One thing we can count on is by the time you have finished reading this buying behavior may have been altered one again.  Changes in buyer behaviors continue unabated.  This is making it difficult for marketing and sales leaders to plan the right mix of strategies and tactics resulting in a winning formula.

5 Buyer Behaviors B2B Marketing Must Keep An Eye On

New buying behaviors means B2B marketers have to become more responsive today.  Creating nimble organizations and improving knowledge in buyer understanding.  Here are ways buyer behavior will continue to reshape marketing:

Buyers Embrace Collaboration

Social and digital technologies has allowed for progress in the area of collaboration.  Meaning the sphere of influence and interaction not only has widened but increased.  Old ideas about roles on buying teams are being shattered as we speak.  The era of collaborative buyer networks has arrived.  We now have to consider internal as well as external members of collaborative networks impacting decision-making.

Buyers Want Co-Creation

Collaborative networks are fostering a new environment for co-creating products, services, and for solving problems.  This new development will put pressure on B2B organizations to get in line with flexible products and services which allow buyers to play an active role in co-creating.  Buyers and their collaborative networks will demand it.  For B2B marketers, this means a broader view on how you deliver messaging.

Buyers Want Less Content

I am sure some will do a double take on the above sub-header.  The fact is buyers are overwhelmed with content.  Here is how one buyer put it to me: “Look, I think twice now about putting my name in a form - not because I am not willing - but I know this just means I am going to get a flood of emails to download more information.” Buyers want less content – yet desire smart content.

Buyers Want 1-to-1

A funny thing happened on the way to marketing automation.  Marketing may be inadvertently dripping back into the mode of 1-to-many as opposed to the coveted 1-to-1.  I came upon this thought after conducting two reviews of lead generation and nurturing campaigns.  Buyers can see right through this screen.  They can smell automation.  A buyer’s voice on an email she received: “What is this?  I really don’t know because it doesn't say anything to me.”

Buyers Want More Than Insight

There is the old adage “too much of a good thing.”  I think we may have such a situation happening.  We have embraced the idea of the Challenger Sale and you see organizations racing to offer insight.  An issue here is too many items are being classified as insight.  This can actually counter-balance the act of contributing insight.   What this means for B2B marketing and sales is they will have to be more judicious in what they label insight.  Why dilute a good thing?

Adaptive and Agile Marketing

With rapidly changing buying behaviors, B2B marketing will need to be more adaptive and agile.  I foresee buyer behaviors shifting in waves.  This means marketing must be able to see these waves and make adaptive shifts in how they connect with buyers.  This will certainly not be easy to do.

Predictability will become even more important as we look ahead.  While Big Data holds promise, it will equally take developing the qualitative ability to anticipate where the new buyers of today are heading.

(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

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• The Art of Buying
• 7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013

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 problem facing organizations today is generating more leads.  Making this issue even more challenging is changes in buying behavior.  Depending on which study to reference, buyers are performing different activities for up to 70% of their buying evaluation before sales intervention.

A recent report by the Aberdeen Group on sales performance shows there is a fair degree of dissatisfaction among sales leaders.  56% saying they were not seeing sufficient growth in top line revenue.  Nearly 30% expressed dissatisfaction with lead conversion to sales.  A recent CSO Insights report indicated that only 20% of organizations understood their buyer’s buying process.  These two perspectives combined point to one of the key issues – targeting the wrong buyer.

Looking back on over 12 years of qualitative buyer research and buyer persona development work, I found in 6 out of every 10 organization– a different buyer was identified than the organization had been targeting!  If you are off-target with the buyer – you will be off-target on your demand generation and lead generation.

Getting On Target

Marketing and sales leaders today are looking to increase their percentage of being on target when it comes to lead generation.  There are four steps you can take to resolve targeting issues:

Do Lead Research:  It all starts here.  You can no longer assume the buyers you've been targeting are the correct ones.  A level of lead research is needed to outfit your lead generation and nurturing team with knowledge about ideal prospects.  For example - it may not always be the CIO but the IT Director.

