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Browsing Category Communicate B2B Value

How do you find out what your customers really want? How do you tell your customers about your innovations in a way that makes them understand why you’re the best company to help them solve their problems?

This is maybe the most fun part of what I do. I use my technical background in engineering and software development, put it together with my marketing and product management experience (not to mention many hours spent studying great short stories) to translate your innovation into communication, and make your benefits clear to your customers.

Contact me to find out how I’ve done this for other B2B companies.

The videos here capture my conversations with B2B execs about these questions.

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Road closed

Have your customers gone pitch-deaf?

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

There’s a hierarchy of needs that isn’t being acknowledged by a lot of sales people. Your sales team might be making this mistake, and it could be costing you sales.

As sales teams rightly attempt to differentiate their offerings and to challenge the buyer with modern B2B sales strategies they miss out on a biological truth. We can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. And if your audience is pre-occupied by a burning issue, all your vision building, differentiation, and challenger selling will not be heard.

One of my clients had a marketing automation system that was not working for them. They were getting bad results from every campaign, so I decided to run a more targeted campaign. That’s when I realized their marketing automation system didn’t let them grade different prospects differently. For example, whether the prospect was from the finance industry or the legal industry, they both got graded the same way. Whether they were a CFO or an IT professional, they got graded the same way.

We called one of the biggest marketing automation vendors in the world (half of you probably use them) and invited them in to replace the old tool. I told them:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

They assured me they could do that. They flew an account rep and a customer success person in to the meeting at my client’s office. I told them:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

And do you know what they did? They spent the next hour talking about their company’s philosophy of the world, probably describing in great detail their integrated view of how a modern B2B business needs to run, their vision of how marketing and sales will be revolutionized by their technology, and how we were perfectly positioned to be the beneficiaries of all of this progress!

They probably said all those things. But I didn’t hear a single word they said.

Why? Because I was hung up on this:

Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.

They eventually got around to showing us how to do the number one thing I had asked to see. But by then it was too late. I was distracted, annoyed, and frankly thought less of their professional ability to hear our problems and provide good solutions.

Should I have been so hung up on that one feature? Wasn’t it in my best interest to see the broader picture? Weren’t they doing me a favour by helping me see all this? It doesn’t matter. I was surprised that the existing tool didn’t do this, and given the cost of doing a migration, the table stakes for me were to not have a similar surprise with the new tool. I also wanted to show the client team how that one feature could transform the way they ran campaigns. Of course I cared about more than just that one feature. We had a long list of requirements at strategic and tactical levels. But at that moment, I was preoccupied by just one thing. And everything else was a distraction.

Here’s my advice in 3 steps:

  1. Find out what the number one thing is that your prospect wants to hear about.
  2. Talk about the number one thing that your prospect wants to hear about.
  3. Once you have confirmed that their number one thing has been addressed, re-contextualize that number one thing into your grand vision, and move to your vision from there.

Here’s that same advice in 3 words:

Connect, then redirect

Yes, you have to identify the stakeholders, get in front of them, connect them to one another, and help them arrive at a solution that helps them take their organization into a future whose arrival they all support.

But you have to remember that in their busy, attention-fragmented world, you first have to deal with what they think is their biggest burning issue. You might do this by providing a solution for it, or you might do it by showing them that they actually have much bigger problems than the one they’re thinking of. But you have to deal with it. This doesn’t contradict the research findings about the difficulties involved in sequential sales to multiple influencers. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone about one thing and they have something else on their mind, they won’t hear you.

You have to connect with them on that one issue so they can free up their attention to really hear what you’re saying about the bigger issues. Otherwise they’ll think you’re just trying to lead them to your pitch. That you’re a bad listener, or a bad problem solver. That you’re pushy. That you just don’t get it.

Instead, first connect, then redirect. Try it out in your next prospecting call and see what happens.

Don’t talk about how good you are

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Talk about what they want to be good at.

Think of ways to help them succeed. Talk about what they care about. Let them know you understand how important those things are. Then show them you understand what contributes to their success in those areas. Then, talk about how what you do makes those things happen faster, cheaper, easier, better.

Once they trust you to help them achieve those things, help them share this vision with their peers and bosses. They probably won’t ask for your help here. Nobody wants to say “I don’t have enough influence.” But they probably need your help. Find ways to offer it before they need it.

Shoulder to shoulder collateral: The secret to what your customers and your salespeople want

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Say you’ve spent some time creating your buying experience map.

And say you’ve figured out where your deals are getting stuck, and you’re ready to create that key piece of collateral or that key sales enablement tool that you hope is going to get your customers past that obstacle.  You’re ready to create something that will accelerate your revenues and make life better for your customers.

