Why We Need a New Model of B2B Marketing

The marketing model currently used by most B2B companies has significant flaws, and most of the tactics used to improve B2B marketing performance have been only modestly successful. What's really needed is a different paradigm of B2B marketing, one that is grounded in a clear, evidence-based understanding of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

Embracing a new marketing model will be difficult for some B2B marketers. To understand why, consider the following thought experiment.

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Suppose you've recently been hired to be the CMO of a B2B company, and you've been tasked to reinvigorate the company's marketing efforts. Through market research, you've identified several attributes of the potential buyers in your company's target market.

• Most of your company's potential buyers are not actively evaluating products or services like your company offers at any given time.

• A trigger of some kind is almost always required to motivate the potential buyers to begin a buying process. In this context, a trigger is an event that causes a potential buyer to feel a need or desire to fix a problem or seize an opportunity.

• Except in rare cases, marketing messages or content alone will not cause potential buyers to begin a buying process.

• When a trigger event occurs, most of your company's potential buyers quickly create a mental list of companies, products, or services that they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set.

• This initial consideration set is created before most potential buyers have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they've formed from a variety of touchpoints, such as their past experiences with companies, products or services, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.

• Almost all of your company's potential buyers make almost all of their purchases from companies that were in their initial consideration set.

Given these buyer attributes, what marketing strategy would you use?

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The buyer decision-making attributes described in this thought experiment make two strategic decisions rather clear. First, it would make no sense to emphasize marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to initiate a buying process because such programs would be largely ineffective.

Second, it's clear that a primary focus of your marketing strategy should be to increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of as many potential buyers as possible because that greatly increases your odds of success.

These strategies differ significantly from what most B2B companies are currently doing. Today, most spend a lot of money on marketing programs designed to entice potential buyers to start a buying process, while they spend far less on programs to get their company into buyer initial consideration sets.

This disconnect is important because research has shown that the buyer decision-making patterns used in our thought experiment accurately describe how many business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

What Really Triggers a Buying Process?

For example, in a 2021 survey of business decision-makers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International, researchers asked survey participants what kinds of events triggered their decision to search for a new vendor/solution provider. The following table shows the percentage of respondents who selected each of 12 trigger events.

These survey results illustrate that a wide variety of events can trigger a B2B buying process, but they also show that events involving the consumption of marketing/sales/news content (shown in red in the table) won't be sufficient to trigger a buying process in most cases.

Why Being On the "Day-One List" Matters

Research has also confirmed the importance of being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set.

In 2022, Bain & Co. and Goggle surveyed 1,208 people at U.S. companies who had been involved in buying several kinds of business products and services. From 80% to 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research. And 90% of those respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor that was on their day-one list.

The military concept of "decisive point" is a good analogy for the role and importance of the initial consideration set. A decisive point in a military operation is "a geographic place, key event, critical factor, or function that, when acted on, allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an adversary on contribute materially to achieving success." [Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operation Planning (Washington, D.C.:  U.S. GPO, 2011), GL-8.]

Being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set is a decisive point in B2B marketing because companies that are in the initial consideration set have a significant advantage over those that aren't.

Two Critical Changes

The findings of these research studies (and others) make it clear that we need to change some long-standing and widely-held beliefs about how B2B marketing can effectively drive strategic business outcomes.

First, we need to recognize that marketing's ability to persuade potential buyers to begin a serious buying process is limited at best.

And second, we need to focus more of our efforts on ensuring that our company is included in our potential buyers' initial consideration sets. After all, you've got to be invited to the party before you can be asked to dance.

Top image courtesy of R/DV/RS via Flickr (CC).

Looking Back, Looking Forward - 2025 Edition

Source:  Shutterstock

The beginning of a new year is what behavioral scientists call a temporal landmark, a date that is more meaningful than others. Temporal landmarks often prompt us to make significant life changes or commit to pursuing new goals. 

If you doubt the power of temporal landmarks, just consider how often we make "New Year's resolutions" to lose weight or begin a regular exercise program.

Like many marketers, I used the final few weeks of 2024 to reflect on what happened during the year and plan for 2025. My objective for this blog has always been to provide information and insights that are timely, thought-provoking, and useful. To achieve this goal, the content of this blog needs to evolve to account for the always-changing landscape of B2B marketing.