Develop Lead Personas:  Lead and buyer personas are useful in understanding consideration and purchasing behaviors.  Organizations, through personas, can determine how a prospect behaves when moving from a lead persona to a buyer persona.   One of the main benefits of this approach is the ability to tailor lead and buyer personas to fit the needs of dedicated lead nurturing teams as well as sales team.

Buyer-Centered Design: Designing your lead generation strategies, systems, and processes should revolve around buyers.  The key is in modeling their behaviors when in lead nurturing and when they enter the buying cycle.  Better results will happen when you meet buyer expectations and goals – which can be distinctly different when in lead nurturing versus buying cycle.  Conversion rates at the point of when a lead persona converts to a buyer persona (becomes a sales-ready lead) will rise.

Conversation Enablement Training:  What is needed is making conversation enablement a staple of training for lead generation and nurturing teams.  The long ramp-up time it takes for lead generation teams to understand prospects is out of synch with the pace of change in buying behavior.  As the CSO Insights report pointed out, barely 20% of organizations understand their buyer’s behaviors and buying processes!  In my qualitative research, I often hear of the frustration prospective buyers have in the lack of productive conversations.

Targeting the right prospect is becoming the lifeblood of organizations today.  For many companies, tackling this issue means discovering who represents their ideal target buyer.  In addition, gaining greater clarity on how buyers differ in behavior when they are being nurtured versus actively engaged in a buying cycle.  Combining these can be a winning ticket and get your lead generation results on target.

(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

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle

• One Way to Know the Ideal Buying Scenarios for Lead Nurturing (tonyzambito.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)

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)
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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 Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
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Buyer Trend: On A Quest to Be Demand Fulfilled

The conventional as well as social buyers of today can be said to be on a quest to have their demands fulfilled.  Demand being, for the purpose of this article, the catchall phrase to represent a buyer’s desire to have their goals realized, challenges met, problems solved, and concerns alleviated.  What the convergence of the Internet and the Social Age has proffered is the ability for buyers to chart the quest for meeting their demands with much more control, participation, and engagement than in any time in history.

The significant buyer trend of the past decade has become the blinding obvious – we know that buyers are self-directing 70% to 80% of their own buying process.  This trend is profoundly changing the landscape of business in macro as well as micro level ways.  It is the under layers of this trend that is having the most affect on marketing and sales in terms of the thinking towards demand generation.  I have emphasized thinking in this series of articles due to how trends require us to reshape our thinking.  When you change the way you think about things, the things you think about change.

One of the things we need to change our thinking on – and what is meant by the under layers – is what happens when buyers find you?  If our thinking is still in the context of push and generation, then there will be little difference in whether buyers found you or you found them.  Their thought processes are becoming more complex and intelligent engagement is what they seek to help them get their demands fulfilled.  What do buyers find – when they find you?  Do they find themselves akin to being in the middle of Times Square with flashing billboards, bright lights, and the consistent horns of taxi cabs?  Are they bombarded by insistent push messaging – loaded with the conventional features and benefits dogma they’ve come to loathe?

Being in the business of buyer personas for over a decade now, I’ve seen organizations still have this thinking despite having personas right in front of them.  The fatal flaw being buyer personas were developed as profiles with push messaging and demand generation thinking as opposed to how to fulfill the goals of buyers.  Buyers today are developing a sixth sense and becoming fairly astute at knowing the difference in how an organization is thinking.  The under laying aspect of this trend is this: what buyers are seeking today is to have their own demands fulfilled - not to have your demands for generation met.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

The C-Suite today can begin to look at what really is going on in its’ interactions with existing customers and prospective buyers.  Questioning whether the incessant need to hit short-term quarterly results is blinding them to the need to shift their thinking.  In essence, finding that the drum keeps beating loudly on urging the troops to push harder and harder.  Evaluations can be performed to look at interactions and determine whether they are being used as an opening to push message or are they being made into an available opportunity for buyers to have their demands fulfilled.

