B2B Buyers Rational? It Ain't Necessarily So.

The B2B Kool-Aid claims buyers don't behave like consumers.

But two new studies show it ain't necessarily so.

State of the Connected Customer, from Salesforce.com, reveals how consumer-like many B2B buyers have become:

• 83% say technology informs them about product choices
• 80% say they expect companies to respond to them in real time
• 79% say it's vital to have a sales rep who's a trusted advisor
• 75% say they expect companies to anticipate their needs
• 70% say technology makes it easy to take their business elsewhere
• 66% say they'll switch brands if they're treated like a number
• 65% say they'll switch brands if a company's communications aren't personalized

Turned Off, from Sprout Social, reveals why buyers "unfollow" companies on social media:

• 46% say the companies annoy them by over-posting self-promotions
• 42% say the companies post irrelevant content
• 35% say the companies use too much jargon
• 18% say the companies are don't post frequently enough
• 15% say the companies fail to respond to comments

You say, so what, who cares?

Well, Turned Off also reveals 75% of buyers have purchased a product after seeing it on social media.

No Wine before Its TIme

According to a study by Regalix, The State of B2B Content Marketing 2016, 73% of CMOs are dissatisfied with content marketing.

Crap content, of course, explains much of the dissatisfaction. Crap content won't give a brand a welcome seat at customers' tables.

CMOs' impatience explains the rest. They've spent all this dough. Where are the results?

Maybe they expect too much, too soon.

Content marketing isn't branding; but it sure as hell isn't selling, either.

To work, it takes time and amplification. Before results arrive, you have to cultivate an audience and win its trust.

Look at the number of readers you're getting. How large is your readership? How many readers are clicking from your blog to other value-added content? How many are sharing and recommending your content? If the numbers are low, you can't expect stellar results. Those take time.

So exercise some patience. Be like Orson Welles, who earned his "grocery money" in the 1970s by shooting TV commercials, the most famous of which has aged pretty well.  

CMO, Want to Avoid Extinction?

No CMO wants to be left on the sidelines. Sidestepping the confines of traditional marketing to deliver a more relevant and integrated customer experience will ensure the future of the CMO on the digital playing field.

— Accenture White Paper

Dear CMO:

Afraid you'll be banished to the North Pole?

Ready to declare every conventional marketing tactic passé?

Well, be warned: your rush to "embrace digital" is abominable.

The reason's simple.

Just like people who use an online dating service, B2B customers use digital to eliminate you from consideration. They don't use it to start a relationship.

Relationships come from face-to-face.

And relationships are the wellspring of growth, the most valuable off-balance-sheet asset your company has.

So why on earth would you "sidestep" face-to-face?

Do you want to avoid extinction—or accelerate it?

Is Your Content Fat and Soggy?

Is your content fat and soggy?

A story memo can cure it.

Professional writers use story memos to pitch ideas to editors and producers.

The brief memos answer five questions:

• Why does the story matter?
• What's the point?
• Why is the story being told?
• What does the story say about the world?
• What's the story about in a single word?

With answers to these questions, a theme emerges. That focuses the story, makes telling it easier, and serves readers a tasty treat.

Fat and soggy's fine, if you want to appear "content rich" to boobs, bosses and bots.

But crisp and thin converts customers.

The 5-Finger Guide to B2B Marketing

B2B marketer, where should you focus?Mark Schmukler of Marketing Insider Group says you should master these five areas:

Your website. All roads (whether email, SEO or SEM) lead to your website. It'd better be responsive. If it's not mobile friendly, you're toast right off the bat. Fifty-seven percent of visitors won't like you.

Your brand. Develop a brand guide and harmonize everything customers encounter, from business cards to brochures, email signatures to trade show exhibits. Your credibility is at stake, especially if you operate in a niche industry.

Search Engine Optimization. The key to SEO is content. Lots of it. Content is the way to gain authority with Google. And it needs to be placed all over the web, not just on your own site, so learn how to do PR.

Search Engine Marketing. SEM comes into play where SEO leaves off. Google Adwords puts you among the top four slots in Google searches. Why Google Adwords? Simple. Google owns owns 71% of the search market.

LinkedIn. Forget the other social media platforms until you leverage LinkedIn. Ninety-four percent of B2B marketers use it to distribute content, especially those who need to reach senior managers (half the world's highest earners are members). And sponsored content is awesome. You can target members based on 15 categories, including location, industry, job title, seniority, gender, age, and years of experience.

Looney Tunes

Maybe it's the "new normal" after 2016's presidential campaign.

The panelists at a marketing conference I just attended were unanimous: only "crazy" will capture customers' attention in 2017.

