd-sourcing the Next Company.ly

Ever wonder where the witty and uniquely spelled digital company names come from?  So do we! In a Digital Media Conference first we’re going to use the crowd to come up with a name for a new Social Analytics / Entertainment company being started by three ex-Googlers and Facebookers. Bring your puns and feel free to use the following ideas to prime the pump:  Uber-likes -- “Order more likes than your competition.” SoVidMo (MoVidSo?) – “What’s next in Social Mobile Video.”

Buzzword Bingo

Shhhhhh – Keep this one to yourself as we get three of the industry’s biggest gadflies to pontificate on “What’s Next for Digital Media” while everyone in attendance gets a bingo card with the buzzwords du jour, unbeknownst to the panelists. The first person who gets “BINGO” will win an iPhone 6 (preordered, of course). Transparency? Big Data? Ninja? Freemium?  Bring it.

Of course these are a little over the top, but every good satire starts with a kernel of truth (or something to that effect).  If this does nothing but get a programming director to drop something a little out of the ordinary into their next conference then it’s a win in my book.

During a period when online publishers were already improvising monetization efforts to compensate for the rise of programmatic buying, mobile introduced yet another variable that would further complicate the situation, forcing a shift in focus. Already squeezing every last cent out of online CPM’s, mobile traffic immediately made its presence felt as online audiences were no longer restricted to a computer screen as a means of accessing their favorite digital content. As a result, mobile traffic began cannibalizing impressions from the desktop impressions, further impacting an already depleting bottom line. Digital publishers reliant on online advertising revenue were suddenly dealt with a brand new form of supply to figure out and monetize immediately, or face a slow death at the expense of mobile's rapid growth.

By properly understanding the psyche of the mobile user, and aligning approaches to meet what consumers demand, these basic mobile guidelines for publishers will not only help your properties produce a mobile experience that maximizes mobile audience engagement, but also the revenue stream that follows:

· Content is king, and this is especially true in mobile. When determining how to slice and dice online content for the mobile screen, hone in on the content that matters to your audience and make it compatible for their mobile viewing pleasure. For this content to be considered mobile compatible at least two requirements must be met. First, this content needs to be easily found and identified by the user upon initial visit and, second, it must be made native to the mobile screen. Simply shrinking pre-existing content, which then requires the mobile visitor to pinch and zoom to engage with information is a mobile property’s worst enemy. In fact, a recent study commissioned by Google found that 79% of mobile visitors that find a mobile site difficult to use would immediately leave to find a suitable replacement.

· Mobile is a “need to know now” medium. Unlike TV, Radio or PC, mobile users carry this Internet connected device with them at all times. This reality feeds our instincts for instant gratification, so it’s only natural that a mobile user is accustomed to immediately being able to access desired content or information. Within seconds, a mobile device can be leveraged to find the nearest food, access the latest sports scores, lookup tomorrow’s weather forecast, watch a trailer, or purchase movie tickets. To reproduce a successful mobile experience for your organic audience, their immediate asks must be met.

· Which is better, App or Mobile Optimized site? Depending on who you ask, there is an argument to be made for either as each format comes with an inherit set of benefits and limitations. When deciding on which to adopt, it is advised to let the content influence the decision-making. For example, apps are conducive to rich content experiences. Publishers with an audience who primarily consume video, music, images, and social media are more likely to reproduce a favorable mobile experience for their audience through an app. On the other hand, a well-designed mobile optimized site may be best suited for content that is research or task oriented. Whereas apps are largely utilized for consumption of media or leisurely browsing, mobile web audiences are typically on a mission in search of facts or specific information.

· Monetization of mobile is very possible. For most publishers reliant on ad revenue, low mobile CPM’s and ad fill rates are top concerns of this medium. That said, many publishers who find themselves in this situation can look to experience immediate gains by examining mobile monetization shortfalls and adjusting appropriately. For one, just because a site can be accessed from a mobile device does NOT make it mobile optimized. All too often I come across web based properties simply trying to milk their pre-existing ad demand by serving online formatted banners within mobile based viewing sessions. Plenty of mobile demand exists, but a "mobile first" ad serving infrastructure must be in place to start reaping these benefits.

Given that mobile traffic already accounts for 20% of all daily U.S. Internet traffic and, with sales of mobile devices also surpassing PCs, this shift in traffic from desktop to mobile is not destined to slow down anytime soon. For those ill-prepared to fully absorb this continual transition, the good news is that it’s not too late for publishers to adopt a successful mobile strategy, regardless if they are starting from scratch or purely looking to improve upon current framework.

From an SEO buyer’s perspective, it must be downright confusing and discouraging to obtain multiple quotes from SEO service providers that very clearly have differing price ranges and service methodologies, but not so clearly defined differentiating skill sets and experience.

So sellers attempt to make it easier for buyers to understand SEO proposals in order to ultimately get to a closed deal - a signature on a contract. In the meantime, are they undermining their own profession and setting themselves up for failure by setting unrealistic expectations with clients?

Or are SEO clients being unrealistic in their expectations of SEO results in the short term versus the long term, leading SEO service providers to drastic measures that may ultimately result in the client’s web presence being penalized in organic search? Or even results in the client quitting or not paying?

This blog post is for both buyers and sellers of SEO services in hopes that 2013 will be the year of equilibrium for SEO. The year that SEO is finally regarded for what it is – extremely important in the digital marketing mix; a long-term online strategy that is based on strong, optimized content published and distributed across the entire web presence proving relevance and authority.

The four SEO selling and buying tricks described below produce unachievable expectations and create disequilibrium in the SEO services market. When these tricks are practiced by either the buyer or the seller the economics of SEO fail, because the time and effort required to meet SEO expectations and results will not match.

1. Promises of a #1 Search Position

The trick of selling the promise of a #1 Search Position as well as clients buying the promise has been around for quite a while. It still surprises me, especially with all the algorithm changes that have occurred recently, when I see this assurance in online advertisements or on an SEO agency’s home page.

Buyers, if an SEO agency promises a #1 Search Position for a keyword, exercise caution. Unless you are Wikipedia, a #1 Search Position cannot be guaranteed. Buyers need to understand that organic search positions are produced based on relevancy and authority of content around a keyword. There are numerous, uncontrollable, external factors and competition around a single keyword - no one, not even Google, can guarantee organic search position.

Read: The Five Forces of Keyword Competition Framework.

Sellers of SEO services, if your team is able to consistently deliver a #1 Search Position for a keyword, can that position be maintained over the long run, is it a highly converting organic search term, or is it perhaps not even searched on?

2. Promises of Increased Sales from SEO

The promise of increased sales as a result of SEO efforts is only possible if the SEO agency has complete control over the client’s sales processes (e.g. sales funneling, pipeline structure and reporting, sales team, commissions, etc.) and the SEO agency has sales consulting expertise on staff.

Sellers of SEO services beware… how do you even know there’s a market for what your client is selling? You may be able to improve their web presence for organic search conversions, but how do you even know their products or services are in demand and the processes around selling those products or services are efficient and proven?

Buyers of SEO, if increased sales are a requirement for your business, consider hiring a sales process consultant rather than an SEO professional whose actual task it is to improve your web presence visibility in the search engines for highly converting keywords.

3. Selling and Buying SEO Services Without Any Mention of Content Marketing

The outcome of Google’s massive algorithm changes over the past two years is that it takes really great, fresh, optimized content produced on a regular schedule to convince Google that the source is relevant and authoritative and should therefore be returned as a search result. This takes a lot of commitment, work and a strong focus on content marketing.

SEO (including the building of backlinks and the creation of social signals) requires a content marketing strategy. In fact, it is impossible to execute on SEO without one. Buyers’ expectations of SEO services will be better met if they also buy into a content marketing strategy.

SEO will also have a longer-term effect on a web presence in organic search when more quality, optimized content is produced.

The lack of a content marketing strategy will leave the SEO seller with insufficient content to work with to positively impact organic search position and the buyer with unmet expectations about SEO in general.