CMO’s can begin to look at how to develop fulfillment models based on the demands of their existing customers and prospective buyers.  Fulfillment modeling will thus become an important new competency.  By fulfillment, I do not mean the mere availability of information and content as in the early days of direct marketing – where collateral was king then.  I do mean that CMO's will have to lead efforts to develop an appreciable deep understanding of the demand fulfillment goals and scenarios that drive purchase decisions.

When buyers are in the 70% window of self-directed activity or in the 30% window of direct engagement, CMO’s and CSO’s can ensure that buyers are able to connect in ways that allows them to continue their quests to have demands fulfilled.  As opposed to push messaging, buyers find tools and logic available to them that help them in their pursuit.  What CMO’s and CSO’s have to be on guard for, especially in light of the growing role of content strategy and content marketing, is if their content is more of the same – push messaging – or is it truly serving the purpose of demand fulfillment.

The Future

Perhaps I am playing on words and semantics.  I think not.  My many conversations while engaged in qualitative investigative efforts is telling me that the future will require a shift in thinking on exactly what takes place when buyers find you.  How organizations think on whether they are performing demand fulfillment or demand generation will be reflected in how buyers find organizations to be when they do find them.  Changing thinking and getting results from that change is one of the hardest undertakings an organization can go through.

The businesses of the future who think demand fulfillment first will find a new world of opportunities opening up to them.  It opens the road to creative and innovative ways to engage buyers in helping them to have their demands fulfilled.  Developing fulfillment models that no longer force buyers into the tired framework of push and generation – a framework that still exists and cannot be disguised with the label of content marketing or the technologies of social business.

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Buyer Trend: Buyer Behavior Changing Rapidly and Buyers Are Saying – Get Me Please!

Evident over the past two years are monumental shifts that are occurring in buyer behavior.  We’ve seen buyers entering the buying stages in unpredictable ways and deferring direct interactions further down the buying process.  There have been generational differences noted between the rise of the younger social buyer as well as hybrid behaviors of traditional buyers.  Buyers at first seemingly consuming information at a rabid thirst pace while other buyer groups demonstrating content fatigue and rejecting content outright.

Rather than rehash the mountain of information that can be found about what buyers are exhibiting, suffice to say that buyers are adapting, changing, evolving, and developing new processes along the way.  We know, to a degree, what buyers are doing.  And data-driven marketing and BIG data has become BIG business to tell us what buyers are doing.

In the past two plus years, we are seeing a rise in the analytical push and explosion in the wont for data.  This is turning into a Catch-22 dilemma for C-Suite executives.  While research can be found that data-driven companies do outperform non-data driven companies, the C-Suites in corporate worlds can be drowning in data and can never hear the still voice of their existing customers and prospective buyers.  This dilemma is most certainly compounding the issue of unpredictability about buyers in the future.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

There is no question that the C-Suite and perhaps in particular the CMO is under constant duress to figure out how to find the right mix of products, services, and experiences that make loyal customers and wins over prospective buyers.  I suspect that on any given day of the week, a C-Suite member is pouring over the data explosion taking place and attempting to decipher what insight can be useful for predicting how buyers will behave and buy.

Here’s a problem we all know business has.  When it comes to looking at the future – we just do a plain bad job at it.  We’ve been trained, conditioned, brainwashed, whipped, and had the fear of the devil put in to us to rely on BIG data as a way of planning and predicting the future.  And to some degree, analytics and data help us to find out what buyers are most likely to do in the future.  But, is BIG data on its’ own a reliable measure of outcome?  While I am not certain, I am willing to guess that the 80/20 rule applies here with 80% of the C-Suite not being able to give an affirmative yes to that question.

