A few thoughts on B2B marketing – Page 2

The easiest sales to close are the ones where the competition have left them wide open

Many years ago I worked alongside the sales team of a B2B2C financial services company. The Sales Director was getting frustrated at the lack of sales being closed, and became even more frustrated when he discovered that his sales managers weren’t sticking to the agreed script when they went out to see prospects.

He’d had a mooch around the common drive and found that his sales managers were editing the “official” sales doc to suit their own presentation style.

This, clearly, would not do.

To counter this, he locked the “official” sales deck, and told his sales managers to use this version so that they couldn’t deviate from the narrative he believed was best to make a sale.

This puzzled me.

Surely the best sales people – even when they only have one solution to sell – position that solution so that in some way it meets the needs of the person they’re selling to.

The Sales Director was having none of it. His team were to sell his way, or not at all.

So far, so not-very-good.

Why your standard sales aid deck may not be an aid at all

In due course, the old Sales Director moved on, and an external candidate was brought in to shake things up. I sat alongside the new guy in his first sales pitch, as I was going to be the manager responsible for onboarding the new client if the sale was closed.

When we met at the client’s offices before the meeting, I asked him if he was going to be using the ‘mandated’ sales deck to present from.

“I’m not presenting from any deck, Simon” he told me. “I’m just going to ask our prospect a few questions”.

And ask he did.

After the usual “Hi-how-are-you” pleasantries, his opening question to the prospect was “So help me understand a little about how things are going here – can’t be easy in the current market?”

And so thus prompted, the client happily opened up to talk about market share, cost challenges, compliance challenges, budget challenges and the like.

And each time the prospect paused, the new Sales Director would nod; offer up a relevant market-related insight of his own; and asked the prospect to continue.

What fascinated me was that in the absence of a sales deck to talk to, the eye contact between the prospect and the Sales Director was pretty constant.

I’d never thought of a sales deck as being a distraction before – I’d always thought it was a framework around which a sales manager would build their argument.

Not here.

Instead, a meeting that under the old Sales Director’s mandate would have been a lecture (“I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna listen!”) the prospect and the new Sales Director had a discussion.

Using insight to lead the witness

It was clear from the tone of the discussion that the prospect was engaged and felt he was being listened to from the start.

But what was also curious was the direction the discussion was going.

Because the other thing that became quickly clear as the meeting progressed was that the new Sales Director had done a lot of prep.

He’d read up on the prospect and his boss via LinkedIn and trade press mentions.

He’d read up on the prospect’s business – market share, revenues, company report, and in particular the CEO statement that talked directly about the strategic direction he wanted to take the business.

But most intriguingly, he’d read up on the client’s incumbent provider, and done his own research on where they were vulnerable: in this case, high complaints levels, unmet promises, and slow service delivery.

So – not unlike a good prosecuting lawyer facing a guilt-ridden defendant – before he even asked a question, he knew what the prospect was going to say.

Which meant that over the course of perhaps 45 minutes, he was gently able to guide the prospect into saying that they had a range of challenges where the incumbent was under-performing – pretty much all of which could be solved in some way by what the Sales Director was there to sell him.

Why this is important

The way that meeting was conducted was quite revelatory for me.

Many of the key things I learned then I still apply today:

Sales is a dialogue, not a monologue. No one can be lectured into buying – not in B2B, anyway.

The phrase “Help me understand…” is one of the best opening lines you can use in a sales meeting.

Maybe leave the deck at home: promise to send it after the meeting so the prospect has something evidential to show their stakeholders?

But most importantly, if you want to sell to need, researching where the prospect is currently being sold short can be surprisingly lucrative.

Selling to weakness

Not all incumbents are weak in the same areas, of course.

Some will have poor post-sale implementation.

Some will have high ongoing running costs.

Some may be particularly poor at servicing a particular vertical, or a particular territory.

Some may not actually solve for the key issue they were appointed to solve.

However, not every sales manager has the time or resource to uncover empirical evidence of each competitor’s specific weaknesses in sufficient depth.

This is where having independent research can pay dividends, and where clients often engage me to help them.

I speak to their key competitors’ clients.

I ask them where they are happy with their incumbent provider.

Then, more importantly, I then ask them where they’re unhappy.

Over a period of interviews – either quantitative or qualitative, depending on the brief – I’m able to build a comprehensive view of which competitors are weak, and where, and what a competing vendor (that’s you, by the way) might need to offer to get them to switch.

Clients get a detailed report on the findings that tells them what propositions to lead with when pitching against each of their key competitors.

Which mean that instead of sticking to the standard script, sales managers can ask the pertinent questions most likely to gain traction with their prospect.

