Adapting to New B2B Buying Behavior

In a recent article by McKinsey titled “The Basics of Business-to-Business Sales Success” (May 2010; http://bit.ly/ddKQHh), McKinsey states B2B customers say they care most about product and price, but what they really want is a great sales experience. While many focus on the sales experience after the initial contact, don’t forget to manage the experience from first contact backwards to avoid being eliminated prematurely.

It’s a known fact that many buyers are using online resources deeper into the sales cycle – making themselves available to the sales staff sometimes only after they have already eliminated some of the competition. Attention to gaining an early understanding of the person and delivering the right experience is critical to ensuring your sales team gets an opportunity to do their thing.

Where I deviate from the McKinsey article is using a schedule to dictate communication frequency rather than the value of the communication or allowing the customer to have control over the process. In my 15+ years of sales and marketing executive experience, customers never once followed my timeline. Marketing automation tools (such as Marketo) and social media tools allow the prospect to control communication frequency. By allowing prospects to either speed up or slow down their online experience and ensuring you are providing content that is meaningful to their job title/industry/company size/stage in the sales cycle, you stand a significantly better chance of not getting eliminated before the race ever begins. To be clear, highly valuable/relevant content can be more effective than a schedule in providing a great user experience.

Ramifications:
1. Your life will be considerably easier if you use a dynamic web form that allows you to ask a limited number of different questions at each of the first few touch points. This approach is better than asking a lot of questions at once (which will drive away some good prospects early on). This will allow you to know the person well enough to direct pertinent, meaningful information to them. There are a number of technologies that can do this.

2. I found post-event surveys helpful in going beyond questions that you can ask on a form. Using a strong incentive, I was able to get 48% of 2,400 attendees of an American Marketing Association webinar to fill out a form and tell me things like how they intended to use the subject of the webinar, if and when they were considering a purchase, if the project was funded, etc.

3. I have also found success at identifying the stages a lead goes through prior to being “sales ready,” identifying triggers that allowed me to know when a prospect was in each stage, and developing collateral assets for each of those stages.