What the C-Suite needs to do is balance the equation on finding out how to predict as well as meet buyer goals.  The C-Suite of the future will come to rely on BIG insights and see such interwoven into their strategy planning.  By BIG insights I refer to the qualitative nature of research that gets to the most important questions of how and why buyers behave as they do to make purchase decisions.  Giving us the BIG insights that can help us to plan for a future in ways buyers have yet to envision even for themselves.  The C-Suite today must add BIG insight to the equation of being informed about buyers and making sound decisions that will put them on their existing customer’s and prospective buyer’s computer or tablet screen consistently.

The problem that has always plagued BIG data is that it is an analytical view of past results – it is rooted in a past-to-present orientation.  And past results are important.  I am not saying they are not.  What I am saying is that buyer behavior is changing so rapidly that the C-Suite must balance out the equation to attain the deep understanding of buyers that is focused on future orientation.  An equation that leads to BIG insights that also shapes the organization’s future relationships with existing customers and prospective buyers

The Future

In the present and in the future, C-Suite leaders will be called to lead their organizations in distinguishing between data that is factual in nature and insights which helps to inform decisions.  This is where it gets tricky.  The existing dialogue about BIG data uses language about insights – and to be sure there is insight to be had quantitatively.  However, there are BIG insights to be had qualitatively that propel the organization forward into a future that they co-create with existing customers and prospective buyers.  The C-Suite of the future will look at shifting resources to be more balanced between quantitative data and qualitative insights that are achieved through mixed qualitative investigative methods.  The quest for deeper insights will grow as it becomes the path to finding ways to differentiate in a constantly changing social world.

What buyers are saying today is pretty simple.  They are saying “you are not going to get me just on numbers and facts.”  Buyers are evolving a new expectation.  That is, they want you to "get" them qualitatively and they want you to “get” them in ways that will help them.  What I’ve discovered through qualitatively research is that while today buyers want to self-direct their own buying processes and minimize sales involvement, they are future oriented towards committing to a relationship that will help them grow.

Are you ready to invest in the BIG insights that will guide your organization to exactly what that relationship is suppose to look like?

(Photo by Kenny Madden © All rights reserved)

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This is the first of a series of articles planned on looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future.  This article looks at how buyers are seeking experiences and the new role of the C-Suite as experience creators.

Buyer Trend: Overwhelmed By Content

During the past two years, we’ve seen a significant rise in focus on content and how content is the new marketing.  While some may debate that content marketing is messaging in new clothing, it is now a competency that marketing executives need to assure getting right.  We’ve learned in the past few years about the value as well as the role content can play in the early stages of buying processes.  In light of the heightened and almost frenzied attention paid to content marketing, there has been much written - and I’m sure internal meetings held in corporations all over the world  - on the “how-to” of content creation.  This has led to a crying game in the corporate halls bewailing the need for publishers and journalists to come in and help.

Content creation has become a driving force in marketing and sales organizations.  So much so, buyers today are faced with the unintended consequences of information overload and content fatigue.  They are often faced with the daunted task of sorting through myriads of information that will allow them to learn and hopefully help them to make an informed purchase decision.  In essence, a buyer trend is evolving whereby managing and filtering information is becoming overwhelming.

Experience, as a unique form of competitive advantage, has suffered through its own identity crisis during the past decade.  Customer experience has had the unintended consequences of being identified as predominantly beefing up customer service capabilities.  At the same time, we have seen companies who have done admirable innovation of truly unique experiences that cut across an entire organization’s functions.  What we are seeing today however is resurgence in the original intentions of The Experience Economy as put forth by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore.  That is, people - be they consumers or B2B buyers - want to be part of an experience in its totality.  They want to enter stage left or stage right into a theatre of experience and onto the business stage being offered.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

I chose to use the word creation intentionally to label from content creation to experience creation.  Both require that mixing of skill, talent, knowledge, and intuition to put forth something new and creative.  What C-Suite leaders can do is begin to shift the focus from purely on content creation and lead the organization to see the context of the end game.  The end game being creating experiences that provides a stage in which buyers can play a leading role.  This requires new thinking.  What may sound like a semantics difference is truly a corporate mind shift that must occur.  While on one hand it is important to provide excellent customer experiences, on the other hand it is entirely a different matter for an organization to see themselves as experience creators.

