(this is a guest post by Taylor Mitchell of our sister program for Sales executives, the Sales Executive Council. It originally appeared on their blog.)

A fundamental shift in customer buying behavior has created a rift where Sales and Marketing have traditionally engaged customers. This void in the purchase process where customers are free from supplier engagement, a “no-man’s land” so to speak, has several implications on what successful selling looks like in today’s environment, but one of the more immediate concerns is that most suppliers haven’t fully recognized the shift has even occurred

This lack of awareness could partly be blamed on the fact that there is significant internal confusion in supplier organizations over the ownership of certain commercial responsibilities. Data from the MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic illustrates that companies don’t have a good sense of which function, Sales or Marketing, owns some of the most important commercial activities—almost 70% of the member companies surveyed were unsure of who owned the insight generation responsibility, for instance.

As such, many sales organizations lack the scalable organizational support reps need to successfully sell in today’s environment, and are therefore leaving individual reps to do much of the heavy lifting themselves.

What makes matters even more difficult for sellers, and sales organizations alike, is the fact that buyers are not contacting suppliers until they are, on average, 57% of the way through their purchase process —meaning they have already determined their needs, completed due diligence, and have even begun to do some comparison shopping.

Given that this emerging commercial rift or “no-man’s land” is essentially enabling customers to make purchase decisions without supplier influence, it is all the more important that suppliers alter their strategies to drive customer engagement at the earliest, most formative stages of a sale and shape customer demand.

The SEC is focusing on just this in our forthcoming 2012 research. Initial findings suggest that the best companies are developing an organizational capability spanning both marketing and sales to generate unique insight, develop scalable commercial messaging based of that insight, and to generate leads/select opportunities based on customer receptiveness to that insight. By doing so, these companies are able to successfully support their sellers in engaging customers early and shaping their demand.

What is your organization doing to tackle no-man’s land and increasing buyer sophistication? Does developing an organizational capability to generate unique insight and support sellers sound like the right approach to you?

Americans (and maybe some of our non-American friends) all know the familiar gameshow scene of the Price is Right: Bob Barker (or Drew Carey, if you prefer the new guy) inviting crazed contestants to guess the price of everything from oatmeal to cars to exotic trips to Fiji.  And as the title says, the focal point is price, price, price.

Outside of the gameshow arena, consumers are arguably just as obsessed with price, and this attitude has become a pain point for many a sales representative.  How does a sales rep keep the conversation away from price when that’s all that a customer is thinking about?

Teach them something else that’s right.

Let’s look at a case on truck driver engagement and retention to see how Marketing at Volvo was able to deal with this issue.

Initially, no matter what sales reps went in with…

“We have a better product!  We have more features!  We can address your needs!”

… the customer always brought the conversation back to price.

“Well… a truck is a truck, but hey maybe you can throw in some free chrome bumpers!”

Volvo convened a small group of mid- to upper-level directors in a workshop to brainstorm and develop a new message for the sales reps.  MLC members, read more about the key elements to this workshop here.

They recognized an opportunity to improve driver management for their customers…

“Customers are underestimating how much unsatisfied drivers are costing them.”

… and crafted a pitch that teaches customers the value of Volvo solutions.

“Instead of telling them how our 2,092 square inch windshield will reduce the likelihood of an accident, let’s talk to them about the costs associated with driver turnover.”

Notice that instead of leading with the value of product features and focusing on known customer needs, the new approach leads with issue(s) costing customers money and telling them something they don’t already know about themselves.

And voila, you’ve shown your customers that the price is not the only thing that’s right when it comes to your business!

MLC members, read the full case study here.

As marketers, we’re doing a lot to get closer to our customers. It’s partly because we want to sell better to them – tailor messaging, that sort of thing – but it’s also because we want to do a better job of designing the offering to their needs. But what’s much more difficult to accomplish is making customer insight a key driver of strategic internal processes, an asset that animates key decisions across the firm.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and the things they had learned from their customers, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good! Read More »

It’s no secret these days that B2B sales requires a lot more consensus than it did before. You might have a great relationship with one buyer who can push through a small-ticket purchase on his or her own, but what happens when you want to increase your share of the customer’s wallet, or move up to higher-level solutions deals that involve more than one functional silo?

