The core reason b2b prospecting underperforms
The overwhelming majority of people working on any given b2b marketing campaign have never seen, met or spoken to a customer, and certainly not a prospect. They work from reports and results. They are separated, a gap to a chasm, from the often-conflicted humanity of the people that make the decisions. This separates your campaign from its potential. We are not fishing on the shores of Lake Abundant – it’s harder than ever to differentiate ourselves, to find, nurture and motivate the prospect as the world become increasing atomized.
Content Karma: Crappy Personas = Crappy Content
I was going through some old family photos the other day. Wonderful memories of days long ago that I am digitizing to ward off the ravages of time. But, in one sense, I was preserving the ravages of time. Unfortunately, the copy can never be better than the original. A poorly-shot blurry old snapshot will still be a bad picture even in 600 DPI digital form! So it is with personas and the content marketing that comes from them. Mark Schaefer noted the same thing in a recent post arguing that "customer personas may be an outdated marketing technique"... but his advice is not bother taking any photos!
Great product, great promotion, and… great problems
Instigation: Applied Biosystems develops and manufactures the range of scientific instrumentation used by DNA researchers. One of their lower-priced devices to read DNA, the 2400, was used primarily in university research labs. Its features and reliability outpace all competitors, yet it was steadily, and inexplicably, losing marketshare. To resuscitate sales, AB decided on a promotion. They would bundle the 2400 with AB’s new line of popular chemical reagents. The promotional price would be less than the sum of its parts and labs would be getting the best instrument and reagents on the market. With great expectations, the salesforce began to call their customers that afternoon.
If You Build It, They Will NOT Come… Until You Know Who “They” Are
Instigation: IBM has enjoyed a remarkable reputation, especially in mid-range computing, but were surprised to hit rough territory when they introduced a new office solution for physician practices. Expectations were high because this new offering was much more than an upgrade. In fact, it addressed both clinical and financial requirements in ways that outpaced the competition.
Putting Insights to Work: Getting PROSPECTS to Sell Other Prospects
Instigation: While this software giant is dominant on the desktop, its offerings were still considered weaklings in vertical markets like healthcare. These industries have been dominated by established vertical competitors with many years of experience and large, dedicated sales forces. With a small budget and big perceptual obstacles, Microsoft asked B2P to help attract and engage hospital CFOs to consider their financial information system, Great Plains, for hospitals.
Shifting Focus from Products to PROSPECTS
Instigation: This ‘challenger’ mining company in Africa was up against major suppliers around the world. Their core product was a low-margin commodity, and they were losing economies of scale to larger producers. They were looking to build their volume to gain scale as well as expand into new areas... that had even stronger competition! Internally there was no agreement on direction, or even what the problem was. Typical of engineering firms, the focus was on the product, putting the marketing team in the position of “finding buyers” for what they produced.
Creative Questions Energize a Quiet Commodity Industry
Instigation: This long-established supplier of office products to small businesses had just been acquired. The newly merged company was anxious to explore options to increase growth within the current customer base, particularly in its top vertical segments, but years of prior attempts by Deluxe to increase volume through new products and services or new marketing methods had borne no results. The client was looking to us to tap undiscovered or overlooked opportunities, but their small business clients (wearing many hats) spent very little time thinking about this low-involvement category.
Being Right Can Be So Wrong
Instigation: Asigra has been quietly providing data backup and recovery software for decades. Positioned as the “cloud backup expert”, Asigra serves more than 550,000 sites throughout the world with single-minded devotion. Content to devote all their energy to supporting their channel partners, they are one of the most accomplished companies you’ve never heard of. By focusing solely on backup and recovery, Asigra developed a string of product innovations that led to industry analysts including them among preferred enterprise-grade backup solutions. The good news was that this opened a long-sought opportunity -- to expand from SMB to the enterprise. The bad news was that the enterprise marketplace is home to the well-known and well-entrenched 500 lb. gorillas of technology. Asigra needed a positioning that enabled them to get meetings with senior decision-makers at the corporate level.
The Power of Product, Process, and … People
Instigation: Once a dominant manufacturer of those ubiquitous hospital IV pumps, Baxter was steadily losing market share to competitors with more advanced products. To reverse their fortunes, they developed a competitive new line but, being late with the new technology, they knew they had to get the marketing exactly right or their opportunity to reestablish leadership would be lost. In addition, the marketing team needed compelling prospect insights to help align other internal groups around a cohesive go-to-market plan.
Tradeshift
Instigation: Tradeshift is a B2B start-up offering a free invoicing platform and a growing web-based business network. Like many start-ups, its vision was grander than its reality. It quickly found itself in a sea of small companies offering commoditized e-invoicing services. Frustrating to employee and founder alike was the challenge of navigating between here and where they want to be. Their marketing had become muddled. As the new CMO John Eng observed, “Our vision was so big it was hard to communicate. Our messaging had to speak to a range of small to large companies. The challenge was that we’d never really codified a company-wide story or the messaging that conveyed that story.”