Instilling such a mind set into corporate culture is no easy shift.  Companies seeing themselves as experience creators’ means looking at content creation in terms of how it fits as an essential piece of creating an experience buyers want to be a part of.  It requires the C-Suite to discover new talent that can in effect create a theatre of experience.  Using the metaphor offered by Pine and Gilmore, leaders today will need to find producers of experience and find directors who are skilled at interweaving content, conversations, interactions, and roles into the production of buyer experience.  Content creation can be likened to, in this metaphor, as scriptwriting.  Writing content that makes the experience vision and the artful direction required come alive for buyers.  The focus becoming one of creating content that fits into the overall vision of the experience and discovering, just as scriptwriters write in pauses and silence, that less can be more.

The Future

As we look to the future, the C-suite will in effect become the producers and directors of the experience theatre a company builds.  Allowing buyers to participate in as well as experience a story on a business stage that unfolds and marvels them each and every time.  One of my favorite theater productions has been A Chorus Line.  No matter how many times I see it, I still get emotionally wrapped up in the story, the script, the music, the choreography, and the experience of the production.    Organizations today must create their own version of the longest running Broadway show that buyers want to return to and revel in the experience more than once.

While the corporate hallways may be filled with talk bemoaning the need for the talents of journalists or publishers, the C-Suite who sees themselves as experience creators will have a keen eye towards finding the brilliant producing, directing, and scriptwriting talent that can build a theatre of experience.  Creating a theatre of experience that builds the anticipation, engages buyers in the story, and has them talking afterwards – each and every time.

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When formulating marketing, sales, demand generation, and content strategies, an important factor is that of understanding the choices buyers make.  Oftentimes, strategies are crafted with a singular focus on the purchase decision.  However, increasingly evident today is that buyers make purchase decisions that are a summation of several choices.  In today’s social world, buyers are confronted with making choices in more areas than ever that directly influence the ultimate purchase or renewal decision.  Helping buyers to make choices in pre-purchase as well as post-purchase situations paves the way for influencing the purchase decision – hopefully in your favor.

At this moment in time, we are in an unusual paradoxical irony when it comes to choices and decisions.  While the increase in Internet and social technologies have made it easier for buyers to control their fate, the many choices available to them has made the buying process more complex for both sellers and buyers.  When there are more options and choices available, it can actually increase the complexity of decision-making.  This unique combination of an increase in buyer options and choices along with an increase in the complexity of the buying process is directly impacting buyer behaviors today.  One way of understanding changes in buyer behaviors is to understand buyer choices.

To gain such an understanding, we can look at several areas where buyers are confronted with choice:

Information

I want to refrain from using the word content in this context.  The word “content” is super hyped today and has taken on multiple meanings.  If we look at the root of what buyers are seeking, it gets us to information.  Buyers are making many choices on where to go for information, how to retrieve information, and identifying what information is relevant.  We are still very much in the infancy of understanding the buyer behaviors associated with information gathering and the impact of new Internet and social technologies.

Buyer Experience

What has transpired over the past few years is a wholesale change in the collective set of experiences buyers have available to them.  Preferences are beginning to settle into the minds of buyers and choices being made on the type of experiences they desire.  I have written much about buyer experience over the past year; especially as an area of innovation for companies.  Understanding how buyers are now choosing experiences they desire and how they impact the purchase decision is critical to informing future strategies.  As I have written previously about, understanding the concept of experiential buying is becoming more and more important.