4. Selling and Buying SEO Services Without Any Mention of Social Media

Similar to #3, SEO agencies that are not yet factoring social networks, social media and social signaling into their SEO services methodology are doing their clients a disservice.

A blatant note to both buyers and sellers of SEO services: a year ago, Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, said, “The social signal, the people you ‘hang with’ is actually a ranking signal.” (December 2011).

In 2011, Matt Cutts was asked by an SEO Agency what three things should be included in your SEO strategy, and one of the three items he suggested was, “think about social media marketing … a lot of people think SEO versus social media marketing, and a lot of the time it makes sense to keep a holistic view.”

SEO results will be better gained and expectations better met when an entire web presence is optimized for organic search. This means distributing optimized content across the web presence to be socialized and shared, thus increasing relevance and authority for your audience.

It got me thinking – what do I tell my team on an ongoing basis, how do I guide my new sellers and what is the one thing I would share with anyone starting out in media sales.  What’s the one nugget?  While answering my own question I thought I’d sample some of my friends and peers on the sales side who have been selling & managing in the space for 7+ years.   I’m glad I did.  Very good sales insight and advice from people who have been doing it since it was banners and text links (over 90 years collective experience in the New York market).

If you could give a new media seller one piece of advice what would it be?

“Be yourself. Don't try and emulate an older executive and how they did it, build relationships that last, building them naturally...Rome was not built in a day."

“When setting up meetings bring ideas and concepts to the table that show you have put time into learning about their prospective client BEFORE the meeting.  Bring something unique that identifies a need and provides a solution or answer to that need.   Make the time spent valuable for those attending and don’t go on meetings just for the sake of hitting a weekly quota/KPI.  If you aren't working for a company that’s capable of producing unique and fresh ideas to share at your meeting then find a new job because wasting people’s time at a meeting will reflect negatively on your own personal brand as a sales person and will jeopardize future meetings when you actually have something worthwhile to share with a client or prospect”

“Have a point of view, stand for something. If you are asking for a minute of a busy clients time, come prepared with knowledge of what they do and how you can help. Never start a relationship by asking what they are up to. Know their business in and out before the first meeting.”

“Relationships Matter.  Treat your relationships like gold.  We all 'grow up' together in this industry and you never know who will be the next head of an account or an agency!  Agencies/Clients alike get bombarded with so many calls/emails every day from publishers so being able to separate yourself from that clutter is like gold.  Bottom line is that 99% of us are all selling essentially the same thing and people buy from people they like and trust...”

“Believe In What You're Selling.  Don't just come in with every product offering your company has to offer, bring only those that truly make sense for your client into that meeting.  If you have conviction that what you are presenting absolutely fits in with the strategy they've shared with you, that will shine through and your credibility will go way up (vs the salesperson that somehow has the 'perfect offering' every time he/she comes in).”

After reading these I find myself remembering a recent sales call where I might have veered a little too far in the “everything in the toolbox” pitch.  It’s this type of feedback, knowledge and peer interaction that reminds me just how important it is to build, maintain and grow relationships on both sides of the media business.

A Special thanks to Jordan Grossman, Brian Tucker, Eric Shoicket, Brian Wallace and Keith Hernandez for their input – some of the best in the business.

Be it a factor of too many companies chasing the same digital budget, the almost inhumane time-constraints on buying teams, or a lack of resources all around, it feels like there’s a communication problem at the end of the sales / RFP / proposal process in digital media.

One common topic that usually comes up over a casual lunch or happy hour is the lack of business etiquette or manners from both sides of the sales aisle when it comes to the final part of the proposal process. The buyer perspective is something like this:  “An RFP is not a promise of business, I’m sorry you didn’t make the plan this time – just wasn’t a fit - but if you continue to hound me and fire emails into the client there likely won’t be a next time.”  The seller perspective is generally looking for more insight:  “Just give it to me straight – did we or didn’t we make it?  If not, can I have feedback a little more detailed than ‘Budget cuts’ or ‘Change in Direction’?”

A thread recently popped up on SellerCrowd asking for “Things that media planners say.” Here are a few entertaining (or sad, depending on where you sit) responses:

-       Sucré:  “We'll reach out if we see a fit!”

-       Midas:  "We are going with preferred partners"

-       Cervantes:  "Thanks for the great lunch, but how about next time we do a helicopter tour of Manhattan for the team? Another vendor did that for another team here and it sounds fun!" That was before they spent any money with me, too...”

-       Parsley:  “My favorite response...NOTHING!”

-       Homer:  “I only answered the phone because I didn't recognize your number on caller ID, but now that we're talking, I have to go because I have a client conference call starting now. Give me a call back this afternoon and we can talk”

-       Shallots:  “After asking for availability for an in-person meeting I received the following one line as reply..."Those weeks will be tough, apologies"

These are six from a total of 40 responses. That’s right, 40.

And to keep it a level playing field, I reached out to some friends on the Agency side to get the other perspective:  Things reps do, but shouldn’t:

-       Telling us that they have spoken to the client about a program, and that the client is super excited about it and wants to move forward, when they have not spoken to anyone on the client side at all

-       Playing the lowly salesman unable to meet a quota card

-       Upon hearing the news they didn’t make the plan, saying:  “You know everyone in your content vertical is running with us except you all”

-       I once had a rep I thought was a friend and didn't make the plan.  I knew his inventory was tight so I emailed him an informal one off to let him know he wasn't on the plan. He then forwarded it to my director and the client even though in my email I said I would follow up with further rationale.

-       When they get my name wrong – really wrong as in “Hey Tiffany”, um, it’s Elizabeth, thanks though.

And this story deserves a spot all its own:

“I was extremely busy as an assistant planner, and was working on putting together a plan recommendation and hadn’t gotten back to a rep on an RFP they had sent a week earlier.  I was sitting at my desk when all of a sudden, a person in a monkey suit approached me and started singing a song and doing a dance.  As this was happening, the entire office was curious to know what was going on and crowded around the dancing monkey.  I was totally confused by this monkey, until he handed me a note with a banana – it read “you’re bananas if you don’t work with us”.  I supposed after several attempts at emailing and calling me, the rep thought this was a good way to reach me.  Needless to say, he never got my business again.”

I’d like to propose an informal media sales code, which boils down to a combination of communication and manners.  As sellers, let’s pick up the professionalism and manners, and buyers, please communicate the good, the bad and the ugly with us.  And speaking directly from experience to the Sellers out there – In an industry where a 40% close rate is hall of fame material, you’re not going to make every plan you submit a proposal on.  Don’t take it personally and be ready for the next time you’re up to bat.

A special thanks to my friends on the agency side who shared their stories.

It’s about time that digital marketers learn how to be more real.  Well, more real-time. Just like Darwin said, it’s not about being the biggest, or the smartest, it’s about responding fast.

Digital marketers are clamoring to leverage social media data and real-time marketing technologies to understand consumer attitudes and interests, but listening and responding on a traditional media cycle is too slow. A four-week reaction time is too late to leverage anything that happens. Listening and media buying need to happen together, in real time.

How many times have you noticed the same exact video or funny picture (most likely of a cat or wedding proposal) being shared by a few of your friends on Facebook? Then at dinner when you wanted to share this funny piece of content, alas, you realize that everyone around the table already saw it? That’s how fast content moves around the web, Pinterest “pins” are being shared on Facebook, Tumblr posts are being retweeted on Twitter and many pieces of content get their 15 minutes of fame. Internet fame is temporary; people flock from one meme or trend to another within hours and from one social network to another within minutes.

But it’s not only memes that spread like wildfire across the web; it’s also news, opinions, and other worldly topics and discussions. Everyone has their own micro-community they live in – tech, sports, cars, cooking, motherhood. News spreads. And fast. 24/7. Those who care about it will know about it. In this environment, brands need to be agile. How can they connect with their audience in the moment they care the most (or at least just care)?