Because the easiest sales to close are the ones where your weaker competitors have left the sale wide open.

Need help?

If you want help researching where your own B2B competitors are weak, please get in touch.

Although based in the UK I work with clients internationally.

I’ve worked in B2B marketing for 25 years, and so readily understand the business context in which the research is being commissioned.

It also means that the recommendations and conclusions I draw are grounded in business reality.

I’ve access to a very wide panel of B2B business contacts that stretch across technology, professional services, engineering, financial services and beyond.

Leave me to find the areas where your rivals are weakest, and then leave your sales managers to exploit them.

[email protected]

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

Simon Hayhurst

“Sale” photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash

Why savvy marketers aren’t abandoning brand investment just yet

Imagine for a moment there are two luxury car brands. Let’s call them…oooh, I dunno…Mercedes and BMW.

Let’s imagine both are facing a downturn in sales as inflationary pressures bite into household expenditure, and customers think they’ll delay renewing their existing model for another year. (No idea if this is true, by the way, but it’s not hard to imagine).

Sales fall, profits fall, and there’s pressure on both marketing departments to drive more traffic into showrooms. The marketing budget is fixed, so any investment in increased sales activation (dealer mailings, showroom promotions) has to come out of brand spend (outdoor, TV, glossy press).

Let’s imagine that one brand (let’s say BMW) cut and run – all brand spend is cut, and all the saved money goes into sales activation.

The other (Mercedes in this case, but obviously it’s just an example) maintain a balance of brand advertising and sales activation.

Question: what happens to sales, profit, and profit margins for each brand in the short, medium and long term?

My hypothesis is that in this case, BMW see an initial increase in showroom footfall relative to Mercedes. Brand advertising is great at penting up long-term demand, but sales activation is much better at releasing it. BMW’s showroom footfall is maintained and converts to sales at a decent premium. Mercedes sales stagnate by comparison. BMW win the short term.

In the medium to long term, however, something different happens.

Mercedes, through persistence in brand advertising, maintain a reputation for being an upmarket manufacturer of desirable cars, and its sales managers – whilst struggling for volume – are able to hold their price at a premium to mid-market dealership brands.

After a while, though, BMW’s dealerships find it harder to maintain their traditional margins as there is no brand advertising to fuel consumer desire.

And so over time – and it might be several years – the allure of the BMW brand becomes a little less attractive than Mercedes for those seeking a luxury saloon experience. With no emotional hook to hang its brand on, fewer and fewer consumers associate the letters B, M and W with “the ultimate driving machine”, and consumers still looking for an upmarket saloon to park on the driveway drop BMW from their brand repertoire and gravitate to Mercedes.

Eventually, BMW end up as a manufacturer of cars that are high-end in terms of cost of production, but their dealers are far less able to charge a high-end price for them.

Without brand advertising to drive headline demand, the efficacy of BMW’s short-term sales activation activity also becomes weaker, as there is less and less pent up demand to activate. Prospects who are persuaded to turn up at BMW showrooms are less inclined to pay a premium to own one.

And so in the long term BMW’s sales AND margins fall.

***

A company’s share price is a reflection of the stock market’s view of a company’s ability to generate *future* sales and profits.

A single quarter’s sales shortfall may not be greeted with cheer by the stock market, but I’d argue that a continued quarter-on-quarter decline in margin as a brand is unable to maintain its premium pricing position is seen as something worse. Something that is far harder to correct.

Yes, short-term promotions can shore up a hole in a single quarter’s sales figures. But for long-term margin retention, marketers need to try and hold their nerve and maintain investment in comms that persuade people to pay more than they might need to to acquire the more desirable product.

***

Now this is only a thought experiment: in the real world the choice of luxury car isn’t a binary one, nor are the brand vs activation budget options, and of course there are a whole range of other variables at play.

But perhaps if you’re a CMO who’s under pressure to divert significant brand spend into sales promotion, you need to remind your CFO that there’s a reason successful upmarket brands with the longevity of BMW don’t plaster the press with “Sale Now On!” ads.

It’s because they’re not that stupid.

***

The above thought experiment is couched in consumer marketing terms, but only because the two consumer brands I picked on are universally known.

But if you’re a B2B marketer, the same principles still apply.

At its simplest, your B2B brand is the thing that you have a market reputation for.

If you want to give your brand the reputation for being the cheapest on the market, go fill your boots. But it will come back to bite you.

Hold your nerve.

Whilst your sales managers might feel that procurement managers are always looking to beat them up on price, in truth there isn’t a procurement manager on earth who would proudly proclaim “I hired them because they were desperate!”

Investing in your brand gives your sales team a reason for prospects not to buy on price.

