(this is a guest post by Jamie Kleinerman, of our sister program, the Sales Executive Council)

At last week’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” the keynote address was delivered by Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the well-known book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Dr. Cialdini’s work on persuasive techniques is always an interesting read for sales professionals, but what made his speech especially timely and relevant for the summit was that it was about persuasion during times of greater information overload and uncertainty.

Faced with more information than ever before, stricter budgets and approval processes, and greater internal consensus requirements, customers are increasingly uncertain about making purchases today.

According to Dr. Cialdini, people exhibit several possible responses when faced with decisional uncertainty:

• Freezing—a reluctance to act or make a choice until the uncertainty is resolved
• Loss Aversion—a tendency to prefer choices designed to prevent losses over choices designed to obtain gains
• Heuristic Choices—when choices are made, they are based on a single, relevant factor rather than a set of relevant factors

It’s no easy feat for sales forces – and marketers crafting commercial strategies – to contend with customers exhibiting these behaviors. Reps can help customers overcome their decisional uncertainty and hesitancy though, by using some key principles of persuasion and influence. Read More »

Last week, my colleague Shelly wrote a preview of this year’s B2B research, which we’ll present for the first time in Chicago later next week. She mentioned 4 purchase need profiles: Total Cost of Ownership Buyers,  Service Buyers, Risk Avoidance Buyers, and Innovation Buyers. It’s the last category, Innovation Buyers, that I want to discuss in some more detail today.

Innovation buyers make up 30% of B2B buyers. The key question they ask of suppliers is “How can you make me better?” They’re most likely to categorize purchases as “strategic” as opposed to “transactional”, feature larger-than-average buying groups, and are more likely to use RFPs to attract potential suppliers.

In the past, the sales force managed these buyers with deep conversations and solutions tailored to their innovation needs. But since our research indicates that customers are delaying contact with Sales departments until they’re 57% finished with the purchasing process, we’re finding that those Sales conversations don’t happen early enough in the process to actually make a difference on the ultimate decision. Marketing needs to step into the “middle funnel” to speak to innovation buyers – but how can it be done in a scalable way? We’ve found that part of the key to engaging innovation customers is to articulate unique, valuable supplier perspectives.

This year’s research process unearthed a great best practice from Danisco, a food ingredients company based in Denmark, whose marketing team is getting the “valuable supplier perspective” thing right. Want to learn more? We’ll unpack that concept in great detail at this year’s executive retreat! But, in the meantime, we can leave you with three concrete steps to increase your mind and wallet share among innovation buyers: Read More »

(The following is a guest post from David Sroka, President and CEO of Point of Reference, a customer referral program provider.)

The marketing department in B2B firms is typically responsible for producing “evidence” of satisfied customers in the form of case studies, quotes, press releases and videos. This customer content has plenty of uses and users, but arguably, the heaviest consumer is the sales force. Like other marketing “investments,” there’s an imperative to make decisions that garner the biggest bang for the buck. So how should the marketing department decide how to spend its finite budget when it comes to sales-accelerating assets like customer content? Start by considering the current range of available content relative to where it’s needed in the sales cycle. For instance, press releases and one-page success stories are perfectly appropriate early on in the sales cycle, but less meaningful and effective in the middle to later stages.  Full ROI case studies, often 5-10 pages in length, are overkill for the early stages when buyers are merely tire kicking.

To provide a framework for this approach we created a tool to help you link various content types to various sales stages: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

The adage “Scientia Potentia Est” (knowledge is power) has a new meaning in today’s marketing world.  “Knowledge” has become synonymous with “information sharing” and “information visibility”.

The phrase du jour is “content marketing”, a strategy to educate customers and make them confident that the originator of information is the right and trustworthy choice when it’s time to make a purchasing decision.  Yet, how effective is your content marketing strategy in improving the bottom line? Read More »

At MLC, we’ve just started our major research for B2Bs for 2011 and we’re having a series of research calls with our members.  (Want to participate?  Just let us know).  Through those conversations, we’ve seen a few early trends for 2011, which I offer below, with resources from MLC as appropriate.  And stay tuned – we’ll be providing a lot more information as we launch our customer survey and develop our major research initiative for the year.

Here are the 9 (plus one) trends for 2011: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

More than 70% of B2B marketers are racing to position their firm as a thought leader, but as our research on Insight Marketing shows, the success rates of these efforts are questionable at best.  Marketers invest a lot of time to arrive at edgy insights that have the potential to reframe how customers view particular business challenges, but these insights often fail to stick.  Why is that? Read More »

MLC’s research has established that one way B2B companies differentiate themselves in areas other than price is by insight marketing: creating content that conveys credible and provocative insight into the customers’ world, and demonstrates how the your unique differentiators ultimately solve a customer’s business objectives.

If content is king, how do you get your customers to stay tuned in? After all, this is an era of fragmented attention: we have thousands of media outlets and advertisers vying for our eyes, especially on the web. Every week, dozens of interesting business books are published, and for busy executives, to-read stacks get higher and higher. For years, content producers have been told to go with the flow: assume your audience’s attention span is close to zero, and make your content snappy enough to be read quickly. Read More »

What are the limits of the Nature vs Nurture debate?  Was I really a St. Louis Cardinals fan at birth?  (of course).  One friend of mine seems predisposed towards the Jersey Shore.  Is it in her nature?  (well, she is from New Jersey).

I’ve even heard echoes of the debate when members refer to their employers:

“It’s our nature to follow very specific processes”

“Our culture hasn’t changed in 85 years”

“Our leadership believes that our go-to-market strategy from 2002 is still relevant”

“Our brand personality mirrors one thing: our company’s history”

In other words, some members claim that Nature trumps Nurture.  That the innate qualities of a firm’s culture, leadership, brand personality and politics (Nature) eclipse the impact of externalities and experiences (Nurture). Read More »

By Rob Hamshar

WD-40, the famed degreasing and rust-preventing agent, is widely known for its versatility.  As the story goes, it was originally designed and marketed in the aerospace industry to aid in airplane maintenance. But through the years, thousands of new applications were found and problems solved.  Everything from lubricating door-hinges to de-squeaking bedsprings to freeing tongues stuck to frozen metal in wintertime.  The value of a can of WD-40 has undoubtedly increased in the mind of consumers as its perceived utility increased.

The reality is, most B2B companies are much more capable of doing something very similar.  One example that we’ve found is from Dow Chemical.  Like many B2B companies, Dow has a broad array of products and services and interacts with their customers in many different ways.  But, through surveys and conversations with their sales reps, they’ve found that there are often pockets of customers within every customers segment that tend to value a particular part of Dow’s offer far more than other customers in the same segment. Read More »

We just held our inaugural business-to-business meeting looking at our content engagement strategies and what it really means to be a thought leader (and whether that’s even the right goal).

Not surprisingly, when talking about current challenges, we had lots of conversation around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

For Marketing to support that, one thing we need to do is engineer our content to make people want to share it.  But how? Read More »