To understand just how fast a topic can emerge and recede online, take the recent example of the release of a new trailer for the hit game Call of Duty [see graph below].  The Trailer's announcement on May 1st was greeted with an immediate surge of interest and discussion on Twitter.  Within less than 24 hours, the conversation shifted from Twitter to a high level of comment activity on YouTube.  In real time, users shifted their behavior from a discovery platform in Twitter, to a viewing and discussion platform in YouTube.  Even more compelling is the fact that the topic almost entirely receded in less than 48 hours.  In a total arc of just 72 hours, a compelling piece of content was discovered, consumed, and discarded.

So what tools are available to help marketers crack the real-time nut?  Technology companies like Baynote and SocialFlow, for example, help marketers make decisions about what content to release and when based on their followers’ real-time conversations.  Companies like Motista and WiseWindow gather social media data to analyze real-time trends around brands and products.

Although, often, it takes more than available tools and technologies, digital marketers need to shift their way of thinking and campaign strategies to reflect how quickly interests shift online. They need to listen and move in real-time.

To paraphrase Darwin, it’s about being responsive. And fast. Really, really fast.

© All Rights Reserved I-5 Design and Manufacturer

This is part 4 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer-based modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

When it comes to the SMB segment and the multiple sub-markets, it is just a plain fact that you cannot be everywhere. We addressed the segmentation thought process crucial for buyer-based marketing to the SMB segment in the previous article, Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing, as a means to know where to have a presence. Therein lays the new buyer realities of today. Having a presence that creates a gravitational pull of SMB buyers towards your organization is the new realty of mastering the SMB challenge.

SMB marketing and sales began to become more than just an afterthought in the early ‘90’s through the early 2000's. Considerable investments were made in establishing inside sales organizations and in outbound marketing activities specifically to reach the SMB base of customers and prospective buyers. Newly created inside sales organizations endured the trials and tribulations of field sales entrenched infrastructure as well as the ownership battle of the mid-size customer gray area. Marketing discovered that outbound tools for inside sales and for marketing to the SMB segment varied greatly from that of a focus on large field accounts.

In a span of 5-7 years we find ourselves in a drastically different world. The notion of reaching buyers is becoming a huge hurdle to climb for those wedded to predominantly outbound activities related to inside sales. As mentioned, establishing an inside sales function can be a sizable investment. The Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 today find themselves with inside sales units loaded with personnel, technology, software, and etc. that were installed and aimed at outbound efforts. What we now have is the challenge of turning on a dime to repurpose inside sales and marketing support to at least gain balance in inbound marketing while succeeding at a level of outbound demand generation as well.

This has more to do with transformation shifts in buyer behaviors with new technologies being the driving force behind these changes. What is profound is that this is more than the labels of the elusive, invisible, or buyer 2.0. No, they didn’t go anywhere and they are not hiding. Nor, should we be of the mind that buyers are now just empowered – as if sellers gave them the empowerment. Buyers today - with SMB buyers a significant part of this picture - are creating new ways of working and conducting business. Here’s the smell the coffee moment for sellers: SMB buyers, in addition to larger accounts, are creating a new world of buyer-driven economies whereby as sellers - if you do not fit or adapt – it is a world in which you will not be participating within.

While I may be seemingly digressing here, I do so to make a very salient point. SMB buyers are adapting new technologies in the entrepreneurial fashion they have started their business with in the first place. Unburdened by large scale infrastructures, they can see how to make new uses of technologies nimbly and drive new ways of conducting business as well as expand their own customer bases. SMB businesses, not so surprisingly, may be surpassing larger enterprises in their adoption of new technologies for interacting with buyers.

What Does This All Mean?

If you are part of a larger enterprise marketing to SMB buyers, what this all points to is a higher stakes challenge. Expectations on buyer experience are being renewed at a constant rate for the reasons mentioned above. Many of today’s new technologies, which for the most part had their original invention in non-business pursuits, have balanced the equation. While larger enterprises enjoyed an advantage in acquiring newer technologies over that of SMB businesses, this may no longer be true. In fact, the opposite in many cases may be true with SMB businesses able to leap frog into newer technologies as cost factors continue to be driven lower.

With this being the case, larger enterprises need to focus on creating seamless buyer-based experiences that allow SMB businesses to act quickly, make choices, and do so in the channels they prefer. This applies to both inbound and outbound efforts. A key focus for inbound efforts is that of enriching the buyer experience. Darren Pleasance, a Principal with McKinsey & Company, recently covered this topic in an excellent article entitled, Serious about SMB experience? Focus on your web site, on McKinsey's Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum site. Darren mentions the importance of the web site experience, providing the ability to buy seamlessly through multiple channels, and investing in post-purchase experiences as keys to success in the SMB segment. All of these contributing to enriched buyer experiences. The core of SMB buyer-based marketing and selling will not only be the web site as Darren articulates, but I believe the totality of the buyer experience now becoming the driving force behind how SMB buyers choose.

This brings us back to outbound. Does this mean inside sales and other outbound activities will simply go away? Far from it I believe. A fundamental shift however needs to take place in how organizations view and orient their outbound efforts such as inside sales. This shift relates to transforming from a tools-based approach to a buyer-based experience approach. Here’s the voice of one SMB business executive articulating this point:

“The thing that kills you is that you get what you need from the web site but contacting them directly is a whole different matter. It’s as if they are clueless that I may have visited their site and got information to review. On top of that, I get calls from their people saying they are my account manager. Really? Then how come they don’t know that I talked to someone in their company already?”

This exemplifies what happens when organizations fail to connect their inbound activities with outbound activities in SMB buyer-based marketing and selling. On the other hand, connecting the two tightly enriches the experience as this SMB business owner says:

“I was really impressed to be honest. I went on the site and found a few items I wanted to read so downloaded them. I got a call from the company; his name was Steve, first acknowledging that I had downloaded the papers and then asking if I had questions. We wound up having a discussion on some of things we’ve been working on. Wasn’t pushy or anything like that.”

To create impressive buyer experiences, this integration of inbound and outbound cannot be ignored. While the shiny object these days is inbound and the incessant promotion of content marketing, for some products and services, the ultimate deciding factor will continue to come down to the buyer conversation taking place. One thing we can count on is that more and more SMB buyers today come to table ready for a conversation – are you?

Next Up: Closing the deal in SMB with Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• Channeling Buyer-Based Experiences in SMB (buyerology.com)

Buyer Persona © All Rights Reserved Cristian Cardenas

The sheer size of the SMB makes for a daunting task for any organization intent on marketing to the SMB segment. When you consider some Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 organizations can have in the 10’s or 100’s of thousands of companies in their customer bases, the expression of zeroing in on your target buyer can sound near impossible. It is a dilemma however that cannot be ignored. The U.S. Small business Administration estimates that the SMB segment accounts for better than 98% of all businesses in the United States.

In the previous article in this series, How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer, I touched upon the means to get to know the SMB buyer. Marketing to the SMB segment and buyers should first start with visiting the segmentation issue a little deeper. There have been many means tried for SMB segmentation whether it is by size, type, vertical, products, solutions, and etc. To some degree, they have helped to manage the challenge of bringing a tighter focus to the SMB segment and its’ sub-market segments. Analytics of your SMB customer database is like fighting numbers with numbers – you can contain the data but without behavioral insight – you will not be able to get inside them. The call to action now is for organizations to bring more science and evolution to the challenge. Why? Because buyers in general have changed so rapidly in the last three years alone that gaining a competitive edge has become much more complex.

Getting Descriptive

Going beyond conventional methods of segmenting the SMB customer base means getting more descriptive about how SMB buyers behave and how goals drive their behaviors. This includes getting a good sense about their Buyergraphics – their attitudes, perceptions, values, information needs, and more. The attempt here is to answer some tough questions that help to bring more focus to an SMB strategy:

Who are our best customers in the SMB segments and why?

In what SMB sub-market segments are our best customers?

Who are our best prospects and in which SMB sub-market segment are they?

What are the best means of engaging our best SMB customers and best SMB prospects?