Before you start creating that tool, do a quick check. Ask one question:

Could it be used shoulder to shoulder?

To explain what I mean by shoulder to shoulder collateral, let me use the example of the product brochure.  Most of you probably  don’t rely as heavily on the printed product brochure as you once did, and that’s probably for the best.  But I use it as an example because everyone has either made one or been given one at some point.

Now imagine how that printed brochure would get used by your salespeople.  Would it be something they leave behind as they’re on their way out of a sales call, hoping it doesn’t hit the bottom of the recycling bin before the door closes behind them?

Or is it something they can use to get invited to the same side of the table as the prospect, literally shoulder to shoulder, and work through how the product is going to solve the prospect’s problems?

A really good sales enablement tool, whether it’s a product brochure, or an ROI calculator, or a live demo on a tablet, or anything else that your customer needs to see, can get you invited to the customer’s side of the table.  If this doesn’t happen literally, it will at least happen in the customer’s mind.

You want the customer to think “These people are on my side.  They’re working with me to solve my problem.”

When you’re creating these tools, ask yourself “How would this be used to have a shared conversation about a problem the customer has?”  It might wind up being a tool that gets shared digitally, and your salesperson’s shoulders might be situated nowhere near the prospect’s shoulders, but if you can imagine them using it this way, you’re more likely to be creating something that will build understanding and rapport.

When in doubt, think of the opposite situation.  Think of the last piece of ordinary vendor collateral that was sent to you or you found on a website. You know, the one with a lot of product shots, maybe some acronyms, a couple of quotes from satisfied customers, a reference to a magical quadrant of some kind, and maybe even some pictures of shiny happy people pointing at a laptop and smiling. 

What did you do with it?  You probably either recycled it or deleted it from you device.  But why?  It did all the things it was supposed to do, right?

  • It talked about benefits, not features.
  • It included the voice of the customer.
  • It demonstrated differentiation in the marketplace, and so on…

So why was it a dud?

If you can’t see your problems being solved in what you’re reading (or more likely, scanning quickly) you lose interest.  If you don’t get a sense that the vendor is on your side, you’ll ditch it and move on to the next thing.  And this is as it should be, because you’re busy doing your job, and it’s not your job to buy things from vendors.

Your customers are a lot like you.  So the next time you’re creating some collateral for them, imagine yourself or your salespeople pulling up to the same side of the table as the customer and using the collateral to share a conversation.

If you can’t imagine that happening, you probably have to start over.

And your salespeople will appreciate it too.  They don’t want to clutter their prospects’ desks with glossy paper garbage stapled to their business card.  They want something they can use to develop a relationship of trust.

Start aiming for collateral that passes the shoulder to shoulder test. 

If it’s done right, the customer will make it their own.  They will save it to their favourites, or they will print it and scribble some notes on it, or forward it to a colleague with their thoughts attached.  It becomes their tool for getting what they want, not just another piece of nameless “content” that you leave in your wake, destined for the recycle bin.

 


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Excerpt from a design by Jenny Cham based on a presentation by Kerry Bodine

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 3)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

This is the third and final installment of my conversation with Kerry Bodine about B2B customer experience management.  Catch up with part 1 and part 2.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age.


Aldwin Neekon:  It sounds like all of what we’ve covered so far would apply equally in a B2B or B2C context. What’s different when you’re dealing with an enterprise or B2B situation, when you’re selling to companies instead of individual consumers?

Kerry Bodine:  What you need to do to change your B2B organization is Read More →

Excerpt from a design by Jenny Cham based on a presentation by Kerry Bodine

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 2)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

This is part 2 of my conversation with Kerry Bodine about B2B customer experience management.  Part 1 is here.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age.


Aldwin Neekon:  So how do you recommend companies who are getting started in customer experience management sift through all of the information they get through all these different sources? You’re not going to get a unified voice from thousands of customers. Some customers will love something that other customers hate. How do you avoid misinterpreting the data?

Kerry Bodine:  You can always interpret data a million different ways. Data does not necessarily equal truth. Data equals Read More →

Excerpt from a design by Jenny Cham based on a presentation by Kerry Bodine

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 1)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

I spoke recently with Kerry Bodine, customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile apps, wearable devices, and robots.

I had noticed that some of the techniques I use to map out my buying processes to help my clients improve their sales were similar to those used in the customer experience field. I had some questions about customer experience generally, and how it applies to B2B businesses specifically. So I turned to Kerry, a globally renowned expert in this field. Here’s what we discovered. Read More →

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