PDF We created a Buyer’s Bill of Rights a couple of months ago, but didn’t have the right context to explain the “why” of Buyer-Centric, but now in context it is becoming clear that this is the “how” to become buyer-centric in your engagement within your markets. Imagine if all vendors treated buyers this way how amazing our buying experiences would become. All movements start with a “moment” and a core of early evangelists. Here is to hoping this one catches on…. please, soon…. and start with the worst offenders who provide lights-out customer service… I mean literally “no one is home in our call-center bad service”… or the “SPAM to your inbox chokes” marketing offenders. Continue reading “Buyer-Centric Bill of Rights” »
Archive for the ‘Marketing for CEOs’ category
Buyer-Centric Bill of Rights
February 6th, 2012The Evolution to Buyer-Centric
February 6th, 2012As we have progressed to defining a “new” category of engagement in sales and marketing that we coined “Buyer-Centric” versus your traditional sales and marketing models, we have continued to develop better visual tools to help companies figure out where they are in their development. We decided that “social” was not helping people figure out why what we are seeing in the market is different that thinking about social media as a channel. Behavioral is too tactical and too esoteric. Continue reading “The Evolution to Buyer-Centric” »
Defining Buyer-Centric Marketing
February 6th, 2012We are Seeing a Disconnect Between The Way Buyer’s Approach the Market And The Solution-Centric Marketing That Vendors Provide
- Buyers are active and participating within on social websites, forums etc., but the social market is noisy, saturated, mature, and cluttered with vendors so buyers are faced with many options to choose from which makes the decision making process more difficult
- Vendors are using technical jargon (educated buyer) and needs to shift towards more “pain” and “generic” social search orientation for a less educated, but more strategic buyer.
How do you develop customer relationships, influence requirements, and drive sales if buyers are doing research and making buying decisions before your organization becomes aware and engaged?
- Understanding how buyers solve business problems, research and weigh solution options, reconciling various organizational motivations, along with assisting the organization to solidify business, functional, & technical requirements
- Identify buyer motivations, triggers for purchase, and research/selection/ buying process, and behavioral market segmentation
- Focus marketing engagement around buyer’s needs, not with solution awareness messaging
- Leverage social networks & online communities to reach buyers in their communities of interest
- Provide decision support, not solution advocacy
- Assist them in building targeted strategic business cases based upon their particular needs before then addressing
tactical functionality and feature requirements.
Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to Buyers
November 7th, 2011
We owe you a mea culpa…. We’ve been seller driven, not buyer driven. We’ve focused on selling you what we think you need (what we sell) versus helping you make better decisions. We haven’t helped you make the business case for why this is a significant problem. We’ve automated our marketing systems to better reach you, but never asked if or what you’re interested in. We’ve treated you as a company, not as a group of individuals with different needs, perspectives, and roles. We don’t know what a “day in your life” looks like to give us context as to why you don’t have the time to sit through our “canned” presentation, educate us on your business, and sift through all of our market claims.
Continue reading “Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to Buyers” »
Anti-Marketing is the Anti-Matter Equivelant for Marketing and is Now Back in Vogue
October 13th, 2011Anti-marketing is coming back into vogue. Anti-marketing is the anti-thesis of the flashy, emotional appeal. It is the lengthy, detailed, fact laden, and intellectual outline of the context of the problem, value proposition, feature and functionality comparison. In short, it isn’t short, but substantive. Not “anti” marketing where marketing is evil, but more like Anti-matter and matter. Marketing and anti-marketing cannot exist in the same space, but one cannot exist without the other. Anti-marketing is the long form of campaign marketing; not a “quick read”, but it is designed for those who want a more qualitative understanding of a solution to make an educated decision.
Look at ads pre-Madmen 1960’s where text was a large portion of an ad, but Madison Avenue changed and started to focus on eye candy to appeal to your emotions. Now, appeal to impuse purchase outweighs the educated, thoughtful, and careful deliberation.