Descriptive buyer modeling helps you to get answers to these questions and gives you insight into the data as well. In the previous article I stressed the importance of buyer modeling to help get to know your SMB buyers. Modeling buyers and portraying them via buyer personas and scenarios helps you get to the first two questions mentioned. To help round out the SMB buyer picture, learning their attitudes towards your product, service, or technology and how these attitudes drive information needs help to get deeply descriptive. There are three specific buyer modeling efforts that can help shed light on the attitudes and goals driving SMB buyer behavior and help inform buyer-based marketing strategies:

Buyer Mental Models: collecting a picture of SMB buyer attitudes, perceptions, and goals that influence buying decisions can be a descriptive means for segmenting as well as buyer-based communicating. For example if your product technology is getting high marks for user-friendliness and there is strong attitudinal resistance to perceived complex technology in 3 out 5 identified sub-markets, then creating buyer-based marketing strategies around this mental model is one way of segmenting.

Buyer Content Models: identifying the information needs and goals of buyers today extends well beyond just the concept of content marketing. With the rise of SMB sub-market segments engaging not only in new technologies but forming new ecosystem, the information needs of SMB buyers are vastly different and changing rapidly. Carrying the above example further, the information needs of the 3 sub-markets may vary differently in context and how information is shared amongst both suppliers and partners. More and more, organizations will need to think context-based marketing and context-based selling as opposed to just content-based marketing. While this will apply to all types of businesses, I believe this will be especially true for the SMB markets.

Buyer Experience Models: how SMB buyers view, perceive, and expect experience is undergoing transformative gyrations. The way SMB buyers experience inbound marketing and other newer technology-based marketing and sales is certain to be different than larger enterprises. There are many more what I call Buyer Moment of Truth in SMB that are frankly invisible to marketers and sellers today. Not identifying where these moments of truth are can be a significant disadvantage in laying out both inbound and outbound marketing and sales strategies. Understanding experiences is important since they are instrumental in shaping attitudes, perceptions, and perceived values. For the examples mentioned, previous experiences with technology not yet cleared of bugs may have created entrenched resistance to both new and complex. Reshaping thinking around experience can then become an important strategy.

Modeling SMB buyers to a deeper level and around the three modeling efforts mentioned gets organizations closer to a true buyer-based marketing effort. In addition, it gives more robust ability to segment SMB by behavior and context. Buyer-based marketing can be most effective when it addresses how buyers behave and understanding the context of why they make purchase decisions.

Informed with behavioral buyergraphics that hone in on buyer behaviors and how they are influenced by mental models, information needs, and experience can be a powerful way to resonate with SMB buyers. Getting at the heart of their contextual environments, which will vary by sub-market segments, gives the insight needed to develop specific buyer-based marketing strategies that defies one-size fits all. When it comes to the dilemma of how to make sense of thousands of SMB customers and prospects, taking these steps eliminates wasteful guessing and pinpoints buyer-based marketing at the right buyer, the right sub-market, the right context, and the right time.

Next Up: Connect With SMB Buyer Through Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Use Buyer-Based Selling To Engage The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (blogs.imediaconnection.com)

©All rights Reserved Peter Schofield

This is part 2 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

In the first article of this series, we visited two new realities. One, that many Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 organizations are turning a focused eye towards growing their SMB customer and revenue base. With revenue growth potential shrinking in larger strategic accounts due to budget and pricing pressures, many are dedicating attention and resources with more determination than in the past. The second reality is that they are finding a very different buyer this time around than in the past. Simply put, SMB buyers are more social, more sophisticated, more connected, and are transforming their buying behaviors at an accelerated pace. New technologies opening their world to advantages only once afforded to large enterprises.

Waking up to these new realities has set up another challenge for executive leaders. That is of how to get to know the new SMB buyer. Here’s how one sales executive put this to me recently:

“One of the things we realized is that we have got to get to know our SMB customers. If you keep in mind that we haven’t really dedicated much resource to this area, then we are lacking in knowledge per se’. We’ve got to find out what is important to them versus just giving them some generic sales pitch.”

This is a very salient point for many organizations tend to view the SMB as a whole segment in of itself. The reality is that the SMB is highly fragmented and consists of many layers of sub-market segments. Getting to know what makes SMB buyers tick is, by no means, as easy as saying this is your SMB buyer. Layer on top of this the enormous changes in buyer behavior, the invisibility of SMB buyers in their sourcing for information, and new empowering technologies makes this endeavor a higher mountain to climb. It is no wonder many executives are walking out of their meetings where SMB growth is identified as a top priority saying – now what?

Getting To Know The New SMB Buyer

The first tough challenge is realizing that viewing the SMB as a single market and that rudimentary means of segmenting by employee size and revenue figures are not going to result in the understanding needed. While vertical segmentation is of significant help, what is paramount is knowledge of how these sub-markets and buyers within behave. What are steps that executives can take to understand the new SMB buyer?

Buyer Research: This has to be a clear mission. Getting to know the new SMB buyer is going to take some level of buyer research. It is going to take the integrated approach of committing to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the full 360 degrees of the new SMB buyer.

Buyer Modeling: Depending on the degree of fragmentation in sub-markets, powerful buyer modeling can be an extensive exercise. However, one well-worth the upfront investment to get to know the new SMB buyer in ways that transforms efforts into an order of magnitude competitive advantage. There are several areas of modeling that by understanding them deeply, can make your organization relevant to buyers and core to their problem-solving:

Buyer Persona Modeling: What is important here is not to model the single archetypal buyer but to model the new levels of interactions buyers are having with newly formed ecosystems and networks. They may be SMB but they are growing exponentially and organically by creating new ecosystems. Buyer persona modeling represents composite archetypes based on behavioral research with a focus on identifying critical goals that drive buyer behaviors.

Buyer Scenario Modeling: To get a handle on the problems SMB buyers face and what confronts them, modeling buying scenarios can give your marketing and sales teams insight into how to be relevant. Additionally, this gives you the ability to address fragmentation and identify sub-market segments that have the best optimal scenarios to be part of the SMB buyer’s solution.

Buyer Decision Modeling: How SMB buyers are making purchase decisions today is changing so fast and by sub-markets that not monitoring this aspect of a SMB strategy can put an organization behind the curve. While looking at the buyer decision journey can be fruitful, in my qualitative research I’ve noted how the new SMB buyers are adept at more ad-hoc decision-making. Furthermore, with the rise of ecosystems and networks, collaborative efforts in making purchase decisions are not so neatly streamlined. Newer technologies are also making purchase decisions more decentralized than ever – making fragmentation on this issue even more complex.

Buyer Value Modeling: SMB buyers’ value varies widely by sub-market segments. Gaining insight and modeling how these values operate in their day-to-day world can help you to tailor offerings and communications to fit specific sub-market segments. Depending on the industry and markets, values in the SMB take on a deeper emotive texture and can be a deciding factor in purchase decisions.

Avoid Big Data Trap

With the rise of big data, there will be a tendency to try and “cut the numbers” every which way to make sense of the SMB market challenge. When dealing with 5,000 SMB accounts to 150,000 SMB accounts, the tasks of getting to know these SMB buyers at a deeper level can look downright daunting. Analytics will play an important role towards reaching understanding. I also contend and advocate that qualitative and predictive buyer modeling is essential to integrate into the mix of discovering the new SMB buyer of today. Buyer behavior within the SMB world is rapidly changing. A reasonable assumption can be made that in some SMB sub-market segments it is changing at a faster pace than that of larger organizations.

The combined use of analytics and predictive buyer modeling can yield an insightful picture into how these new behaviors translate into uncovering why buyers make purchase decisions. And, get closer to the holy grail of uncovering the reasons why they would change.