That goes for email Subject lines as well as all other content.

Sales trainer Ryan Dohrn recommends these 10 grabbers:

Subject: [Road Runner] recommended I get in touch

Insert a [peer's name] in your Subject line. Referrals are the best way to connect instantly.

Subject: I was just wondering…

This line can introduce an offer to meet.

Subject: May 29th?

Another way to introduce an offer to meet.

Subject: 3 reasons…

This line precedes a list of reasons the customer should engage with you. It's effective after previous emails have bombed.

Subject: Did something happen?

Guilt works after you've had a meeting or sent a proposal and received no feedback.

Subject: New idea for you

Effective right out of the gate when you want to arrange a meeting. Offer an idea that gives the prospect a slight competitive advantage.

Subject: Acme Anvils

Ruffle the customer's feathers by naming her competitor. Let her know how her rival is a step ahead.

Subject: Wrong person?

Use in your last-ditch effort. Ask the customer to provide information that will eliminate her from your list. But be careful: this line only works when you are emailing aggressively, not occasionally.

Subject: 20 minutes?

This line must be followed by a promise to solve a problem or save time and money.

Subject: I will respect your answer

It's not nutty to ask for a "No." When a customer feels like she can say "No," she'll at least reply.

Artful Dodgers

Open secret: B2B prospects are dodging salespeople.

It now takes 18 or more dials to connect with a B2B prospect over the phone, according to TOPO. Call-back rates are below 1%. And only 24% of sales' emails are ever opened.

The reason: reps put their own agenda above that of prospects, so prospects turn to peers for advice.

It's why 1 million B2B reps will lose their jobs to self-service e-com by 2020.

Two professors, Laurence Minsky and Keith Quesenberry, urge B2B reps to try "social selling."

"With social selling, salespeople use social media platforms to research, prospect, and network by sharing educational content and answering questions," they say in Harvard Business Review.

"As a result, they’re able to build relationships until prospects are ready to buy.

Social selling makes sense, because three of four B2B buyers rely on it to reach buying decisions.

A survey by Hubspot shows 72% of B2B reps who use social media outperform their peers, and more than half have closed deals as a direct result of social selling.

Reps can be sell effectively with social media by spending no more than 10% of their time with it, the professors say; but they need to be trained.

Marketers can provide that training, but often they don't want to.

The solution? Wrest social media from marketers and hand it to sales.

By providing a self-guided portal where reps can find marketers' content and share it with prospects on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, B2B companies can win over artful dodgers, the professors say.

"After all, social media is too important to be left to marketing."

The Devil You Know

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't'.

— Irish Proverb

How often are you flummoxed by a prospect who decides to do nothing, or stick with an incumbent supplier it hates?

Princeton psychology professor Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economics for explaining why clients do this.

Kahneman’s research challenged conventional economic theory, proving people make irrational decisions all the time.

A key basis for those decisions is "risk aversion."

People are more motivated to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain. In fact, the perceived loss has twice the influence on the decision the equivalent gain has.

How do you counteract risk aversion?

In the way you explain the potential loss.

You need to do careful research to pinpoint the loss (generic claims never work, and cheesy fear-mongering backfires); and then show the prospect it will avoid that loss by choosing you.

Here are three things you should do:

• Provide your prospect insight. A financial advisor had trouble selling doctors deferred compensation plans. It used a white paper, Healthcare Post-Obamacare, to get meetings with physician groups. The white paper was chock full of gloomy news and predictions of losses, many of which had little to do with deferred compensation plans; but the data motivated doctors to meet with the advisor and discuss the firm's products.
  
  
• Prove over and over you produce results. The top Realtor in my home town mails homeowners postcards every week. Each one boasts of the rapid speed and ginormous sale price at which she just sold a home. If I fear getting a below-market price for my home, I might remain in it. Or I might just give her a call.
  
  
• Make your case. Case studies that emphasize how you helped clients dodge disasters demonstrate you can do the same for them. Software provider Minitab proved this in a case study about Ford Motor Company's use of its product. Ford's launch of Fiesta was jeopardized when the automaker found ugly brush marks on every vehicle's carpet. Minitab helped Ford avert showroom nightmares by enabling it to evaluate the results of 34 test fixes in 12 days, and choose the right one.

Laundry Lists Kill

Want to kill audience interest quickly? Use a laundry list.

"We think dumping the entire contents of the benefits-basket onto a reader, viewer, or listener will outpull selective choice," copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis once said. "Not so, because emphasis becomes diluted. When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing."

But wait, it gets worse.

