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Chip Hian Heng is the CEO of clickTRUE Malaysia
Here’s a fact you already know, organizational buying decisions are complex. Shaping your B2B sales and marketing strategies to make it past the organizational gateway and into the relationships with people making top-level decisions at a multinational corporation takes deep empathy.
The B2B buying process is a non-linear journey an organization takes to purchase from a B2B vendor for company growth.
With that, who you approach will impact the response you’ll receive to your offering.
As a B2B Business Head, your marketing and sales pipeline will involve supplying fitting information at each stage of the buying journey. What you’ll need are comprehensive content pieces to guide their choices leading up to a purchasing decision. Gone are the days where consumers make a purchase directly from advertisements. With that said, there are 8 stages of the B2B buying process you'll need to keep in mind and B2B sales & marketing approaches catered to the organizational buyer, directly shaping your overall business acquisition strategy.
Problem Discovery
A need in an organization can be categorized as internal and external triggers. Internal triggers could be a business problem that arises through operational errors, system flaws, or staff member actions. External triggers could result from a salesperson's awareness, an ad, or maybe even developments from your competitors. As the organization discovers a problem, you can begin to consider how your solution can to penetrate the opportunity.
2. Problem Definition
Upon acknowledging a need, it's mandatory for the buyers to define it by forming a description that everyone understands. By doing so, stakeholders can understand its nature and the solution to seek. A visual viewpoint could be working alongside engineers, operational managers, sales representatives, and others to identify product characteristics and, with that knowledge, understand the product-related concerns.
You could strategize with your marketing department to prepare relevant content pieces to position your solution to address the organization's newly defined problem.
Supplying awareness, upper-funnel content should suffice for this stage. For instance:
1. Educational infographics
2. How-to tutorial videos
3. Blog posts
4. Customer success stories
As a result, the prospective customer will naturally discover your products and services, making them more open to a sale.
3. Product Specification
Next in line is technical specifics. It’s usually the engineering department's responsibility to suggest a few alternatives with sufficient detailing to ensure that it aligns with the organization's understanding of the solution needed.
This will be an excellent time to bring up analytics on those content assets you deployed to check for email open rates, video views, website visits so that you can tailor your contact approach with the prospect. We'd highly recommend creating a buyer persona with all your learnings, too. It will add strength to your foundation for successful B2B marketing & selling.
With that, you’ll be able to acclimatize your initial contact with the buyer and put your brand top-of-mind on the prospect.
4. Supplier Research
At this stage, the buyer conducts deeper investigations by sifting through company reviews, publications, case studies, and also consulting peers from other corporations for opinions and recommendations.
To ascertain the impact of your B2B sales & marketing strategy, you will need to grasp the buyer’s pain points accurately to meet the needs of their investigation.
The Sandler Pain Funnel presents a series of strategic questions (in order) to better reveal the pain points driving the prospect’s research.
The 8 questions are as follows:
In addition to asking the right questions, get your page ready with:
These will not only add value to their research but boost your chances of obtaining the deal.
5. Proposal Qualification
At this point in the journey, the organization qualifies the suppliers after notifying them to submit proposals. Depending on the vendor, some may only send a catalogue while others a sales representative. Given the decision-making complexity, this proposal should closely replicate your overall sales and marketing strategy to target the customer.
From your end, prepare to set up a private meeting (physically or remotely) to personalize your sales pitch to suppor and strengthen your proposal. As a Business Head, adding your insights to your salesperson’s presentation will increase credibility.
6. Supplier Decision
The buyer then skims through the proposals and selects one after evaluating the vendors under their consideration. The process comprises careful reviewing in areas such as capabilities, reputation, customer references, warranty, etc.
Here's where your empathy will set the tone for this decision stage meeting. Use this opportunity to let your prospect fill in the gaps in your conversation. Ideally, you should be doing less talking and more listening to make them feel heard and understood.
In the moments you do get to speak, teach rather than sell. Offer advice to help them improve their business, and you'll quickly earn their trust and build on your credibility.
7. Contract Finalization
Next, the organization determines the final order with the chosen solution provider, laying out the technical specifics, the quantity necessary, warranty finalization, etc.
The timing of your follow-up will need to be carefully thought through. Jumping in too soon may cost you the sale at the last minute. Nonetheless, if you're too nonchalant, you may not get to finalize the contract.
Studies from Forrester found that 59% of B2B customers prefer managing relationships on their own. This indicates a mindset of potentially not liking the idea of being pursued by salespeople.
With that in mind, you’ll have to understand your prospect. Growing the skill of balancing personalization, persistence, and perception will help you understand how your prospects like to be approached.
8. Performance Examination
The final stage is often the organization assessing the supplier's performance after a couple of weeks in and providing feedback for future improvements, which either party may initiate. It'll tighten areas like efficiency, quality, customer satisfaction, and other facets.
Your after-sales services should be top-notch to ensure the solution meets the customer demands and craft considerations for future strengthening that will improve customer satisfaction and maybe even gain brand loyalty.
Happy clients pave the way for valuable case studies and testimonials that could impact your prospective clients. Unhappy clients create opportunities to learn why things aren't working out and respond with growth-driven ideas.
To conclude, It's important to note that the eight-stage buying process described above is only applicable to new tasks, which often involves a high level of complexity and deep involvement in the buyer's purchasing decisions as the Head of Strategic Business.
For straight and modified rebuys, organizations may implement condensed versions of the process. In some instances, certain stages may be irrelevant when a supplier has already been chosen.
Some corporations may find e-procurement processes ideal when routine buying is involved in which the selected supplier provides a variety of goods at a pre-negotiated deal.
Nevertheless, your sales cycle can be shortened with inbound marketing (content marketing). Addressing needs and pain points head-on with blogs, webinars, and case studies build your prospect’s trust in you as you show them that you’ve done the work of understanding their needs. As a result, it’ll increase the likelihood of having your buyers choose you as their solution provider.
Download this case study to get a clearer picture of the buying journey, pain points, motivations, and goals from a B2B buyer persona that will inevitably increase your impulses in leading your marketing & sales teams.