Give your company a reputation for offering something that creates margin for you and value for your customers. Apply sales activation wisely.

Otherwise that sale you’re planning may well be your last.

“Everything must go!” indeed.

***

The above is a scenario from the B2C world, but if you’re a B2B marketer and want to conduct research into what potential buyers might value in your own proposition, please do get in touch. Although based in the UK, I work with clients internationally.

Simon Hayhurst

September 2022

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing

A couple of weeks back on LinkedIn, I posted a link to an article that hailed the advent of the Metaverse as new tech that would completely revolutionise businesses everywhere.

The article was sponsored by a management consultancy urging CEOs to get on board with this brand new disruptive tech before their own company gets disrupted out of business.

My post went viral (c50,000 impressions and counting) – not, I suspect, because readers found the linked article especially insightful – but probably because the world-weary cynicism of my post struck a chord with many people on here fed up with the constant “Next Big Thing!” hype in their LinkedIn feed from people who ought to know better.

I do seem to get quite a few posts in my feed that proclaim that “X is dead!” or “Forget everything you ever knew about Y” or “The world has changed but you just don’t know it yet!”

Given I work in marketing – and so most of the people I follow are marketeers – this constant hype in my feed has rather bothered me.

But it took a really perceptive comment in a message to me from one of my connections – step forward Gerry Mezzina – that crystallised why I felt this discomfort.

Gerry‘s comment?

“There’s a whole lot of promoters out there, not many marketers!”

Marketing – surely – is the identification of buyer need and the alignment of organisational resource to satisfy that need at a profit.

So much of what passes for ‘marketing’ in these kind of shouty “Next Big Thing!” posts is really just ‘promotion’, as Gerry says.

It also explains why – as the virality of my original post might suggest – most of my fellow marketers are fed up with it.

So here’s my own message to the shouty promoters clogging up my feed:

– please, please take time to understand need
– align the resources of your business so that you can satisfy that need at a profit
– then
– and ONLY then
– go to market with a proposition that is relevant to your audience, distinctive from what the competition are saying, and is believably true.

In the meantime, please get off LinkedIn and save the shouty hype for Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The true marketers on here can see your BS for what it is.

Thank you.

Why the Metaverse may never be universal

“Who remembers Google Glass? What were all that about?”

It’s almost a decade since Google announced that the Explorer Edition of Google Glass was going on sale at $1,500 a pop, offered initially to Google I/O developers in the US.

For digital natives too young to remember that far back, Google Glass was a wearable device that had an optical head-mounted display that enabled wearers to check messages, view photos and search the internet, amongst a host of other features – with everything controlled by the wearer’s voice and motion.

Dystopian? Possibly. Ingenious? Certainly.

At the time, I was working for Europe’s biggest mobile phone and gadget insurer, managing their biggest £ multi-million corporate relationship with one of the UK’s biggest banking groups.

There was a bit of a hoo-ha about Google Glass within the company at the time. Up until this point, we’d insured mobile phones and tablets and everything in-between (anyone remember the term “phablet”?) and we had a rigorous supply chain in place to ensure we could repair or replace such items within a couple of working days. But how would that supply chain be able to repair or replace eyewear devices? Especially if they were prescription eyewear devices?

Certainly, the Google Glass NPD path was not a smooth one. In February 2015, The New York Times reported that Google Glass was being redesigned by former Apple executive Tony Fadell and that it would not be released until he deemed it to be “perfect”.

In July 2017, it was announced that the second iteration, the Google Glass Enterprise Edition, would be released in the US for companies such a Boeing.

In May 2019, Google announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2. Google also announced a partnership with Smith Optics to develop Glass-compatible safety frames.

So Google Glass wasn’t a fail-fast punt by a tech giant. A lot of money was invested in its development, and Google clearly believed that the product had a long-term future.

Indeed, according to an excellent article at www.failory.com/google/glass:

Time Magazine named Google Glass as one of the Best Inventions of the Year
Google Glass got a 12-page spread in Vogue
They appeared in an episode of The Simpsons
Such luminaries as Prince Charles, Oprah, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lawrence and Bill Murray were all photographed wearing a pair

So how come many people believe Google Glass is currently residing in the “Where Are They Now” file?

Again, according to Failory:

The product couldn’t do all the things the marketers promised
The design was cumbersome to wear (Google claimed a benefit was that Google Glass was ‘much lighter than a smartphone’, but as one Reddit commentator memorably fumed: “Yes but I don’t wear my phone on my face”)
There were major privacy concerns – not least that the people Google Glass recorded hadn’t given their permission to be filmed
Ultimately folk didn’t think it was worth the hassle – it felt like technology solving for a problem that didn’t really exist in the consumer’s mind

Well, a decade after the initial launch, it seems Google are on the road to launching again.