Laundry lists not only kill interest. They can kill a deal.

Good salespeople know this intuitively: If you want to kill a deal, introduce an extraneous element. Laundry lists introduce baskets of them.

Laundry lists bar interest and block deals. So avoid them.

To create a responsive ad, letter or email, choose one benefit your audience values, and subordinate the rest.

Social Selling ≠ Black Hat Selling

A fool with a tool still remains a fool.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

In a fool's hands, "social selling" becomes antisocial.

The reason?

On social networks, you should serve, not sell. (Serving puts customers' goal in the forefront; selling puts yours.)

If you can't grasp the difference, steer clear of social selling.

It will rapidly turn you into a black hat.

"There are no other areas of a seller’s life where the circles in the Venn Diagram of 'apps I use for work' and 'apps I use for fun' overlap," says Peter Ostrow on SiriusDecisions.

The overlap is a dark and dangerous pitfall.

Ostrow offers three rules for side-stepping it:

Social Selling = Listening. "The best way to grow long-term sales effectiveness via social is to develop a keen sense for what is being said in your particular corner of the market—and how influencers are saying it," Ostrow says. Follow subject matter experts on Twitter and connect to them on LinkedIn.

Social Selling = Contributing. Use half your posts to curate the best content the SMEs publish. "Your buyers will respect you far more as a helpful source of knowledge if you actually help them become smarter and do their jobs more effectively—as opposed to just selling your stuff in a disguised, purportedly indirect fashion that everyone sees through anyway."

Social Selling = Collaborating. Don't think, do. Dive into the conversations. Share ideas. Serve.

Digital and Events: They're Cousins

Yes, we get it: digital's hip and events are square.

But they're cousins, identical cousins all the way. One pair of matching bookends, different as night and day.

B2B CMOs know they spend 50 cents of every marketing dollar on events.

But they don't recognize, in reality, they spend even more.

John Hall, CEO of Influence & Company, recently told me an ever-growing portion his clients' digital spend directly supports customer engagement through events (before, during and after).

B2B CMOs are using online channels to drive face-to-face results; they simply don't assign that spend to the events.

That means CMOs are oblivious to the true picture. Spending surveys don't capture it either.

In this family, the brash, hip child is gets all the parents' attention, while the shy and dutiful one goes quietly about her business. What a wild duet!

Live Events: Wanamaker's Worry and the Pedigree Problem

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.

John Wanamaker

B2B CMOs spend more than 50 cents of every dollar on live events.

But they don't share Wanamaker's Worry.

They never ask, how much of my money is wasted? They simply boost event budgets when sales are up; and slash those budgets when sales are down.

Event managers will gripe all day about spotty crowds, the cost of drayage, and the bungling of lead follow-up. But the foolhardy spending begins and ends with CMOs—specifically, with their pedigrees.

CMOs ascend to their lofty jobs through predictable routes. Advertising. Digital. PR. Research. Product management. Sales. 

Have you ever heard of a CMO who once held the job of event manager at his—or any—company?

The consequence of their pedigrees is: CMOs bring blinders to the job, when it comes to live events.

It's why they don't share Wanamaker's Worry.

Pick a Peach

Good words are worth much, and cost little.
                                                                      
                                                                                       George Herbert

Sunday's trip to the farmers' market told me peaches are in season. They all cost the same, so we put a lot of care into picking the fattest, prettiest and juiciest. We picked up a lot of them before settling for the best.

You can spot the careless writer easily: when it comes to word choice, she's the one who settles for the first peach she picks up.

She publishes pap like this:

Your IT application infrastructure is the foundation of your business. It must be scalable, available, and secure. It must also evolve as your business needs do. This is why you need more than a support contract from your technology vendor. You need a collaborative relationship. Such a relationship is the key to a successful strategy for deploying and maintaining an enterprise platform. Red Hat understands this need.

Roget's Complaint, Rule Number 2 of copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis' "three key rules of copywriting," states:

With all the specific descriptive words available, the writer who regards neutral, non-impact words such as needs, quality, features, and value as creative should agree to work for no pay.

Specifics sell, Lewis says; and specific descriptive words sell because they provoke the emotions of otherwise indifferent readers.

"Specific words generate far greater emotional reaction than generalized words; the more specific, the more the writer controls the emotions," he says.

Novelist Joseph Conrad famously said, "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.

So, a word to writers everywhere: If you want to make readers hear and feel and see, don't settle for the first word that shambles through your comatose cranium; and certainly don't, if you expect to be paid. Instead, open your Roget's. You will find it's packed with fat, pretty, juicy words that cost little, but are worth much.