Another Year Dominated By AI

Artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, was the hottest topic in marketing in 2024, as it had been in 2023. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggered an arm's race among technology companies to develop generative AI capabilities.

Spending on AI exploded in 2023 and continued at a blistering pace last year. In a November Forbes article, Beth Kindig, the CEO and Lead Tech Analyst of I/O Fund, wrote that AI-driven capital spending by four tech industry behemoths - Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon - will total about $240 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2023.

Ms. Kindig's article also noted that AI-related capital spending will likely continue at these nosebleed levels into 2025 as the big tech companies build out AI infrastructure to meet demand that currently exceeds supply.

The capabilities of the large language models that power generative AI also improved exponentially in 2024. For a great overview of these technological advances, I recommend you watch this video by Christopher Penn, the Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights.

Generative AI is already having an impact on many aspects of business including marketing, even though we are still in the fairly early stages of AI adoption. AI will have an even greater impact on marketing this year as more AI-enabled software applications become available, the adoption of AI increases, and marketers become more adept at leveraging AI's capabilities.

How This Blog Will Change in 2025

I plan to make a few changes in my approach to this blog in 2025. Most of these changes are based on my decision to apply greater selectivity to the content I publish here. This means I will probably publish fewer posts in 2025 than in previous years.

Since 2023, I've published three types of posts here - research round-ups, book reviews, and general information/opinion posts. Here's what I'm planning for each of these types of posts in 2025.

Research Round-Ups

These posts typically include brief descriptions of two to four research studies. In 2024, my three most popular posts were research round-ups.

Most of the generally available research about B2B marketing consists of surveys of marketers. While this kind of research can be useful, research that focuses on the thinking and behaviors of business buyers is even more valuable.

This year, I'll be looking for surveys of business buyers, and I'll also be looking for studies based on research methodologies other than surveys, such as the study I discussed in my most popular post of 2024.

Book Reviews

I published eight book reviews in 2024, and while no book reviews made the 2024 "top 10" list, I believe books remain an important knowledge resource for marketers. I'll continue to publish book reviews this year, but I plan to be more selective when choosing books to review. Therefore, I'll probably publish fewer book reviews in 2025 than in 2024.

General Information/Opinion Posts

In January 2023, I published a post that made the following argument:

"Marketing success in 2023 and beyond will depend on marketers' ability to leverage the capabilities of technology and data science and to effectively apply the principles of behavioral science that describe how people make decisions. These two distinct, but complementary, abilities now constitute the yin and yang of high-performance marketing."

This argument is even more true today than it was two years ago. The smart use of artificial intelligence has the potential to drive remarkable gains in marketing productivity, but those gains won't be realized unless marketers also design and implement strategies that reflect how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

I've published several posts discussing the cognitive aspects of B2B buying over the past few years, and I'll continue to address those topics in 2025.

Leveraging behavioral science principles in marketing is necessary, but some marketers believe more is needed. A relatively small but growing cadre of B2B marketers are arguing that the current paradigm of B2B marketing is out-of-step with how most B2B buying decisions are actually made.

These marketers contend that we need a fundamentally different approach to B2B marketing, one that is grounded in an accurate understanding of real-world market dynamics and buyer decision-making.

I largely agree with this point of view so I'll be discussing this topic in several posts over the next few months.

Here's to a year of successful marketing in 2025!

Our 10 Most Popular Posts of 2024

This will be my last post of 2024, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. My goal here has always been to provide content that readers will find informative, thought-provoking, and useful, and I've been immensely gratified by the attention and engagement this blog has received.

For several years, I've used my last post of the year to share which posts have been most widely read. For this list, I'm only considering posts published in 2024. I've ranked the posts based on cumulative total reads. Therefore, those published early in the year have an advantage.

So, in case you missed any of them, here are our ten most popular posts of 2024.

    1.    [Research Round-Up] The Effectiveness of AI-Generated Images for Marketing 

    2.    [Research Round-Up] Insights From "The CMO Survey" and Nielsen's Annual Marketing Report

    3.    [Research Round-Up] The Latest From NetLine On B2B Content Consumption   

    4.    The Powerful Head Start B2B Marketers Shouldn't Ignore

    5,    [Research Round-Up] New Study Shows the Continuing Value of B2B Thought Leadership

    5.    Why B2B Marketers Need to Care About "Opportunistic Learning"

    7.    Decoding the Critical Components of Buyer Trust

    8.    Halos, Horns, and Content Marketing 

    9.    Is B2B Brand Marketing Making a Comeback? 

    10.   Is B2B Marketing Fulfilling Its Revenue Growth Mandate?

Happy holidays to everyone, and best wishes for a great 2025!