Next Up: The Importance of Buyer-Based Marketing in SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• 4 Ways the Power of Buyer Choice Will Transform Business Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)

Do Your Research Before You Pick Up The Phone © All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 1 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of target buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

As we continue to come out of the deep freeze over the last few years, we are beginning to see encouraging signs of an economic recovery. However, the purse strings are still drawn tight and new patterns of buying has created an atmosphere of even more exacting pricing pressures from enterprise-wide level buyers and accounts. This means less room for revenue growth to come directly from the fabled 20-30 percent of large customers who typically have made up 70-80 percent of total revenues. This is how a VP of Sales in the software industry put it to me recently in my research:

“Here is what it looks like…we are actually selling more of our product into our larger accounts than ever before….but…over the last three years we've faced stiffer competition that has driven our pricing down. So the net-net has been that we are just holding on as best we can to these larger accounts. Another words, we are not getting significant real revenue growth from them.”

It is highly likely that this refrain is being repeated across many Fortune 1000, Global 2000, and even Inc. 500 listed companies across the globe. With revenue growth opportunities shrinking among their large accounts, senior leaders in these organizations are turning a focused eye towards the highly sought after small and mid-size business segment. For instance, in the highly compettive world of IT Products and Services, both HP and IBM made substantial investments and strategic moves in 2011 to target the SMB segment. Challenging Dell and its' low cost entry strategy for small to mid-size businesses.

A New Challenge And A New Frontier

There is good reason for Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 companies to target revenue growth from the SMB segment. It is one of the fastest growing segments and traditionally has been coming out of a recession. It also has proven to be lucrative when you consider that actual contribution margin percentages are much richer per sale when compared to large accounts. It is little surprise that senior executives have shifted at least one eye towards expanding their SMB customer base and tapping into the revenue growth potential that can exists.

While targeting or at least accounting for the SMB segment is not a new idea to larger enterprises, this time around they are waking up to new buyer realities. Buyer behaviors continue to change rapidly and these new behaviors are associated with largely buyer-driven changes. What is confronting those wanting to achieve revenue growth from SMB buyers and companies is that they may know very little about these buyers and companies. How to market to SMB buyers and companies becoming one of the hot priority items showing up on the agenda of many large enterprise management meetings being held daily, weekly, or monthly. As one Senior VP of Sales and Markerting in IT pointed out to me recently:

“I am almost afraid to admit that we may have taken the SME (my notation: some executives refer to SMB as SME – small and mid-size enterprises) businesses for granted all these years. We never really moved beyond segmenting by employee size and revenue so we really don’t know a lot about SME’s as we should. It’s easy say you want to target them but planning how to target them is basically a whole new ball game for us.”

Because little knowledge may exist about SMB businesses and buyers, there are perhaps more assumptions being made about SMB than for larger accounts. Generalized perceptions and preconceived notions run rampant in the halls and meeting rooms of larger enterprises attempting to figure out how to market to SMB segments. There is what I call a “definition churn” that can happen when knowledge is found wanting – new definitions, classifications, segmentations, and etc. begin to appear every 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. Moving around 1,000’s of accounts and prospects in virtual databases to new buckets created for employee size, revenue size, product targets, and verticals.

Unprecedented Transformation Occurring

In the past, working with these definitions may have been sufficient. Looking ahead into the future - and the near future at that – these definitions alone will no doubt prove to be limiting and even detrimental to growth. We are experiencing an unprecedented transformation in the world of business with new buyer-driven economies, ecosystems, networks, and communications emerging constantly – making understanding of SMB buyers and companies that may have been attained even as little 3 to 5 years ago nearly obsolete.

For many large enterprise organizations that show up on the famed Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 lists, growing the SMB customer base may be their number one, or at least in the top five, priority. It is also, as a result of new buyer realities that are emerging, their number one challenge. To tackle both angles of this two-sided coin, gaining deeper layers of understanding about SMB buyers and companies will need to get on these same priority lists.

Next Up: Understanding New Buyer Realities In SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (customerthink.com)

Higher Grade Product Design Concept Models (Photo credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept)

This is part 5 and final article of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

How buyers make choices today, in large part driven by empowering new technologies, will transform how B2B businesses will view buyers as well as redefine what is meant by business marketing. The rigid funnel will no longer serve as a workable means of communicating unique views of buyers and their buying behaviors. This not to say that buyer processes, stages, and steps are no longer relevant but to highlight that buyers today no longer make choices neatly in the paradigm of the funnel. A rigid funnel view, whether it is drawn up horizontal or vertical, cannot provide the orbital view of choices being made continuously.

There are four ways that new buyer choice dynamics will transform the practice of business marketing and alter the view of what practices are relevant:

Predictive Buyer Modeling And Intelligence

As we covered, many B2B businesses are wrestling with the unknown and the invisible. B2B buyers are remaining invisible in their behaviors associated with exploring as well as establishing new networks of participants in decision-making. There will be a rise in the use of buyer modeling techniques as well as integrating the use of buyer intelligence, predictive analytics, and the illuminating aspects of predictive buyer modeling. The changes underway in buyer behavior will cause B2B business marketing to extend well beyond conventional buyer profiling as well as simplistic buyer persona creating for demand generation.

Reorient From Business Marketing Teams to Buyer Driven Marketing Teams

Traditional business marketing has been historically put together teams that are seller driven and narrowly funnel focused. The single buyer model view narrowly shared across all channels. Leaders in B2B marketing and sales will soon have to migrate towards buyer segment teams that are focused on activities that are focused on the buyer’s entire brand and buyer experience. We are beginning to see leading organizations, such as GE, move towards aligning their organizations to industry buyer segment teams focused on deeper understanding and alignment with buyers.

Create Orbital Match With Buyers

B2B is becoming more complex with every passing month. When informed with deep buyer intelligence, business marketing can begin to align to the continuous orbital loop of what confronts buyers and how they make choices. The new role of business marketing is to pull buyers into an orbital loop that mirrors their own and enables choices that are buyer driven. The new business marketing strategy is to create the gravitational pull that buyers feel and are drawn to because it aligns with their own orbital loops. Conversely, how can your organization get close to the buyer’s own gravitational pull and be drawn into their orbital loop? This is a departure from the seller driven and narrow funnel view of push messaging. Another way of positioning this concept in simple terms is this: either your B2B business becomes part of the orbital loop or you can watch it from afar with a telescope – and be out of the loop.

Total Brand and Buyer Experience

Business marketing today can take a strong leadership role in organizations by transforming itself to an orientation around the buyer. Historically, in the seller driven and narrow funnel view world, business marketing has been positioned as the conveyers of getting information in front of buyers. Producing material that buyers could read, provide messaging to sales, and putting together promotional programs with the aim to get sellers to sell harder. My intuitive guess is that in the world of business marketing, this positioning still exists in a large majority of B2B organizations – perhaps trapped within the label of marketing communications. To influence corporate strategy and decision-making, business marketing must now become the conveyors of buyer intelligence and influencing organizations to orient around the buyer. Conveying that what counts is the total brand and buyer experience and that business marketing’s role is to help create these experiences for buyers.

Business marketing today, by making these four ways the cornerstone of transformation, can enhance their leadership role in organizations. Orienting businesses around the understanding of buyer choices being made in a new complex buyer driven world. This is no easy challenge yet one that business marketing must take up. It must demonstrate that it understands buyers deeply and that a designed focus on the total brand and buyer experience is the new business marketing strategy. It is time for business marketing to come out of the literature closet and lead.

(This 5 part series has been compiled into an eBook entitled, A Matter of Choice: How B2B Buyers Choose in Today’s Complex Markets, to make for easy reading and sharing. Click on the hyperlinked title to receive.)

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (buyerology.com)
• The Buyerology of the Buyer: How B2B Leaders Respond to the Psychology of Buyer Choice (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)

© All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 3 of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

When it comes to understanding the psychology of the buyer, much has been done in the world of B2C to get inside the mind of consumers to understand buying choices and preferences. For B2B, it has been harder to translate B2C research dynamics into ways that would make the psychology of B2B buyers more readily understood. However, what we do know is that there is an increasing consumerization effect happening in B2B buying whereby B2B buyers have the same desires for more experiential purchasing as opposed to a heavy emphasis on sterile transactions.