Pick a peach.

POSTSCRIPT: Had she pushed herself, Red Hat's copywriter might have said:

You need an uncompromising IT platform—reliable, scalable and secure. One that will grow as your enterprise grows. And a sidekick you can depend on to be with you all the way. Red Hat understands that.

The Funnel of Uncertainty

As a hurricane barrels up the Eastern seaboard, my local TV weather lady keeps blabbing about the "Funnel of Uncertainty" between Florida and New Jersey, as she gestures at the cartoon conoid on her screen.

Management theorists talk about the "Tunnel of Uncertainty," the corridor on the road to results where "project dampeners" resist "project amplifiers" at every step.

And software developers talk about the "Cone of Uncertainty," the passage of time from when every cost-estimate is a sheer, wild-ass guess to when costs are nailed tighter than a drum.

But I'd never heard anyone talk about the "Funnel of Uncertainty," until my weather lady brought it up.

It's an apt phrase to describe the hell hole prospective customers tumble into, once they surrender their email addresses to marketers.

"Funnel" because that's where marketers shove you as you begin—wittingly or not—your "buyer's journey."

"Uncertainty" because you never know what treatment you might receive along the way. 

In most cases, first you get an email from someone named Kyle, who insists you need a demo. Then you get an email with a link to some goofy infographic. Then, another with a link to an inscrutable slide show. Then, another containing a newsletter you wouldn't read under penalty of death. And then another email with a threat to remove you from the list, should you fail to respond.

There's nothing wrong with funnels; there's nothing wrong with uncertainty.

There's something very wrong with most marketers' graceless treatment of prospects.

Entertaining and educating prospects in the funnel is the corrective to the "buy now or go away forever" vibes you're sending.

Try them out.

Can Customers Find You?

"Blogging is my front door," says marketing maestro David Meerman Scott.

Replete with posts as much as 12 years old, Scott's blog is the power magnet that attracts him new business.

"I'm always surprised at how effectively this tool helps me accomplish my goals," he says.

"There are many posts I wrote a decade ago, back when George W. Bush was President, that are still indexed highly by the search engines and are still driving people who do not know me into my content."

A new study by Mattermark of the 50 fastest growing B2B companies in the country shows 80% of them blog.

If you're among the B2B marketers who don't, please, check your excuses at the door.

Slip Slidin' Away

Although "Death by PowerPoint" is universally dreaded, B2B marketers continue to create overstuffed "megadecks."

"Decks have hundreds of company- and product-centric slides," says Christina McKeon on SiriusDecisions' blog. By stupefying audiences with unwelcome information, "sales reps are missing out on a small window of opportunity to establish credibility with the buyer."

Marketers should instead create decks driven by the buyer's questions.

"Winning sales presentations are buyer-centric," McKeon says. Decks should deliver only what the buyer needs to know at the moment, and omit slides focused on "internal processes and constructs."

Decks should also be designed to prompt a specific action by the buyer. Early in a relationship, that might mean validating her organization's needs; later, it might mean preparing to onboard her organization as a customer.

Marketers also need to "think beyond slideware," McKeon says. Content can be delivered through media other than slide decks, such as leave-behinds or a sales proposal.

Lastly, marketers should confirm their decks actually work. "Marketers should ride along on client calls to get live feedback on how the material is working, so necessary adjustments can be made," McKeon says.

Why Face-to-Face Works

As we all know from Star Trek, the strongest force in the universe is gravity.

The second strongest may be mimicry.

Mimicry is the reason face-to-face works—better than broadcast, direct, email, mobile, outdoor, packaging, print, PR, social, sponsorships, telephone, web, wearables, word-of-mouth, or any other marketing channel.

Like gravity, mimicry is an inborn and inescapable "hidden force" compelling us to behave in predictable ways. 

Mimicry makes us automatically imitate the expressions, gestures, postures, actions and language of people around us.

And mimicry generates trust between parties. It's why couples who share the same manner of speech are 50% more likely to date; why servers who repeat their customers' orders get 70% bigger tips; and why negotiators who imitate their opponents' postures are 500% more likely to win.

Because it builds trust, mimicry "shapes professional success," says Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger in Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. 

"Mimicry facilitates social interaction because it generates rapport," Berger says. "Like a social glue, mimicry binds us and bonds us together. Rather than 'us versus them,' when someone behaves the same way we do, we start to see ourselves as more interconnected. closer and more interdependent. All without even realizing it."

Whenever we go face-to-face, mimicry's our default behavior. 

So it's just natural this vast hidden persuader works its black magic at conferences and trade shows, deleting distrust and making us all members of one federation.

