One Vital Way to Cultivate Buyer Trust and Confidence

For the past several years, industry analysts and other thought leaders have been urging marketing and sales professionals to shift from selling to helping buyers buy. Advocates of this change argue that it will enable marketers and salespeople to better align with the decision-making needs of potential buyers and create more meaningful and trusting relationships.

The problem is, the helping buyers buy approach doesn't go quite far enough. As Tony Zambito, the founder of Buyer Persona, noted in a recent blog post, "If content and sales conversations are about helping to buy, then a mindset towards selling only can still exist. And it can be clear to buyers that you and your team are selling. That you want to help them buy your products, solutions, and services."

Tony suggests that a better approach for marketers and salespeople to adopt is:  "Helping buyers to accomplish future goals and meet future challenges." He argues that this approach will better align them with where many prospective buyers actually are in their decision-making process. Once marketers and salespeople have helped potential buyers "figure things out," they can then move to helping those potential customers to buy.

Helping buyers accomplish future goals and meet future challenges is the right first approach to use when engaging with a potential customer, but it will only be effective if the prospect's buying team believe the information and advice the prospective vendor provides is accurate and, more importantly, unbiased. Only then will potential buyers trust the information and advice enough to confidently rely on it to support their decisions.

The Importance of Decision Confidence

In an earlier post, I discussed the importance of helping potential buyers develop confidence in their decision-making process. Research by Gartner has found that decision confidence increases the likelihood of a positive decision relating to a "new" purchase by 2.6 times.

The best way for marketing and sales professionals to help potential buyers develop decision confidence is to provide accurate and objective information that will help decision makers make the most appropriate choices for their organization. And this can mean providing information or advice that might lead a buying team to decide not to purchase your product or service.

At this point, you may ask:  "Why would we want to provide information or advice that could lead a prospective customer not to do business with us?" The answer, of course, is that you don't want this circumstance to arise very often. And the best way to avoid being in this situation is to make wise choices about which prospective customers to work with.

Choose the Right Customers

Customer selection is a vital issue for both business strategy and marketing/sales strategy. In Playing to Win:  How Strategy Really Works, Roger L. Martin, a Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management, and A.G. Lafley, the former Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble, described a five-point framework for designing an effective business strategy. Martin and Lafley described their framework in the form of five basic questions. While all these questions are important, the two most critical in strategy formulation are:

1. Where will we play? -  In which markets, with which types of customers, in which channels, in which product categories, and at which vertical stage or stages of the industry will we compete?
2. How will we win? -  How will we succeed in our defined field of play?

For marketing and sales professionals, customer selection is the most important aspect of the "where to play" question. The objective should be to identify which types of prospective customers will be likely to purchase your products or services after performing a thorough evaluation of their needs and the available alternatives based on accurate and objective information.

Identifying this group of prospective customers will enable marketing and sales professionals to provide accurate and unbiased information and advice with the assurance that the probability of winning the prospect's business is high.

Image courtesy of Melanie Shaw via Flickr.com (CC).

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Research Takes the Pulse of B2B Marketers

B2B International (a Merkle B2B company) recently published the results of its 2021 B2B Marketing Monitor study (the "2021 Monitor"). The 2021 Monitor was based on a survey of 301 marketing, insight, customer experience and business strategy decision makers at B2B organizations. Respondents were drawn from North America (36%), Europe (40%) and APAC (24%). The survey was fielded in the first quarter of this year.

The 2021 Monitor primarily reflects the views of marketers and other business decision makers at large enterprises. The average annual revenue of the companies represented in the survey was $2.9 billion, and about 20% of the companies had annual revenue of over $15 billion. Respondents were affiliated with organizations operating in several industry verticals.

Optimism Reigns

B2B International found that survey participants were optimistic about the future of their business, their industry and their country in the first quarter of 2021. Seventy-five percent of the survey respondents said they were optimistic about the business outlook for their organization, 69% said they were optimistic about the economic outlook for their industry and 53% said they were optimistic about the economic outlook within their country or region.

These results echo the findings of the February 2021 edition of The CMO Survey. In that survey of 356 senior marketers at U.S. based companies, the respondents rated their optimism about the overall U.S. economy at 66.3 (0 = least optimistic, 100 = most optimistic). That surpassed the rating of 62.7 in the February 2020 edition of the survey, which was the last survey conducted before the onset of the pandemic.

Major Challenges in 2021

B2B International asked survey participants about what challenges they are facing and which of those challenges they are prioritizing to address this year. Respondents identified a group of four widespread, top priority challenges.