According to Tech Radar: Google’s finally ready to give us Google Glass 2, but is the world ready? | TechRadar

Which brings us to the Metaverse.

Facebook are so invested in making the metaverse work that they’ve renamed their entire business after it.

But I do wonder whether by going “all in” on the company rebrand and repositioning, Meta are repeating the mistake Google first made a decade ago.

With their own product re-launch, Google are leaving themselves sufficient strategic latitude to back away if the same challenges reappear: customer indifference, security concerns, price barriers and the like.

Whereas Facebook – sorry, Meta – seem to be betting the strategic house on VR tech becoming the standard, way beyond the scope of gaming, or niche business applications.

My personal bet is that Google have the shrewder strategists, and whilst VR headsets and a Meta world will gain more traction as the tech improves and customer acceptance widens, VR tech will never become as widely adapted or used as the Meta hype (and investment) is predicting.

Am I right? Maybe I should bookmark this blog, and come back to it in a decade’s time.

If I’m re-reading it via a VR headset, then I’ll just have to eat my Meta hat.

Simon Hayhurst

July 2022

Why we B2B marketers need to sharpen our propositions (and how to do it).

A proposition is a very simple thing.

It’s the response to the request: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”.

Yet too often in B2B marketing when faced with that request we lapse into what is known as the Elevator Speech.

The Elevator Speech itself is a simple concept. You’re standing in the lobby of an office block. The lift doors open and you step inside. And just as the doors close, the CEO of your biggest target company steps in beside you. And as he or she reaches for the 20th floor button, they turn to you and say: “So…what do you do?”

You then have the time it takes to reach the top floor to convince the CEO to take your business card and agree to a further meeting.

Elevator speeches often tend to lapse into the long and waffly.

Much longer, certainly, than a crisp, powerful proposition.

The concept of the Elevator Speech doesn’t exist in the B2C world, and I believe this forces B2C marketers to be sharper in their proposition thinking than us B2B marketers.

I think we can learn from them.

Back to Basics

Way back in 1970, the Saatchi brothers set up their eponymous advertising agency with a founding principle.

Not “Creativity” as you might expect, but “Ruthless Clarity of Thought”.

The Saatchi brothers applied this principle to everything they did, and that extended to proposition writing.

At Saatchis, they had a rule: before a creative brief could be signed off for presentation to the Creative department, the proposition had to pass certain key criteria.

It had to be:

No more than a single sentence
Contain only one adjective
And only one verb
No conjunctions

These rules forced whoever was writing the creative brief to be ruthlessly clear with their thinking.

Which one adjective are you going to use?

Which single verb?

The writing of a Saatchis proposition was as much about what you ruthlessly decided to abandon – as much as what you decided you were actually going to include.

Over the following 30 years or so, the Saatchi brothers successfully built a multi-million pound, globally-renown advertising agency off the back of that ruthlessness thinking.

Sharpening the scalpel

A good 20 years ago, I was the Account Director at the B2B ad agency responsible for all Lloyds Banking Group’s B2B communications.

Press, radio, outdoor, online, direct mail, point of sale, brochures…every piece of B2B communication for Lloyds Banking Group came through my team.

At that time, Lloyds Banking Group’s retail banking ad agency was…Saatchi and Saatchi.

Worried that Saatchis would try and pinch our above-the-line comms off us, I decided to apply Saatchis’ own ruthless clarity of thought to the propositions my own team would put in front of our creatives.

Same base rules:

One sentence
One adjective
One verb
No conjunctions

But on top of this I added three further criteria.

Remember I said that a proposition is the response to the request: “give me one good reason why I should buy your product”.

I defined a “good” reason as having three further qualifying criteria.

A “good” proposition is:

Relevant to the target audience
Distinctive from what the competition are claiming
Believably true

Relevance comes from understanding the end user. If we in B2B are not solving for the key problem our prospect is facing, we are wasting our time and our prospect’s.

Distinctiveness comes from studying the competition. What are their propositions? How does ours stand out from the rest? If we are making the same claim as everyone else, we are never going to stand out from them.

Truth comes from taking time to understand the product itself. What does it solve for? How does the end user benefit? Whilst it’s possible to open a sale with a wild overclaim, I guarantee it is impossible to close a B2B sale with one.

Now try this at home

Fact is that a proposition that fulfils all of the above requirements is an incredibly difficult thing to write.

Indeed I’ve been wrestling with this challenge for my own business for more than a year now.

