PDF In response to my last two posts, an “Open Letter to Buyers” and an “Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations”, I have tried to articulate the evolution in the conversations I’ve had about why social is disruptive to business as we know it, why a buyer-centric approach is so critical to the long-term viability of your business, and why your team needs to pay attention now. Continue reading “Welcome to the Buyer-Centric Movement” »
Posts Tagged ‘buying process’
The 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” »
Direct Marketing and SPAM: If you are not an approved IP address, you can’t message to this server
June 8th, 2011
Its amazing how many BtoB marketing communications, direct marketing,and demand generation firms claim that they do social marketing as well as the 50 other things that they drop on their list of “specialities”; “We do SEO, website building, marketing automation, demand generation, telemarketing, lead qualification, marketing analytics, web content development, and SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.”
Ok, after reading 50 of these websites, I am not even sure what social media marketing is…. I gather that they think it is Linkedin, Twitter, and throw in Facebook for good measure. Oh, throw in videos, blogging, podcasts, and webinars to be safe… Oh, also throw in our standard suite of services and something about ROI. Then let’s connect to everyone like crazy on twitter and make sure that we blog on a regular basis, show up to a bunch of marketing events, and put out a couple of press releases.
In truth, most of them don’t really know how to create inbound lead generation from social marketing. It isn’t easy, actually in many ways much harder than traditional marketing. It is a lot easier to load up a database, create a newsletter, and watch the “opens” rate and the hits to the websites. Oh, and add the ubiquitous, connect to us on (pick your platform) widget at the bottom next to the “do not contact” link.
Continue reading “Direct Marketing and SPAM: If you are not an approved IP address, you can’t message to this server” »