• Building/strengthening customer relationships in a digital world
• Connecting with customers on an emotional level to drive higher brand engagement
• Delivering an excellent CX throughout the entire customer lifecycle
• Leveraging data to inform more efficient and optimized marketing programs

More than 50% of the survey respondents said they were experiencing all of these challenges. Of the four challenges identified, delivering an excellent CX throughout the entire customer lifecycle was rated the most important priority, selected by 43% of the respondents as a top 3 priority challenge to address this year.

Top Marketing Strategies for 2021

The 2021 Monitor survey also asked participants what types of marketing activities they would primarily focus on this year. The following table shows the top five types of marketing activities identified by survey respondents.

Rating Performance

B2B International asked survey participants to evaluate their performance in two ways. First, the survey asked the participants to rate their performance on ten distinct marketing practices. The following table shows the five highest rated practices identified by respondents. The table shows the percentage of respondents who rated their performance as 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale.

Note that except for "thought leadership," only about a third of the respondents gave themselves high scores on any of these practices. And these were the practices respondents believed they performed best.

The 2021 Monitor also asked survey participants to rate their performance on six dimensions of customer experience - commitment, fulfillment, seamlessness, responsiveness, proactivity and evolution. The survey used a 10-point scale for this evaluation, and a score of 8, 9 or 10 was considered to be a "strong" rating. B2B International found that performance on all six CX dimensions had improved since the rating was performed in the 2019 edition of the monitor survey.

B2B International defined "CX Leader" as those who rated their performance as strong on at least five of the six CX dimensions. In the 2021 Monitor, 22% of the respondents qualified as CX Leaders. This was up from 15% in the 2019 edition of the survey.

Top Image Source:  B2B International

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How Business Professionals Actually Consume Content

Over the past fifteen years, content marketing has become one of the most widely-used techniques in B2B marketing. Today, virtually all B2B companies are using content marketing in some form.

Ironically, the popularity of content marketing has made successful content marketing more difficult to achieve. As companies produce more and more content, the total volume of content available to potential buyers increases exponentially. And so does competition for buyer attention.

In these circumstances, understanding how business buyers actually consume content is critical to success. The 2021 State of B2B Content Consumption & Demand Report by NetLine Corporation provides several valuable insights on this vital issue.

NetLine operates a content syndication platform, and this report is based on data about millions of content downloads that occurred on the NetLine platform in 2020. This research is particularly valuable for two reasons:

1. It captures the real-world content consumption behaviors of business professionals. The data used for the NetLine report was not derived from a survey or interviews, but from actual engagements with B2B content.
2. The report is based on first party data. The business professionals who use the NetLine platform voluntarily share information about themselves and the organizations they work for in exchange for access to the content resources available on the NetLine's platform.

The NetLine study produced a wealth of information about content consumption behaviors, and I encourage you to review the full report. Here are a few of the report's highlights.

The COVID Effect

As might be expected, the COVID-19 pandemic affected content consumption behaviors is several significant ways. NetLine's analysis found that overall B2B content consumption increased more than 22% in 2020. In fact, the volume of content consumed between February 1st and September 30th of last year equaled 83% of the volume of content consumed in all of 2019.

COVID-19 also affected the topics that business professionals were interested in. The NetLine report states:  "The events of the past year led to a surge in content consumption related to remote work, collaboration software, IT bandwidth, security, and the ripple effects on HR and the like."

Most Popular Content Formats

The ten most popular content formats in 2020 were:

1. eBooks
2. Guides
3. White papers
4. Cheat sheets
5. Tips and tricks
6. Research reports
7. Kits
8. Webinars
9. Magazines
10. Subscriptions

Collectively, these ten content formats accounted for 82% of all downloads from the NetLine platform last year. The three most popular formats - eBooks, guides and white papers - accounted for more than 63% of the total downloads in 2020.

Webinars were the eighth most frequently requested type of content on the NetLine platform in 2020, but this ranking doesn't accurately reflect how important webinars and other virtual events became last year. The pandemic forced the cancellation of essentially all trade shows, conferences and other in-person B2B marketing events, and this drove a tremendous increase in the use of webinars and other virtual events.

The number of webinars uploaded to the NetLine platform increased 103% in 2020, and the number of registrations for webinars increased 49%. Registrations for live virtual events grew by a staggering 2,660%.

Measuring the Consumption Gap

One of the most useful insights provided by the NetLine report relates to the consumption gap, which NetLine defines as the time between the moment content is requested and the moment it's opened for consumption. This data point is important because it should be used to guide the timing of follow-up contacts with potential buyers. After all, it makes little sense to contact a potential buyer about a content resource before he or she has actually reviewed the resource.