Values

Buyers are confronted with choices on values they perceive as relevant.  In today’s hyper-connected environment, these values are constantly shifting.  Staying abreast of the choices buyers make on values they factor into decision-making can make a difference in discovering where your organization has the edge over competitors.  Gaining an understanding of what influences choices about values as well as how these values influence the purchase decision allows for making the nimble and even subtle adjustments to strategies that connects with buyers on where they are at that moment.  Having insight into choices and compromises on pre-purchase to post-purchase values can be a game changer.

Goals

Buyers are confronted more so today than ever on making choices about the goals they pursue.  This is happening on both an articulated and inarticulate level.  What do I mean by this?  The amount of variables as well as constraints introduced to buyers is directly affecting choices made about which goals to focus on accomplishing.  The shifting in goal priorities can make it difficult for buyers to articulate exactly what they are characterizing as a goal.  It is still relevant, in fact, more so today that we understand the obvious as well as the not-so-obvious choices buyers make about goals.  Qualitative as well as contextual inquiry based methods common to ethnography and anthropology are best suited to get at the unarticulated goal choices of buyers.

Buyerology© is a means for framing the need to understand buyer choices and changing buyer behaviors.  Understandings that is crucial to informing future strategies and organizational decisions on how to be relevant to the new day and age of the buyer.  What we do know today is that it is not business as usual.  If that is the case, then we best find out what exactly is considered business today by buyers.

(Note to readers and followers: I will be making a transition by the end of the year to a new blogging platform and new website to focus on Buyerology© and enhanced buyer understanding through Business Buyergraphics©.  Please visit www.buyerology.com for more information and to sign up for updates.   Stay tuned for more articles on Buyerology© and I hope for a smooth transition over the next few weeks.)

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We are living in a world that is fraught with uncertainty.  The degree of uncertainty for businesses today probably is at the highest level in decades.  Resulting in a chaotic world for sellers and buyers looking to make sense of what the future may hold.

This high degree of uncertainty and chaotic environment is showing up in many forms for both buyers and sellers.  Whether it is sellers suffering from significant skill gaps as recently pointed out in surveys completed by DemandGen Report and Sirius Decisions or buyers in recent compiled reports indicating lack of knowledge and information that helps them to make purchasing decisions – uncertainty and chaos reigns at the moment.  This perfect storm of uncertainty and chaos making the ability of marketer’s to communicate with buyers extremely challenging and causing sales organizations to struggle in being relevant to the buying process.  So how does an organization get a hold of itself in such times?

Adaptation Begets Patterns

Organizations and buyers are highly adptable albeit some adapt quicker while others lag.  Oftentimes, those who do lag are left off the train with some just barely grabbing a hold of the last caboose that is pulling way.  When adaptation in industries and markets occur, patterns begin to emerge as we have seen during the past three years - such as in how buyers search for information.  A key to being relevant to buyers is an organization’s willingness to invest in staying abreast of patterns and then adjusting.  This is much easier said than done.  Buyer behavior patterns can be tricky indeed for it can be like shifting sand on a beach that on the surface looks flat but the moment a disturbance occurs -  a crater is revealed.  Caught unaware of the underlying shifts in buyer as well as market behaviors, an organization can find itself falling into a crater that could be difficult to climb out of.

Buyer Behavior Research and Analysis

Previously I have written about the use of multiple qualitative approaches that relates to Buyerology© and the understanding of buyer behaviors.  Investing in a collective use of qualitative approaches, which I called Buyerography recently, helps organizations to get the deep insights needed to be relevant to buyers.  They offer a window into identifying emerging patterns that provides nimbleness in terms of responding to the shifts in buying behaviors and processes.  Buyer behavior research and analysis is becoming an important means for organizations to recognize emerging patterns on the part of buyers and buying organizations.  Understanding buyer behavior is a qualitative social science in particular thus an overemphasis on quantitative analysis will make it difficult to reveal the underlying patterns that are emerging.  Quantitative tells organizations plenty about what and who whereas qualitative efforts in buyer behavior research can reveal much about why and how - important to understanding the story behind buying decisions.