In part 2 of this series, I discussed the Buyer Orbit and the elements of the Buyer Choice Model. Each of these now filled with more psychological aspects related to why B2B buyers buy. This comes with many implications for B2B leaders to not only understand new buyer psychology but to also shift business models, operations, strategies, and interactions that transforms the way they connect with B2B buyers. In part 3, let us look at how B2B leaders are responding to new buyer psychology in relations to the elements of the buyer choice model.

Psychology of Buyer Choice

Understanding buyer choice has many implications for B2B strategies and tactics – whether they are focused on demand generation, content marketing, or selling approaches. Addressing new buyer psychology and buyer choice paradigms, within elements of buyer choice modeling, can be transformational:

Explore

With more and more buyers mapping out exploration due to the proliferation of content and information channels, a side effect of B2B businesses scrambling to be noticed in the 50% to 70% window of buyers remaining anonymous, B2B businesses are considering the implications of buyers taking deliberate action to map out their exploration.

What this means: predicting and modeling how buyers map and begin their exploring as well as what forms of navigation they usually take specific to their industry.

How to respond: devote more resources to qualitative investigative means, such as contextual interviewing and ethnographic research, to uncover how buyers begin their efforts to explore and how they are dealing with content proliferation.

Network

As elaborated upon recently, the single buyer model is no longer sufficient and more and more B2B buyers operate from the new buying model of working within ecosystems and relying on network participation. Codependency is here to stay and B2B businesses must adapt.

What this means: reexamine how buyers are viewed internally and what forms of outmoded approaches may be resulting in missed opportunities.

How to respond: use various forms of B2B buyer research and begin working with buyers to understand important ecosystem and network drivers for their business and industries. Incorporate important ecosystem views into strategy and organizational infrastructure.

Decide

The art and science of decision-making is becoming more complex each year. An increasing number of variables are being introduced into decision-making such as globalization, uncertainty, ecosystem considerations, and more – shifting how buying is taking place.

What this means: how buyers are buying today is shifting dramatically and B2B businesses need to understand the new rules of decision-making, in addition to the buyer decision journey, that are being implemented for purchase decisions.

How to respond: shift internal focus to understanding new rules affecting decision-making, acquired through the mix of analytics and qualitative insight, and support how buyers are making purchase decisions.

Buy

Buying today, as mentioned in part 2, is a higher stakes game for many businesses today. The margin for costly mistakes is the slimmest in decades. The extent of poor choices can have disastrous effect on many aspects of a business. Understanding high stakes motivations enables a focus on why B2B buyers buy.

What this means: B2B leaders must not confuse how buyers buy with why buyers buy. The focus here is on understanding the new buyer psychology in terms of their collective attitudes, goals, beliefs, perceptions, and drivers. This new collection of mental models are changing each time new variables, such as new technologies, are introduced.

How to respond: getting an understanding of buyer mental models through qualitative research efforts will become more crucial each year as buyer psychology continues to shift.

Relate

With higher stakes involved in decision-making and purchases today, B2B buyers seek more assurances post-purchase than ever before. Unlike the emphasis on engagement in B2C post-purchase, the need for deeper ties relationally is affecting long-term loyalty.

What this means: shifting out of funnel thinking and viewing the entire buyer experience cycle is a new rule of B2B thinking today.

How to respond: post-purchase support and talent can no longer be an after-thought of organizational planning but be seen as the gateway to being included in newly formed ecosystems and networks by buyers.

What we are witnessing today is a marked shift from funnel-thinking to that of focusing on the total buyer experience that does not fit neatly into stages or step approach thinking. The new buyer psychology compels B2B businesses today to make the buyer the centerpiece of strategy and respond to the continuous loops of what confronts them (the buyer orbit) and the choices (buyer choice model) they must make.

Next up: Impact on Marketing and Sales

Follow @TonyZambito

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• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
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This is part 2 of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

Growth is getting harder and harder to come by. With this comes the realization that some of the embedded thinking about how to reach and market to buyers are not working well. In part 1 of this series we looked at how the funnel is facing a slow death and the limitations of so called funnel thinking. We are entering a new era of the buyer. Buyer behaviors are shifting yet we know only a fraction about this shift. One emerging insight is that of buyer choice. Simply stated, buyers are making multiple choices prior to as well as well after buying decisions.

Buyers Have Many Options. The floodgates have opened on channels, social media, old media, the Internet, and countless other ways to interact, explore, retrieve, and digest information in this new era of the buyer. With countless options available, buyers are making choices on where to start their exploring.

The Buyer At The Center Of Strategy, Marketing, And Sales. Conventional funnel thinking has a hard time doing this. A better way of stating this is that conventional strategy, marketing, and sales decisions are funneled through an old paradigm of the buyer where marketing and sales held the information cards – cards used to target, sell, and persuade buyers. Today, buyers make the choice on which information cards they decide to deal. B2B leaders today must find ways to focus strategy on the buyer, the choices they make, and the experiences they have with their organizations.

Experience Determines Choice. A while back, I made a choice to attend a Broadway musical – of which I am a big fan. The pre-show experience and excitement was plenty of fun with a great dinner in New York. The musical started and about 20 minutes into the musical the dread began to overcome me. I knew this musical production was going to be – dreadful. We made the choice to leave at intermission and the choice didn’t ruin the entire experience of the evening but it sure changed it. We chose to find a jazz club and had a great time which meant cancelling out the plans we had after the show. Buyers today are taking experience cues well before the buyer decision journey and well after. The buyer experience cues they take-in alter their thinking about the choices they make. And they could be choices about whether to continue having an experience with your organizations – or – find another.

© All rights Reserved Buyerology

Buyer choice anchors five choice elements that can be thought of as continuously orbiting buyers today. A fundamental shift is happening here. In the conventional DNA of funnel thinking, we are accustomed to thinking that involves phases or steps. One phase ends and another phase begin. What I propose is something we can call the Buyer Orbit. This is meant to shift the thinking towards recognizing that buyers are continuously addressing goals, challenges, issues, uncertainty, and growth that are in a continuous orbital loop. This applies to buyer choice:

© All Rights Reserved Buyerology

Explore. As mentioned in part 1, funnel thinking usually started with attempts to make buyers aware of a product or solution. It is still rooted in the thinking of flashing attention-getting means before buyer’s eyes as well as push messaging outwards in the hopes of making buyers aware. Today, buyers are mapping out deliberate exploration prompted by the orbital loop of the goals and etc. that orbit them. Confronted with many choices, buyers are taking time to map out where to explore, how to explore, and etc.

Network. As buyers make progression towards less of a single buyer model to that of a world that includes ecosystems and open networks, buyers are making choices to interact with networks and different ecosystem players to collaborate on addressing the issues orbiting them.

Decide. The way buyers decide today is becoming increasingly complex. Choices are being made on such things as the rules for deciding, who is included, checking dependencies, and assessing impact. Buyers today no longer make decisions in a vacuum.

Buy. The actual buy choice has become a higher stakes game in the B2B world. Not only are the rules for deciding more complex, but there are more dependencies related to buying and potential impact as well. The experience element here is now more critical than ever because of the high stakes. Making the wrong choice, for example, on a software platform designed to measure quality of manufactured parts could have drastic affects downstream with OEMs and distribution.

Relate. The word – relate - has more applicability in a B2B context than say engage for example. The higher stakes involved means buyers needs an organization that can relate to the high stakes and a relational bond is being formed. In the example mentioned above, there may be many discussions before and after the buy choice to ensure that the software platform meets an intended goal. The ability for B2B companies to provide relational choices and experiences becomes an important factor. Does the company provide relational choices whether they are face-to-face, telephone, or complex networking technology that involves exchanging design ideas and specifications?

The new era of the buyer is resulting in a paradigm shift on what is required thinking about the buyer today. Letting go of funnel thinking is no easy task – especially when you strip away the hyperbole and promotion that can surround strategy, it is still very much about the funnel. Buyers today have many elements related to growth, goals, and uncertainty orbiting their world. Making choices as this orbital loop continuously impacts their world is changing the very nature of buyer behavior today. These changes are rocket propelled by a new world of hyper-connectivity and hyper-competition.