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally: Read More »

How would you feel if you were served a dish which you never ordered, instead of the one that you really wanted? I can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. Many B2B customers today find themselves unpleasantly surprised, when companies design offerings for them that they never asked for. Customers complain that companies claim to design products “just like they wanted”, except that they never wanted it!

Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies better understand and serve their customers? We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind: Read More »

Marketing is becoming more important and covering much more ground in enterprises than ever before, but many colleagues around our companies have outdated or incorrect assumptions about what the function does and how we bring value to the organization. We’ve compiled some of the biggest misconceptions here.

Have you heard any other good ones? Let us know in comments! Read More »

We recently heard from a couple of our members in the B2B manufacturing space about their saturation with product marketing, and increasing noise from competition in their industry domain. Many of them were chasing the ever-eluding differentiator against their competitors.

Our advice to them has been to read our work on influencing the empowered customer that predicts a larger role for B2B marketing in the sales process. B2B marketing must tag-team with sales to diagnose and respond to customer needs drive urgency toward the purchase. At the same time as they need to play a larger role in sales, B2B marketers are used to segmenting based on who customers are and what they are buying. They must now move a step further and address why customers are buying and how they can differentiate and adapt to the evolving buying process.

Presented here are our learnings from our B2B MarComm Awards Showcase, on what B2B manufacturing companies can do to make their marketing campaigns differentiated, and successful:

• Own a higher-order need: Conventional B2B manufacturers maybe tempted to talk more about the unparalleled efficacy of their product, but the product differences can be less obvious to the buyers. Companies can benefit from a positioning differentiation, by positioning themselves as fulfillers of the overarching needs their product caters to. For example, AEL Mining introduced electronic explosives with a focus on safety and well-being of miners, rather than product attributes. The campaign got an average of 10,000 visitors a month.
• If you’re a leader, flaunt it: This might sound clichéd, but companies must emphatically claim leadership in categories in which they enjoy a sustained competitive advantage. When Siemens ran its impact campaign, it positioned itself as the only true partner for American lawmakers to answer the Nation’s toughest questions. This reduced the risk perception of the company and led to impressive gains in brand loyalty, consideration and purchase.
• Break communication conventions: Let’s admit it, manufacturing companies are often guilty of creating marketing collateral with uninspiring copy and dull imagery. Cummins realized that in their industry, the ads are usually conventional with trucking equipment and parts photos shown. The company stepped over the acceptable bounds and norms with their big and bold, Cummins red identity in their “Hard to Miss” campaign. They made message the king – 1-800-DIESELS got a lot of recollection and recognition.
• Market internally first: Since the B2B sales and marketing processes rely heavily on each other, any marketing campaign must be sold internally first. Sales reps must be made aware of the strategic objectives of the campaign, and given tactical guidance on achieving the objective. Like Emerson, prepare internally facing marketing collateral before you market externally.

MLC members can register for our upcoming Webinar on the Best of B2B MarComm Awards 2011, which will feature the winning entries of this year’s B2B MarComm Awards to be held at The Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.

This post was written by former colleague Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council. Visit the original here.

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets. The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use. Read More »

By Ana Lapter

Rising event expenses, declining consumer attendance, and increased competition from suppliers of virtual event solutions: these are three factors forcing many B2B marketers to rethink whether trade shows are any longer worth the expense.

I certainly don’t believe that trade shows are worthless.  Our B2B research last year indicated that, if planned and executed correctly, trade shows are effective channels for enabling conversations with customers who are ready to buy.  MLC members – please click here if you want to see the full list of the most effective conversational channels that influence mid-funnel purchasing decisions.

So, what are the ingredients of an effective trade show strategy?  Our recent case study profiling Hill-Rom’s trade show approach illustrates a few critical ingredients that transform a trade event into a lead generation machine: Read More »