Bringing Order To Uncertainty And Chaos

Once patterns can be discovered, bringing order to chaos and uncertainty lays in understanding buyer priorities and goals.  An essential point and the reason buyer behavior research is a primer for this understanding is that buyers themselves are dealing with a high degree of uncertainty and chaos.  They are having their own degree of difficulty in clearly being able to express priorities and goals in precise ways.  Given that premise, then organizations must develop a means for identifying patterns as well as being able to interpret patterns into an actionable understanding of buyer priorities and goals.

The path to gaining a deep understanding of buyer priorities and goals is through buyer behavior research and analysis.  The high degree of uncertainty and chaos in today’s marketplaces makes a presumed understanding one that can be filled with many craters.  Craters that can be littered with failed product launches, content marketing efforts, demand generation initiatives, and a smoldering fire of bad reputation.

Is it time for organizations to take a hard look at their efforts in understanding emerging buyer behavior patterns and how they reveal why and how buyers are making purchasing decisions today?  I know my answer – what is yours?

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The new buyer experience economy has resulted in shifting the economic value of many sales and marketing tactics over the past couple of years.  One approach whose value is on the rise is that of Lead Nurturing.  It’s no wonder why – we have seen major alterations of buyer behavior and buying patterns with technology enabling more buyer control over the majority of the buying cycle process.  This makes nurturing a key element of preventing buyers from disengaging from the buying cycle.

The approach taken towards lead nurturing could make a huge difference.  With the concept of lead nurturing still in many respects a new one, companies are struggling on exactly what to do and perhaps how to implement lead nurturing.  A most common approach, of what can be referred to as “picking and choosing” activities, may actually be hindering the further evolution of lead nurturing.  Here are just a few reasons why:

• Lead nurturing activity is left in the hands of sales representatives who pick from a Chinese menu of choices to engage with potential buyers thus creating inconsistency.
• There has been a rearranging of the deck chairs so to speak on the same types of activities and then these collectively called lead nurturing.  The question though is there anything different going on for the buyer?
• We rely too heavily on technology and automation which in turn makes lead nurturing a program bedeviled with checklists yet lacking in a coherent plan.
• There is a lack of creativity in lead nurturing activities and plans.  The buyer suffers from this because there then is a high redundancy factor of similar types of content distributed via the web, emails, events, and that word most buyers cringe at – campaigns.
• Lead nurturing can suffer from multiple overlapping responsibilities for programs and areas of specializations.  What I mean is that some departments are charged with email marketing for example while others might be in charge of white papers as another example.  Each department marches to the drum of its own beat and implement plans.   The buyer then becoming the recipient of both lead nurturing activities and asks – why am I getting all of these at once – don’t they have their act together?
• Since lead nurturing is a new concept, it still struggles from not receiving the executive buy-in it should causing many sales and marketing teams to make best do with a limited budget.

The dilemma an organization can be faced with is the way lead nurturing has been approached.  Primarily lead nurturing being  approached as a program of activities as opposed to a program of experience.  Thus, an organization can significantly enhance its lead nurturing capabilities when it is linked to the overall buying experience and viewed as a significant element of buyer experience marketing.  Buyer Experience Marketing changes how we approach lead nurturing - from asking what activities should we do to what experiences should we create.

By linking lead nurturing to buyer experience marketing, we begin to shift the emphasis in lead nurturing from inside-out activities to outside-in experiences.  We begin to shift from a reliance on how many activities can each department dream up to how much do we know about the buyer and the types of experiences that will keep him/her engaged in the buying cycle.

This, in my opinion, is an extremely important linkage to be making.  By linking lead nurturing to an approach of buyer experience marketing, it allows us to take steps enabling the buyer to be a participant of experiences rather than a recipient of materials and activities.  It is definitely easier said than done however organizations should begin taking steps in this direction.  Why?  For this simple reason - buyers are certainly not going to wait for you to catch up.