MARKET VIEW 27
Adrian Odds
MARKETING AND INNOVATION DIRECTOR
B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing
What is the critical success factor for human engagement in enterprise marketing?
Empathy. When buyers are researching the market to identify and understand their business problem, they often gather a broad range of insight that can be hard to make sense of. Sales and marketing can use empathy to simplify the complexity of the information that buying groups face.
Business problems typically show up as a pain point in a single silo. Sales and marketing can help prospects identify that the pain points aren't always where the problem originates. It's a bit like having a pain in your leg, that’s referring from something being wrong with your neck.
Sales and marketing must use empathy to simplify the complexity of the information that buying groups face.
How do you break down the buyer journey in practice?
Salespeople know there's the highest chance of a good outcome when they’ve been able to build trust with buying groups. Traditionally, salespeople work with a buying group as they go from understanding their problem, to evidence-building and intelligence gathering to decision-making.
Now, we're finding that there's a significant role for one-to-one interaction and thought leadership at the very early stages of a process while a problem is still being configured and a hypothesis validated. There may even be an opportunity to shape the questions that the buying group will ask as they go to market.
We then let them go away and do their independent research, and our salespeople will then insert themselves back into the discussion later in the process to help buying groups make sense of what they have found.
Identifying the business problems customers are facing and mirroring them in a genuinely helpful way is the first step.
Typically, we go to market with technology partners who tend to be very good at laying out the USPs and benefits of their solutions, but they don't always focus very heavily on the business problem the buying organisation is trying to solve with that technology.
So, there's a role for us to be slightly contrarian in how we think and talk about a problem statement. We focus on outcomes to challenge how clients might be thinking – as the real business issue could be something quite different than initially thought. Only then, will we put together a proposal for a solution based on what the client actually needs to solve their problem.
When we take this approach with clients, their shoulders drop, they relax, and they realise that they're in the arms of an organisation that's going to help them solve their problem in an agnostic, open, transparent, and well governed way.
So, there’s a role for us to be slightly contrarian in how we think and talk about a problem statement. We focus on outcomes to challenge how clients might be thinking – as the real business issue could be something quite different than initially thought.
How can marketing best support sales with content?
Marketing needs to enable the sales function with collateral that they can use to build good relationships and establish trust. The content environment should allow a salesperson and the client to navigate their way through the problem landscape in language that everyone understands.
This works best when marketing and sales objectives are closely aligned, otherwise high-quality content can languish unloved and unused.
Marketing can increase engagement by creating content and collateral that sales teams can easily use based on where their prospects are in the buying journey. But its reciprocal, so sales teams must also take responsibility for engaging with the content.
There's also an important role for learning and development and really good training pathways for sales and marketing people as the buying structures around complex products and services continue to evolve.
Above all, it’s important to remember that B2B buying groups are also human beings, with a range of individual needs and requirements. Bake accessibility standards into your content to ensure it is available to everyone and consider the role for entertainment, humour, and provocation. It's a fine line, and it's a brave marketer that embraces entertainment as a content strategy – but there is definitely an argument for standing out in what can be a dry and competitive environment.
Marketing can increase engagement by creating content and collateral that sales teams can easily use based on where their prospects are in the buying journey.
ADRIAN ODDS
Marketing and Innovation Director
CDS
CDS is an agency that enables change for its large and complex clients. We help organisations across the public and private sector to design and build better services that meet the evolving needs of customers, employees and citizens. The company’s 170-strong team of subject matter experts deliver technical enablement, operational transformation, experience transformation and business process outsourcing.
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