In 2020, the average consumption gap across all job categories was 29.7 hours, up from 28.5 hours in 2019. The authors of the report attribute this increase at least in part to the distractions and disruptions caused by the pandemic.

More Data Points

The NetLine report provides numerous other data points, including what job categories most actively requested content in 2020. It also breaks down some data by industry vertical. As I indicated earlier, this analysis provides a wealth of valuable insights, and I recommend that you review the full report.

Image Source:  NetLine Corporation

Why Helping Buyers Feel Confident Is Vital for Effective Marketing

In a 2020 survey of senior marketing leaders by Gartner, participants were asked to identify their company's primary strategy for fueling growth into 2021. The two most frequently identified growth strategies were increasing sales of existing products to existing customers (39% of respondents) and introducing new products to existing customers (34% of respondents). 

These survey findings demonstrate the importance marketing leaders place on increasing revenues from existing customers. But the reality is, many companies struggle to achieve their goals for revenue growth from existing accounts.

Other research by Gartner explored what factors drive growth from existing accounts and how marketers can support this objective. In this study, Gartner surveyed 1,100 B2B customers who had recently considered continuing or expanding their relationship with an existing supplier. The research tested three potential drivers of account growth - customer satisfaction, willingness to change, and decision confidence.

The Importance of Decision Confidence

The Gartner research identified an important distinction between a repurchase decision and a decision that involved expanding the relationship with a supplier (a "growth" decision). The study found that customer satisfaction had a major impact on repurchase decisions, but no significant effect on "growth" purchases. In contrast, Gartner found that decision confidence increased the likelihood of a positive growth decision by 2.6 times.

Gartner defined decision confidence as:  "The belief and feeling of affirmation that the buying group is exercising sound judgment."

While the Gartner definition captures the essence of the idea, I would argue that decision confidence is a multifaceted phenomenon that has three major components.

1. Confidence in the specific product or service selected
2. Confidence in the company's ability to successfully implement any organizational changes required to reap the full benefits of the product or service purchased
3. Confidence in the soundness of the process used to make the purchase decision

These components of decision confidence are obviously related, and it's unlikely that a growth purchase decision will be made until the buying team (and in some cases other senior business leaders) develop all three types of confidence.

Marketing's Role in Cultivating Decision Confidence

Marketers have an important role to play in cultivating all three types of buyer decision confidence given that B2B buyers are relying more and more on content to support their evaluation of potential purchases. It's important to recognize that decision confidence plays a vital role in growing revenue from both existing and new customers. It's also clear that marketers are doing a better job with some types of buyer decision confidence than others.

For example, many marketers are doing a good to very good job cultivating buyer confidence in their company's products or services. In fact, most of the content produced by marketers is designed (at least implicitly) to accomplish this objective.

Some marketers are also doing a good job supporting the development of buyer confidence in the ability of their company to make the organizational changes that will be necessary to reap the full potential benefits of a new product or service. A growing number of companies now have a dedicated customer success function that is tasked with helping customers maximize the value they obtain from the company's products or services.

Overall, marketers have been less effective at cultivating buyer confidence in the soundness of the process used to make purchase decisions. To be fair, some marketers - especially those in the technology space - have created "buying guides" or similar resources for at least some of their solutions. Over the past two-plus decades, I've reviewed dozens of these buying guides, and unfortunately, most of them focus almost entirely on the attributes, features, and capabilities that prospective buyers should look for when evaluating a particular type of solution.

While identifying critical product or service attributes, features, and capabilities is obviously important, more is needed for a sound, effective, and efficient buying process. Here's a partial list of the additional questions that a comprehensive "buying instruction manual" should address.

• Buying Team - Who should be on the buying team? How large should it be? Who should lead the team? How will the team make decisions?
• Needs/Requirements - How should the buying team identify and prioritize the company's needs and requirements pertaining to a new product or service? Hint:  A multi-page "checklist" of requirements isn't the best approach.
• Potential Vendors - How should the buying team identify relevant potential vendors and then decide which potential vendors to engage with?
• Solicitation Vehicle - What type of solicitation vehicle should the buying team use - an RFI, an RFP, or an RFQ? How should the team structure the solicitation document?
• Demos - How should the buying team structure and conduct demos to make them more relevant and valuable?

The specific content of an effective buying guide will, of course, be dictated by the nature of the product or service and by the size of the required financial investment.

Marketers must also recognize that a buying guide will only instill decision confidence if buyers perceive it to be objective and unbiased. Therefore, when developing a buying guide, marketers must resist the urge to create a document that explicitly or implicitly favors their company's solution. The sole objective of the buying guide should be to help prospective buyers make the best possible decision for their organization.

Top illustration courtesy of Chris & Karen Highland via Flickr (CC).