CAPTAIN'S LOG: Happy 50th, Star Trek. Live long and prosper.

Complaining isn't a Strategy

When the world changes around you and when it changes against you—what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind—you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.

Jeff Bezos

A new survey by Sydney-based The Exhibit Company shows 91% of trade show exhibitors "struggle with leads." Respondents identified six component challenges:

• Attracting visitors to their booths
• Attracting the right ones
• Engaging them
• Qualifying them
• Tracking them
• Following up

While they grouse mightily, many exhibitors hold onto the very practices that assure failure. Most:

• Pick shows wrong for their products 
• Set no objectives, or unmeasurable ones
• Fail to promote their presence
• Mount unwelcoming exhibits
• Muddle their message
• Assign booth duty to novice salespeople
• Forget to turn the salespeople into a team
• Turn off or simply ignore passers-by
• Produce distracting stunts
• Make giveaways a focal point
• Annoy visitors with stupid questions
• Neglect to ask strategic questions
• Refuse to automate lead capture
• Dump leads on salespeople after the event
• Allow leads to go un-nurtured

Exhibitors who bungle their part are like the substance abuser. 

Each one of the bad habits is easy to kick, but the abuser's addicted to her self-pity.

Complaining isn't a strategy.

Buckshot's Back: P&G Bails on Ad Targeting

The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

Howard Luck Gossage

In his blog {grow}, marketing maestro Mark Schaefer asks, "Has there ever been a question that targeted ads are going to perform better than shooting a bunch of buckshot ads out there?"

Schaefer asks the question in light of P&G's announcement that it will abandon Facebook ad targeting, due to the strategy's failure.

“We targeted too much, and we went too narrow,” P&G's CMO told The Wall Street Journal, “and now we’re looking at: What is the best way to get the most reach but also the right precision?”

Schaefer wonders aloud whether every advertiser might close more sales with buckshot ads, for no increase in spend (targeted ads cost more than buckshot ones).

He's firmly undecided.

"On the one hand, the P&G revelation shakes long-held assumptions, but on the other hand, I don’t think we necessarily need to make wholesale changes to strategy," Schaefer says. 

"If you’re a wedding photographer, targeting couples who have changed their status to 'engaged' probably still makes sense, right?"

My direct marketing experience has taught me buckshot advertising's okay; and that frequency's the real key to closing more sales.

From what I've seen, precision-targeting works when a product-related life-event takes place in proximity to the arrival of your offer in the prospect's mailbox. Absent that life-event, your offer is simply more noise ("mailbox clutter").

Targeting based on demographics cuts waste; but it doesn't capture sales. Frequency does that.

A case in point. My client, an insurance company, noticed each time it mailed an offer for term life the bulk of policies were bought by 33-year-old men. Curious about the trend, I called a sample of the men to find out why they'd acted. The resounding answer: a newborn had recently arrived, and dad was interested in baby's wellbeing. So we took two steps: We narrowed the list from a wide range of men and women to men ages 33-35; and, with the money saved, increased the frequency of mailings. Policy purchases skyrocketed.

Frequency rules because you just never know when a prospect is interested. For all its fancy algorithms, even Facebook doesn't know that.

If you can believe sales growth strategist Chet Holmes' research, at any moment only 3% of any population represents interested buyers of your product. If your offer reaches that 3% with enough frequency, you increase your chances to close.

Wait, you shout, I'm wasting big bucks on the other 97%! Not so, Holmes claims:

• 7% of the population at any moment is at least open to your offer
• 30% at any moment isn't thinking about your offer
• 30% at any moment would say it's uninterested
• Only 30% is really, truly uninterested

The upshot of all this?

A little buckshot never hurt anyone.

Unless you hunt with Dick Cheney.

How to Win Friends and Influence Prospects

"Attention is something that can't be refunded or recalled," Seth Godin says. "Once it's gone, it's gone."

Most salespeople fail to realize how fleeting and fragile attention is.

If a prospect won't reply to emails, return calls, accept appointments or keep them, it means you haven't created enough interest to earn her attention.

Here are five sure-fire ways to correct that:

• Get referred. Leverage your network. Ask an influencer to smooth your way.

• Call early. Cold call before the morning madness starts (or late in the evening, when it's past). Be ready to stimulate thoughts. 

• Send a letter. Provoke thoughts the old-fashioned way. Close by asking for an appointment.

• Send a gift.The right one will earn more attention than it deserves. Try a new dollar bill.

• Go where the prospect goes. Use common sense and a little detective work to learn which events the prospect attends. Button-hole her there. Again, be ready to provoke thoughts.