Next up: The Buyerology of the Buyer

Follow @TonyZambito

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IT Buying Process © All rights reserved by Kenny Madden

This is part 1 of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

Finding the keys that unlock improving revenue performance and achieving growth is becoming harder and harder as we go from a single buyer model to that of more interdependency among ecosystems and networks by B2B buyers. B2B marketing and sales is still predominantly tethered to traditional ideas, approaches, and systems that are being dragged into the modern era. While we have seen modifications, the idea of the traditional funnel is still at the core of many B2B organizations today. It matters little whether you keep it vertical or flip it sideways and make it horizontal – it is still suggesting a funnel that winnows down opportunities down to a “buy” decision.

As the modern era rages on with increasing speed where the Internet and Social Technologies are converging into new forms, the oversimplification of the funnel becomes more and more apparent. Simply put, buyers just don’t act or behave in that way anymore. Evidence suggesting that buyers are behaving well out of the norm of our conventional views of the funnel as well as the buying process is abundant from surveys. These behaviors cannot be represented in the view of a funnel. DemandGen, for example, reported that B2B buyers don’t talk to a sales rep until they’ve conducted independent research 77% of the time. There are plenty of surveys around showing buyers acting and behaving differently – yet – the willingness to snap the tether cord of the funnel doesn't appear readily apparent. It does beg the question of: what is going on?

I believe that is still an open question without an answer. We are about to see an uptick in Big Data being touted as the next Big Thing. Why? To figure out what’s going on. My thinking is that if this Big Data explosion is designed to tell us what’s going on within the confines of the funnel - then B2B organizations can find themselves in the untenable position of explaining why Big Data is not telling them anything. Here’s why: we will learn a lot about what buyers purchase and we will learn a lot about how they are purchasing - perhaps. What is missing is the most important question of all – why. And there are two very important components to the why question:

First, why are they buying and second, why are they making the choices they make.

Traditional marketing and sales, oriented towards the funnel, don’t answer these why questions very well. To get close, it may take years of piling on data after data to get a clue. This is a very expensive proposition for companies to take on today.

Despite the many super hyped concepts coming to the forefront attempting to address the 77% who are not getting a sales rep involved until much later, the funnel – whether vertical or horizontal or even cyclical – seems to be glossed over like a sacred cow. The language of these many new concepts is spoken through the prism of the funnel – still. For example, if we take an often used expression of the first part of a funnel – awareness – many of the new concepts are really talking about how to make awareness happen differently in the new social buyer era. But is that what’s really going on? I don’t believe so.

Before moving on to what I believe, let’s review limitations of funnel thinking against the new realities of today:

Buyers Explore vs. Become Aware. B2B buyers are less likely to become aware of solutions and more likely to explore and find them. And they are making significant choices during their exploring based on what they find. Unlike consumer purchases where there is an object of purchase desired – for example a HDTV – B2B buyers are making choices on which path they will invest more time hiking and exploring.

Buyers Are Part of Ecosystems and Networks. The age of the single buyer has come to a close in complex B2B environments. While there may be a target buyer per se’, they are increasingly dependent upon various ecosystem participants who are directly impacted by purchase decisions and have a voice in these decisions. The funnel is very limited outside the scope of the single buyer.

Buyers Just Don’t Make New Buys. In the complex realities of today, buyers are not repeating the new buy orientation of the funnel. There are many choices being made around how to modify different alternatives. In the age of just-in-time – and now in the age of real-time, buyers look ahead into the longevity of repurchase – or continuous supply that feeds the ecosystem with little disruption.

Buyer Views Extend Beyond Purchase. The funnel is based on the short-term view of making the sale and it is measured in quantities. In today’s environment, the funnel cannot accommodate the long term views buyers have on the overall buying experience and doesn’t account for many factors that happen well after the sale.

Given these limitations, I believe that companies today must attempt to understand buyer choices and adopt a different model. A Buyer Choice Model that begins to reflect buyer behavior and provides the language and terminology needed to understand why buyers choose as they do. It puts the buyer at the center of B2B marketing, sales, and service and reflects, more accurately, that buyers are making multiple choices throughout their actions as well as behaviors that ultimately lead to a purchase decision. But – it doesn’t stop there at the purchase decision. There is a continuous loop that extends beyond the purchase decision. The idea of buyer choice modeling is to understand choices that are being made in this continuous loop – so as not to be left out of the loop.

Next up: The elements of the Buyer Choice Model

Follow @TonyZambito

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The good news is that CMO tenure continues to rise. Spencer Stuart, the executive search consulting firm, in their study released early last year reported that average tenure rose to 42 months. Up from 35 months two years ago and up from 27 months in 2007. The bad news is that the CMO position still churns and remains one of the riskiest positions in corporate business. Additional bad news is that the rise is largely due to economic instability and CEO’s desire to stay the course during uncertain times according to Spencer Stuart. Not the best reason for a rise but nevertheless it presents opportunities for CMO’s to succeed in longer tenures.

Economic instability and uncertainty will remain constant variables I believe for the next two years. Compounding the complexity for CMO’s is the state of the buyer. Or, a better expression may be - the ever changing and unsettled state of the buyer. CMO’s can and should play an instrumental role in leading organizations out of economic instability and providing a clear picture of the state of their company’s buyers. There are several guiding ideas that CMO’s can consider to ensure not only a longer tenure but solidifying a leadership role:

Caught In A Spider Web

The CMO role is first and foremost one of leadership. Their role defined by the challenge of leading their respective organization and the company as a whole into the future of marketing to the new hyper-connected and hyper-networked buyer. The cautionary tale here is to avoid getting caught in the spider web of hype and tactics. The state of the new buyer has sprouted new buzz words, touted tactics, and channels all promising the chance to lift marketing up to higher levels. When uncertainty reigns, the temptation can be as alluring as rich chocolate to bite into these new tactical measures. Good CMO’s today will focus on setting the entire course as opposed to thinking about the dessert.

Spinning Wheel

CMO’s today must figure out how to keep the marketing wheel turning. Looking at what relevant spokes in the wheel will result in the right balance. Some of these spokes will come from internal while others may come from external. Sound assessments are needed to determine where it makes sense to bring in outside expertise to keep the wheel balanced and spinning. External spokes can come in the form of customers, partners, and consultants – all being brought together to help them navigate the risky and uncertain road ahead. Balancing expertise in new forms of marketing and direction providing is a skill that CMO’s can develop to ensure less churn.

The Vision Thing

For most organizations, CMO’s can shape the role of not only being the eyes and ears of customers and buyers today but also help to give vision of where they are likely to be in the future. CMO’s today can cause fundamental shifts in buyer understanding through the balance of quantitative predictive analytics and qualitative predictive buyer modeling. When combined, helping CMO’s to offer a vision of the future buyer and how their company can best respond.

Using A Periscope

CMO’s will need to rely on the use of customer and buyer insight to guide strategy planning and gain foresight. Taking care to realize insight gathering should be ongoing and not a static moment in time. Repeating the refrain of balance, endeavors must include balancing quantitative insight and analysis with that of qualitative insight and analysis. CMO’s will need to use these twin periscopes to look out above the turbulent waters and gain deep understanding about buyers that informs them where to find land where buyers reside.

Time For Good Behavior

In significant fashion, buyer behavior continues to be metamorphic as the heat of change rises each year. CMO’s can influence how their company connects with buyers with deep analysis and portrayals of buyers that extend beyond demographics and firmographics. Instead, focusing their sights on a more penetrating view of Business Buyergraphics aimed at understanding the purchasing behaviors of buyers as well as what tangible and intangible drivers are influencing these behaviors.