Illustration courtesy of Dark Dwarf via Flickr (CC).

B2B Brand Management Basics - Part 2

This is the second in a short series of posts discussing some of the basic principles of B2B brand management. In Part 1, I described the ongoing debate in B2B marketing between the advocates of brand building and the proponents of demand generation marketing, and I observed that B2B brand building seems to be making a comeback.

I also noted that Proctor & Gamble invented the business function we now call brand management and that most of what we know about building and managing strong brands originated in B2C companies. As a result, many B2B marketers don't have extensive experience with brand management.

The purpose of these posts is to entice B2B marketers to learn more about a skill set that is increasingly vital for B2B marketing success.

Let's start with three basic questions.

What Is a Brand?

The members of most professions share a common view of the core elements of their trade. If you ask 20 accountants what "net profit" means, you're likely to get 20 similar answers.

That's not true for many aspects of marketing. If you ask 20 marketers what "brand" means, you'll probably receive a wide range of definitions.

The American Marketing Association defines "brand" fairly narrowly: "A brand is any distinctive feature like a name, term, design, or symbol that identifies goods or services."

Philip Kotler, who is often described as the "father of modern marketing," offers a similar definition:  "A name, term, symbol or design (or a combination of them) which is intended to signify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competitors." 

Many marketing thought leaders have defined "brand" more expansively. Here's a sample from a longer list collected by Heidi Cohen.

• Seth Godin - "A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another."

• Ann Handley - "Brand is the image people have of your company or product. It's who people think you are. Or quoting Ze Frank, it's the 'emotional aftertaste' that comes after an experience (even a second-hand one) with a product, service or company."

• David Ogilvy - "The intangible sum of a product's attributes:  its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised."

• Al Ries - "A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect."

Strictly speaking, the AMA and Kotler definitions are more accurate. Most marketing academics would argue that the thought leader definitions conflate "brand" with other concepts such as brand image and brand preference. However, those definitions are likely to be more meaningful to many brand managers.

Which brings us to the second question.

What Is the Goal of Brand Management?

The prime directive of brand management, whether B2C or B2B, is to create, build, and sustain brands that win in the marketplace. "Winning in the marketplace" is typically measured using some combination of high-level performance metrics such as revenue growth, unit sales growth, market share growth, and profitability.

In some large consumer package goods companies with a substantial number of sizeable brands and mature brand management functions, brands are often treated almost like independent businesses. This approach shapes the role of the brand manager, and that's the subject of our third question.

What Are the Responsibilities of a Brand Manager?

Brand managers are sometimes described as "mini CEOs." While that description is an exaggeration, it does capture the broad scope of a brand manager's responsibilities, particularly in companies that view their brands as distinct businesses.

In these companies, the brand manager is responsible for developing the brand's business strategy. This strategy includes (among other things) how the brand will be positioned in the marketplace, how the brand will be marketed, and how the brand's products will be priced and distributed. Brand managers are also deeply involved in managing brand innovation, including product improvements and new product launches.

The specific responsibilities of brand managers will obviously vary across companies, but there are common themes. I recently pulled a few brand manager job descriptions from actual online job postings. Here's a mashup of some of the important brand manager responsibilities contained in those job descriptions.

• Formulates and executes annual marketing plans for the brand, ensuring alignment with the objectives of maximizing brand growth and profitability.

• Manages the brand's marketing budget to maximize short-term and long-term business growth.

• Oversees the design and quality of the brand's products to consistently meet brand standards and fulfill the brand promise.

• Analyzes relevant data to anticipate trends, assess strategic implications, and drive new product development.

• Collaborates with the Company's finance department and other relevant business leaders to review sales and financial data to identify customer issues and opportunities while monitoring overall business health.

• Fosters strong relationships with business management and sales teams by preparing impactful sales presentations, participating in sales calls, and facilitating open communication for effective problem-solving.

Even this partial list shows that a brand manager is often tasked with broad job responsibilities that require both marketing and general business expertise.

