If you’re a B2B marketer, you know that one of the biggest overarching trends in your work over the last few years has been the gradual complication of the sales process. Budget pressures facing business buyers, the greater availability of information via the internet, buying committees and all sorts of other roadblocks and tangles have managed to fit their way into the path between Sales and the sale.
These factors are creating the “no-man’s land” facing Marketing and Sales, one that we told you about last summer in our annual B2B research project. But they’re also making Sales’ job harder by making the process more complex: when buyers have ideas in their head that they get from internet research, or when a committee makes a purchase, rather than an individual, complex contingencies quickly develop, ones that can be hard to manage for individual reps.
Johnson Controls, an industrial controls and facilities management company, sells complex products and solutions. Its reps ran into the problem described above, and had trouble making complex sales. The company’s solution was to embrace game elements to help reps unearth critical, unarticulated customer needs that aren’t being met effectively – and, in turn, reconcile competing priorities among multiple stakeholders.
Johnson Controls first gets all the stakeholders into a room and asks them to fill out two kinds of cards: “needs cards” represent key priorities for each participant in the buying process, and “practice cards” represent the organizational actions needed to meet the needs.
Cards are then mapped onto a special gameboard developed by Johnson Controls, that graphically represents where the customer thinks critical needs are going unmet. Armed with data and benchmarks from across the customer’s segment, reps can challenge customers in the moment by comparing them to competitors.
For more, including how Johnson Controls reps balance multiple priorities among stakeholders, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay to see how this and other companies have revamped their needs assessment process.
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