Adam Benson, CEO, Outsource
I talk to a lot of CEOs, MDs, marketing directors and sales managers. Seriously, a lot.
My particular focus, by virtue of my personal work history, is supporting organisations that sell complex, high-value solutions to larger companies and government (think the B2B tech sector mostly). I help organisations position themselves in their chosen markets, scale their marketing efforts to a more industrial, repeatable, always-on process, and show them how to align to customer needs better in their marketing.
I’m not a guru. I don’t know everything. Far from it. I learn something every day from my team, our clients, competitors and the market. Gurus frighten me. I think it’s their beards.
One thing I have come to believe though is that many marketers and leaders of technically oriented organisations spend too much time thinking about the WHO and not the WHY when it comes to the prospects they’re trying to reach.
Let me explain.
Often, when we’re thinking about marketing, one of the first questions that comes up is “Who are we selling to?” And the answer, eight times out of ten, is a list of demographic, sociographic, psychographic and other ‘aphic’ dimensions that describe an ideal client. This is the ‘customers that look like this’ approach. It’s useful to a point. If you sell enterprise-grade software it makes no sense to market to your local, independent kindergarten.
And the extension to this market identification exercise is building out buyer personas.
Buyer personas are a way for us to try to visualise the human buyer(s) that sit behind a prospect company’s purchase order.
We want to know things like: What are they responsible for in their job? What pressures do they have in their day? What problems are they trying to solve for their organisation? Where do they get their information to make decisions? What are their KPIs? How old are they? What level of training or experience do they have? What role do they report to? What decisions do they have the power to make? Are they rich and single? The list goes on.
I’d be pointlessly contrarian to say that buyer personas aren’t important. If you can accurately map out the values, beliefs, experience and everything else about the humans you need to reach, influence and convince to make a purchase, then do it. It’s going to help you speak TO and not AT your audience. Your messaging, tone, language and approach will all be the better for it. Of course it will. (Just don’t believe your own data too much; building awareness at a category level is just as important as picking off individuals to try to reach.).
So, in summary, these are both good things to do. So why then do so many technical companies throw most of that out the window when they write their website copy or prepare their sales presentations or other marketing and sales content? Instead, they focus on WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE DO and WHO WE DO IT FOR.
Blink to let me know if this is your company.
We sell X (insert hardware, software, service). This might be a product or it might be a solution. Our X delivers the following benefits: lists the good things that happen when you buy our stuff. Organisations that use our solutions include companies such as: names of relevant customers.
Again, if you’re an educated, informed buyer and at the bottom of the funnel most of this works OK. You know what you want, you found the company that has a plausible solution and you want to compare products and features, and know you’re in good company if you make a purchase.
Except it’s not really OK.
Organisations that buy complex, high-value solutions want to know those things for sure. And, for the most part, they expect that you have happy customers and products that work. You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t. It’s a business hygiene factor. It’s a bit like saying ‘Our solutions will move your business forward.’ Well, I’d certainly hope they don’t move you backwards.
I digress.
Organisations that buy complex, high-value solutions are really seeking a supplier that de-risks the purchase better than all the alternatives. These are risks such as:
- Operational risk – will the technology support or potentially interrupt (or end) our business?
- Financial risk – can costs be contained? Is the scope and process for implementation or support clear?
- Political risk – will I be fired if this goes horribly wrong? Is the board reassured that risks are manageable?
- Social risk – might this cost us our social licence if it fails to perform as advertised? If this fails would our ambulance calling system go offline? Would our power station fail or our planes fall out of the sky? (You might call this operational risk as well I expect!)
- Reputational risk – will we be thought less of, or lose our favoured status because the solution we bought failed in a visible way?
Not every risk is of equal weight for every company of course. But they are all considerations in some way; and I haven’t listed all the risks, either.
You’ll note that financial risk is not about the price of your solution.
In fact, for large, complex purchases, the price of a low-risk, effective solution is correlated to the value of that risk mitigation. A cardiac surgeon doesn’t need to offer you “Crazy Discount October” pricing to convince you to have emergency life saving surgery. You are mostly interested in whether you will live or die – not what the price is. (It’s a slightly dramatic illustration, but I contend that the logic holds).
Last note on price. If buyers of high-value, complex solutions are asking about price very early in the sales engagement process something is amiss. My view is that, when buyers can’t work out what value you offer, how you work or how to measure the benefits you purport to deliver, then they ask about price. It’s something they understand and it’s a yardstick to measure ‘something’ from the otherwise confusing and poorly defined discussion they’ve been having up until now. You’re on the ropes at this point even if you don’t know it yet.
Back to the main point.
So, if the most important consideration for a buyer is de-risking (and then validation of your company and its solutions) then it follows that your website and your top and middle-of-funnel digital content should present messages that speak directly to those risks.
I like to phrase it as: for X-sort of companies that have Y problem, we do Z so they can A. Let’s break this pseudo-algebraic, quasi-scientific expression down into actual words,
X-sort of companies. We know who we’re best suited to serve and, if this is you, then you’ve come to the right place. And, if it’s not you, then we’re probably not geared up to help you, or want to, frankly. You don’t map to our optimised business model. Your conviction and focus builds confidence with the kinds of customers you want to reach. Michael Porter calls this ‘focus’ in his Generic Strategies model.
That have Y problem. We understand exactly why you’re on this site or consuming this content. The fact that we have mentioned this problem by name demonstrates that we are part of your world, have experience to share and expertise you can draw on.
To be clear, we’re talking about specific problems here, not broad generalisations. There’s a big difference between saying you help companies build more efficient business processes (broad) versus saying you help companies that are under constant pressure to meet quarterly financial reporting cycles because they rely on spreadsheets (specific).
We do Z. We have a solution that maps exactly to the situation we just described. As an organisational buyer, you’re looking for clarity, fit and focus from your suppliers. You are working hard to separate the fluff from the facts. A precise description, mapping exactly back to the most likely problem (or problems) you’re seeking answers to is powerful.
So they can A. Not only do we understand exactly your problem, and what we will do to solve it, we understand your ideal end state. We are aligned with your definition of success.
If you put all this together what am I really saying? It’s this.
If you know WHY your company, solution or product is relevant to your ideal customer, and you can articulate it in terms that matter to your defined audience, you will secure more of the right kinds of prospects. Simply knowing WHO your ideal client is, or simply explaining WHAT you do will fail to resonate with buyers who are still considering a number of alternative solutions. It’s all in the WHY.
Have a look at our ‘Why would you work with us’ statement on our site if you want to see another example. https://www.outsource.com.au/