The next post in this series will discuss what is probably the single most important concept in brand management - positioning.

Image courtesy of Limelight Leads via Flickr (CC).

B2B Brand Management Basics - Part 1

 

A few weeks ago, I published a post that asked, "Is B2B Brand Marketing Making a Comeback?" My post was prompted by the release of Dentsu's 2024 update to its Superpowers Index study. 

The 2024 update was based on interviews with 3,528 business buyers. Dentsu provided the interviewed buyers 30 decision drivers and asked them to rate the drivers based on how much influence each driver had on their buying decisions.

The three most influential decision drivers identified by the buyers were all characterized by Dentsu as personal drivers, and the firm noted that 2024 was the first time personal decision drivers outweighed functional drivers in overall importance. This finding led Dentsu to assert, "Brand has never been more important in B2B."

Other recent studies have also highlighted the importance of having a strong B2B brand. For example, Bain & Co. and Google surveyed 1,208 business buyers at U.S. companies in 2022. From 80% to 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research, and 90% of those respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor on their day-one list.

Therese Parkes with Google wrote that this behavior "means brand building and remaining top of mind during this process is essential." 

The Great Debate

The relative importance of brand building vs. demand generation (a/k/a "performance marketing") has been the subject of a long-running debate in the B2B marketing community. 

For nearly two decades, most B2B marketers have been primarily focused on improving the performance of their demand generation programs., and most of the B2B marketing literature published during that period was also focused on demand gen marketing technologies and techniques.

But despite this lopsided focus, interest in brand building has recently been increasing. Over the past couple of years, I've noticed a growing number of articles, blog/LinkedIn posts, and other forms of content addressing the importance of having a strong brand in B2B.

This increased interest has been fueled by several factors. A growing number of B2B marketers have recognized that business buying decisions are usually driven as much by emotional and psychological factors as by rational thinking processes.

B2B marketers are also recognizing that a strong brand can improve the performance of demand generation marketing programs, reduce the price sensitivity of business buyers, and strengthen customer loyalty.

The Birth of Brand Management

Most of what we've learned about building strong brands originated in B2C companies. In the 1930s, Proctor & Gamble invented the business function that would come to be called brand management, and by the late 1950s, brand management practices had been widely adopted by U.S. consumer package goods (CPG) companies.

In 1974, the Association of National Advertisers estimated that 85% of U.S. CPG companies (and 93% of those with annual advertising expenditures of more than $10 million) had implemented brand management functions and practices. ("Lessons from nearly a century of the brand management system")

Marketing is a recognized academic discipline that's been widely taught at the university level for decades. However, Professor Kimberly A. Whitler at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business argues that there's a "theory-doing gap" in marketing education.

In her book, Positioning for Advantage, Professor Whitler wrote:

"Most undergraduate courses tend to be theory or concept based, with few using tools or workshops to teach students how to create, build, or construct successful brands. Consequently, the vast majority of marketers discover what marketing is, and how to create marketing strategies and plans, from their employers on the job."

In her research, Professor Whitler found that almost all of the companies that excel at developing C-level marketing leaders were from the CPG or retailing industry. She offered an explanation for this finding in Positioning for Advantage:

"What do these developers of C-level marketing talent have in common? They all have systematic and science-based systems, processes, and approaches to building superior brands . . . The marketers in these firms are typically profit and loss (P&L) leaders in their firms and play an upstream role, often being expected to lead the development of the strategic plans that will drive growth. This differs from the nearly 50 percent of companies that treat marketing as only a sales activity existing just to commercialize the products that other firm leaders create."

Brand Management for B2B

Given the B2C origin and evolution of brand management, it's not surprising that many B2B marketers don't have extensive experience with the discipline. However, it's clear that brand building is becoming an increasingly vital aspect of B2B marketing success.

I'm planning to publish a short series of posts discussing a few of the basic concepts and principles of brand management. These posts will barely scratch the surface of a complex topic, but I hope they will encourage B2B marketers to learn more.

Image courtesy of EdgeThreeSixty via Flickr (CC).

It's Time to Change How We Think About Content Marketing

Last month, Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs released selected findings from their 15th annual content marketing survey. This survey was conducted between June 25 and August 16, 2024, and generated 980 responses from B2B marketers located (mostly) in North America. 