Getting All Techie

Understanding new technologies today, especially those related to digital, social, and Enterprise 2.0, remain an important function of the modern CMO. New technology can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. Some CMO’s, at least gleamed anecdotally, have had their tenure cut short by placing a big bet on implementing a new technology that turned into a sinkhole with little to show for it. Careful assessment can result in good choices whereby new enabling technology moves the needle forward. More profoundly, CMO’s of this era need to engage in the role of determining how introductions of external new technologies change buyer behaviors and what impact they have on their organization.

Don’t Forget Your Best Friend

It might be a good idea to get your office next door to that of the CSO and become fast friends. Neither can exist without the other in today’s complex world where there is elusive understanding of not only buyers but how to create synergy in go-to-market strategies. The marketing and sales alignment issue over the years has revolved too much around tactical concepts as opposed to strategic common sense about buyers. It’s like two assistant coaches arguing about how to get a first down versus how to score points. Get on the same team and worry about scoring points with buyers.

Going To School

On the job learning is critical to keep up with new understandings about markets and buyers. This should not be confused with trying to learn all about the intricate details of social media, content marketing, and etc. The focus on learning should be on understanding buyer behaviors and making sound assessments of what means help organizations best respond to these new behaviors and win over customers. My sense is that the Spencer Stuart tenure numbers will fluctuate downward each time new technologies are introduced and new economic environments arise – caused primarily by skill gaps.

Can any of these guiding ideas ensure longevity beyond 42 months? No, that would be a bet worth not making in these complex times. What I do believe is that it increases the probability and that CMO’s will be better off than when they first started their tenure. Regardless of how long the tenure, it will also enhance preparedness for the next assignment. There is a ying and yang that comes with churn – if you are on the exit side you can always be sure that there will be an entry side somewhere waiting.

Follow @TonyZambito

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Building A Tribe Of Buyers ©All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

Many B2B Marketers today are faced with the daunting tasks of connecting with buyers in new ways and using new mediums that are still in infancy. New tactical approaches have been introduced at a rapid rate and some old ideas re-purposed with new labels – all in an effort to find the ever flowing fountain of gaining buyer attention. The shelf-life expectancy of some of the new approaches is yet to be known; making investment and resource decisions for leaders in B2B Marketing a road filled with risks. For many of these new approaches, the foundation of thinking is still directed towards the single buyer model that has been the standard way of thinking for several decades.

Evidence is building that the standardized focus on a single buyer model has major disadvantages: depictions have lacked in the reality of the real world today, they are narrowly focused on messaging to one buyer or role, it is an over simplification of marketing and selling to a buyer, they are created with little research, and are routinely ignored by selling teams today. These disadvantages are overshadowing the higher-cost and dangers of the single buyer model used in ways where missteps are being made in overall buyer strategy. These missteps resulting in significant loss of marketing dollars and waste of valuable yet limited resources.

How Did We Get Here?

The single buyer model had worked well right up to the advent of the Internet and email. That’s when the barriers started falling down like the Berlin Wall at the end of the cold war. Up until then, all the power of information was held in the hands of the supplier. And in most cases, there was a single buyer target that needed the closely held information. Complex buying was an arduous task assigned to one decision-maker and sellers did all they could to target that one most important buyer – including bringing coffee and donuts. Marketing played the role of supplying information in literature form and focused on advertising. Sales role was to target the single buyer. Sales training was all geared to train sellers how to persuade the single buyer and in the 1980’s we started to see models of how to determine the psyche of the single buyer – was he or she an amiable or an analytical?

The single buyer model is still the major face of the buyer in many B2B organizations. Evidence suggests that this singular picture of the buyer is cracking like an old oil painting found in an attic:

• • It made sense for many years. After all we are talking about the buyer and that is the focus of marketing and sales. On the surface, the profiling of a buyer target seems like an easy fix. In this new age of social and newly emerging forms of networks – it is no longer an easy fix.
  • Emerging is buyer networks extending beyond our traditional views of the buyer. New technologies, social and Enterprise 2.0 as examples, have completely erased the barrier to information and allow buyer networks to operate as one and to weigh-in on purchase decisions.
  • Buying has become more complex since a key factor in buyer networks and the ecosystems they support are interdependent. Meaning more parties participating and more validation is occurring in the purchase decision-making.
  • The tools of the single buyer model are no longer effective. Sales in particular at the frontline routinely discard sales enablement tools given to them by marketing according to recent IDC research.

What Are The Dangers?

Continuing a narrow focus on the single buyer model is a dangerous path for B2B Marketing. Evidence points to major disadvantages occurring.

First, with a focus only on the single buyer model, businesses risk finding their organization being excluded from a buyer’s network and not seen as an integral part of the buyer’s ecosystem. This is a heavy price to pay if you are indeed outside of the network and not an ecosystem player.

Second, the use of the single buyer model has proven to be fraught with shortcomings. They can best be characterized as only helpful today but not revealing. Several executives I interviewed in the last six months of 2011 are saying it best:

“What we’ve learned is that buyer personas, building tools for sales, creating lots of content, and etc. don’t meet the mark in today’s competitive market we are in – we need to know more.”

“Our marketing department created marketing material that targeted a specific role in our industry and they rolled out it out with all the fanfare you would expect. Let me just say everybody had a piece a cake and the party was over that quickly.”

“Our sales people barely look at the tools we give them.”

Third, the research connection has been lost in the conversation. While we are seeing a rise in predictive analytics, companies are yet lacking profoundly in qualitative buyer behavior modeling. This is important due to the evidence which suggests that the introduction of new technologies and networks are changing buying behaviors rapidly.

Fourth, companies are experiencing missed opportunities. When marketing and sales operations have a singular focus on one buyer, it is like having horse blinders on. There is much swirling around the buyer and their buyer network. If the company doesn’t seem to “get it” in terms of what is going on from a network standpoint, then they are unlikely to be privy to other opportunities. More from the voice of a senior director of global marketing:

“We did this whole campaign around the CFO. Yes, we even did a buyer persona. Only to find out we could never talk to a CFO and that they were not the right buyer!”

Fifth, the use of a single buyer model has misdirected focus towards targets that have always been there and has even backfired. They are problematic in today’s world as they are fraught with many built-in assumptions that were developed over the years. The risk here is that buyer requirements and the very nature of the buyer have changed. Here’s the voice of a senior level sales executive articulating this point:

“After the first year of joining this company, I began to realize there was a disconnect between sales and our customers. What occurred to me is that our customers have become highly educated folks and were of a different background of let’s say fifteen years ago. The disconnect is that our sales force hasn’t kept pace with this change.”

Is There A Better Way?

For many executives today in B2B leadership positions, there are three constant clouds twirling around their heads: the lack of insight about buyers, they are faced with tremendous uncertainty about the direction to steer their organization, and they lack the ability to predict as well as forecast into the near as well as far future. The better way points towards providing clues to disperse these clouds before the rain extinguishes any hope they had. There are several ways that I believe can give businesses the insight they need to respond to the ever changing buyer of today:

• Engage in predictive buyer modeling that models the behavioral trends of buyers – a need that aligns with the fast pace of change
• Connect predictive buyer modeling to predictive analytics to illuminate a 360 degree view of buyers
• Balance market and buyer research investments to include qualitative research along with quantitative research
• Develop robust B2B oriented Business Buyergraphics based on purchasing behavior that extend beyond buyer personas, demographics, and firmographics and serves as the triborough bridge between marketing, sales, and strategy
• Utilize target buyer modeling as a gateway to understand and model fast emerging buyer networks and buyer ecosystem dynamics
• Develop a renewed focus on descriptive buyer segmentation based on purchase behaviors

The single buyer model no longer works in this new complex world. We are confronted with a world where buyers no longer act independent of others in decision-making and are dependent upon networks and ecosystems. The imperative for senior B2B executives is to adapt to change and make the tough decisions that come with change. Modeling the behaviors, decisions, and buying scenarios of buyers and their networks give leaders what they seem to be asking for: deeper understanding of buyer behavior, how to attract more buyers, know which direction to lead their organization, and keep the ship floating upright while at the same time plugging the leaks.

Follow @TonyZambito

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