The annual CMI/MarketingProfs survey has been one of my go-to resources for more than a decade. As with earlier editions of the research, the latest survey provides valuable insights regarding how B2B companies are doing content marketing and what practices are critical to success.

I've been a long-time advocate of content marketing. I've published over 200 posts about content marketing since I launched this blog in 2010. Over my 20-year career in marketing, I've watched content marketing evolve from a niche marketing technique to a core component of marketing at most B2B and B2C companies.

Given its widespread adoption and proven strengths, it might seem odd to suggest that the time has come for marketers to think differently about content marketing. But a change is needed and, in fact, is overdue.

I'm not suggesting that content-focused marketing is no longer effective, but I am arguing that it's time to stop treating content marketing as a separate marketing discipline and start focusing on how to use the rich diversity of content to support marketing objectives that will drive strategic business outcomes.

A Quick Look at Content Marketing Evolution

The Gartner hype cycle was developed to track the maturity of emerging technologies, but it is also often used to describe the evolution of marketing techniques and practices. In this framework, a new marketing practice usually receives a huge amount of hype when it first appears, which leads to the spread of inflated expectations for the practice.

When a practice fails to meet these unreasonable expectations, many marketers become disillusioned with it, and some abandon it entirely. In time, however, some marketers develop more realistic expectations for the practice and begin to use it productively.

We also often see a second pattern in the evolution of marketing practices that runs alongside the Gartner hype cycle. When a new marketing practice begins to gain significant attention, a gaggle of "experts" soon appears to help companies adopt and use the practice.

These experts usually describe the practice as a new and distinct marketing discipline. Some argue that the new practice should replace other marketing methods and that the "old" rules of marketing no longer apply. Over time, however, astute marketers recognize that the fundamental objectives of marketing haven't changed, and they begin to view the new practice as a tool for achieving those objectives.

This pattern is clearly evident in the evolution of content marketing. When its popularity and use began to grow, we quickly came to view content marketing as a distinct marketing discipline. Overall, this was good because it fostered the rapid development of a substantial body of knowledge about how to do content marketing effectively. The downside of this approach is that it made it easy to view content marketing as an end unto itself.

The essence of content marketing is using informative or entertaining content to, as CMI put it, "attract and retain a clearly defined audience - and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action." Such content is the "fuel" for marketing programs that are designed to achieve a variety of marketing objectives.

Most strategic marketing objectives - such as revenue growth and increased market share - have remained largely unchanged for many years. Therefore, what we now call content marketing is about using a distinctive kind of content to achieve long-standing marketing goals.

Why the Different Way of Thinking Matters

Source:  Pat Pilon via Flickr

Focusing on "content as a vehicle for achieving marketing objectives" rather than on "content marketing" may seem like an inconsequential difference, but it has meaningful implications. For one thing, it should inform how we approach marketing performance measurement.

Measuring the performance of content marketing programs has been a hot topic for several years, and numerous marketing pundits have offered measurement frameworks for this purpose. However, most companies should not focus on measuring the performance of content marketing per se.

In virtually all B2B companies, marketing will be responsible for three core types of marketing communication programs - brand building programs, demand generation programs, and customer retention programs. In some cases, marketing is also responsible for developing content for the company's sales enablement program.

These programs are the mechanisms through which marketing achieves (or doesn't achieve) its strategic objectives, and the performance of these programs is what companies should measure. Content is an essential element in all these programs, but it is only one of several factors that will determine program success.

Therefore, metrics that focus only on content performance won't adequately measure program performance. A good marketing performance measurement system will include content-related metrics, but the primary metrics should be focused on the outcomes that each type of program is designed to produce and, ultimately, on the business impacts of those programs.

The Most Profound Marketing Practices Disappear

In a 1991 article for Scientific American, the late Mark Weiser, then the chief technology officer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center wrote:  "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."

Content marketing has been one of the most profound marketing developments of the past two decades. The development, management, and dissemination of content have become essential marketing competencies. Content marketing has been assimilated into the fabric of marketing and is simply the way marketing is now done. 

Top image courtesy of The Wild Blogger via Flickr (CC).

"No Decisions" - Why They Happen and What You Can Do About Them

The quest to understand how people make buying decisions has probably consumed more brainpower than any other topic in marketing and sales. In B2B, we've also devoted a lot of time and energy to diagnosing why some potential customers fail to make any purchase after conducting a thorough buying process.

Such outcomes are usually called no decisions, and several studies have shown that B2B companies lose more sales to no decisions than to competitors. In the research for their 2022 book, The JOLT Effect, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna found that between 40% and 60% of prospective sales result in no decisions.

Rational vs. Non-Rational No Decisions

Some no decisions are entirely rational. For example, a potential customer may decide not to buy because their current solution is superior or equivalent to the proposed alternatives. In such cases, the alternatives don't provide enough additional value to justify a change.

However, many no decisions can't be explained on a rational basis. These are situations where the potential customer has recognized the existence of an issue or challenge that needs to be addressed, the fit and business case for the proposed solution are strong, and the price of the proposed solution is affordable. But despite these circumstances, the potential customer decides not to buy.

Such "non-rational" no decisions point to the role of human emotion and psychology in B2B buying. An impressive body of research has shown that many B2B buying decisions are driven more by emotional and psychological factors than by logic.

So, how do emotions and psychological factors drive no decisions? To answer this question, the starting point is understanding the power and prevalence of fear in B2B buying.

How Fear Drives No Decisions

More than a decade ago, Enquiro conducted a landmark study of the B2B buying process. The research used several methods to gather data from almost 4,000 individuals involved in B2B buying. A core finding of the study was that B2B buying is not a rational process, but rather an "emotional, heuristic process" in which fear plays a leading role.

Gord Hotchkiss, the CEO of Enquiro, discussed the results of the study in The Buyersphere Project, where he described the role of fear in B2B buying in unequivocal terms. He wrote:

"B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk. And in that, there are two distinct types of risk. There is organizational risk, typically formalized and dealt with in various procurement processes and then there is personal risk, which is unstated but remains a huge influencing factor in organizational buying."

The personal risk that is present at some level in every B2B buying situation is the risk that the decision-maker will be blamed if the purchase doesn't deliver the promised benefits. So, fear of blame is a hidden force in every B2B buying situation.

Personal risk often causes business buyers to practice what psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has called defensive decision-making.*

Defensive decision-making occurs when a business buyer doesn't choose the option that would probably produce the most benefits for his or her company, but instead chooses the option that will protect him or her in case something goes wrong.

Defensive decision-making can easily lead business buyers to view their status quo as the safest option, and that results in a no decision.

A Strong Brand Reduces No Decisions

You will never completely eliminate no decisions. As I noted earlier, some no decisions are completely rational. Sometimes, your offering won't be significantly better than what your prospect is already using or doing. Your objective should be to identify these situations early in the sales process so that you don't waste time pursuing a deal you are unlikely to win.

Reducing the number of non-rational no decisions is challenging because, by definition, you are dealing with emotional and psychological factors that are difficult to identify and usually differ for every buyer.

In The JOLT Effect, Dixon and McKenna lay out a four-pronged approach that sales reps can use to reduce no decisions. The authors argue that high-performing reps look for ways to "take risk off the table" (the "T" in JOLT). Examples of these tactics include free trials, opt-out clauses in contracts, and performance guarantees.

One of the most effective ways to reduce non-rational no decisions is to build and sustain a strong brand presence in the relevant market. A strong brand reduces the level of personal risk associated with choosing your company.

If your company/brand is well-known by the decision-maker's superiors and colleagues, the perceived risk is even lower. This explains the rationale of the quote:  "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

In a recent paper published by The B2B Institute, Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and author of Alchemy, described the power of a strong brand to reduce risks:

"A decision to appoint a respected brand is much less reputationally risky than the appointment of an unknown. If you appoint a well-known company to a task and things go wrong, your colleagues are likely to blame the supplier. If you appoint someone obscure, they may blame you."

Advocates of brand marketing often assert that building a strong brand will improve the performance of demand generation programs, make buyers more willing to pay a premium price, and increase customer loyalty. Unfortunately, it's not usually clear why a strong brand delivers these benefits. One likely reason is that buyers are apt to view a strong brand as the safest choice.

*Gerd Gigerenzer is director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam. For a more in-depth discussion of defensive decision-making, see his book, Risk Savvy:  How to Make Good Decisions.

Image courtesy of Dan Moyle via Flickr (CC).