The closest I’ve got so far is that “I uncover insights that help B2B marketers deliver powerful marketing strategies”

Sure, it’s a single sentence. The elevator speech for the CEO who is only going up one floor.

But whilst there might be only one adjective in there – “powerful” – there are at least three verbs.

Yet I would argue that it does at least have the merit of being relevant to my target audience, reasonably distinctive from much of my competition, and – as I hope my clients would attest – evidentially true.

It’s not perfect, then, but it has stood me in good stead so far.

So why bother?

The Saatchi brothers eventually sold their advertising agency stake and were subsequently listed in the Sunday Times Rich List as having a combined worth of £220 million.

So who knows? If we in the B2B world employ Saatchi’s ruthless clarity of thought when developing our own B2B propositions, then maybe this time next year, Rodney, we might all be millionaires.

If you’d like help researching which proposition might be the most relevant, distinctive and believable amongst your own target audience, please get in touch. Always happy to have my brain picked.

[email protected]

Simon Hayhurst

Hayhurst Consultancy

March 2022

Vorsprung Durch Branding

Once upon a time, in the days when the world wide web was just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes and direct mail was an actual *thing*, I started out on my career in marketing.

The financial services company I worked for had recently appointed BBH’s newly-formed below-the-line* agency Limbo to work on its direct mail projects.

As an excited young marketing pup from the north it really felt quite exciting to be invited down to Soho to find out all about how creative agencies worked, where ideas came from, and what it felt like to be taken out on an expensed agency lunch. (Kettners, for those that remember).

Wide of eye and bushy of tail, on arriving at the agency I was given the usual guided tour, and then invited into the lair of Creative Director Mike Cavers who was going to help me understand the art of (commercial) persuasion.

Although this was way back in 1989, one concept Mike showed me he was working on struck me as extraordinarily forward looking, and I strongly suspect is still repaying the client’s investment today.

It was a glossy mailpack for Audi. It contained the usual shiny brochure, expensive car shots, elegant typography, understated copy (almost certainly the handiwork of Limbo’s Head of Copy Richard Krupp) – all the kit and caboodle you’d expect in a 1980s automotive mailshot.

But it had one extra item that made me curious. A large, fold-out poster of the Audi model the mailpack was promoting.

“Hang on” I remember asking: “Does the target audience for this mailpack really blu tack car posters to their walls? They must be in their thirties, at least?”

“Nope” said Mike, “but they have 8 year old kids that do”.

He went on.

“I guarantee you – and Audi – that in about 30 years’ time, the kid whose first bedroom car poster was a glamourously-shot Audi will have that image fondly recessed in their mind when they themselves come into Audi’s target market. Sure, that mailpack will drive short-term showroom footfall, but the long-term ROI on that poster alone will be astronomical”.

OK, so I’d love to tell you that I now drive an Audi and evangelise about the brand to everyone I meet. As it happens, I don’t, but that’s not (quite) the point I want to make here.

Two points, actually.

Firstly, it underlines the importance of brand in communication. Even though the mailpack was briefed to be a sales activation piece to drive showroom footfall, it also managed to help embed (very) long term positive brand associations with a future target audience. There are probably Audi brand managers out there today still unwittingly benefiting from the brand investment in that poster from over 30 years ago.

That poster would have added pennies to the cost of the mailpack back in 1989. In the intervening 30-odd years, Audi will have only had to sell one additional car off the back of their investment in that poster for it to pay for itself several thousand times over.

As I’ve written elsewhere in a B2B context, brand communication pents up long-term demand: sales activation releases it. Marketers – consumer or B2B – who focus their comms primarily on getting today’s consumer to buy today are missing out on the chance to embed more emotional, more enduring ties with their brand.

Brand investment allows you to compete on things other than price, and thereby extend your margin. Coca Cola’s advertising does not position itself as a cheap cola. Nike’s advertising does not position its product as cheap sneakers. Mike Cavers’ Audi poster did not position it as a cheap car.

The second point, almost in passing, is this: for all the immediate power that digital marketing has, it has zero longevity compared to physical media. Compared to digital, direct mail is slow to produce and expensive to distribute, but the physical impact and potential longevity of giving a target something that endures can – for the right brief – have exceptional impact.

(Incidentally, you might want to think about that next time you send out digital Xmas cards to your clients and prospects instead of paper ones. A digital card is seen and gone in a click – a branded paper Xmas card will sit on a client’s desk happily reminding them of your good wishes two or three weeks after your digital email has been consigned to the Delete folder.)

These days Mike Cavers is retired and passes his time buying and selling artwork in Nonton in France. He’s probably long forgotten that mailpack, and certainly long forgotten me, but there are probably still a few middle-aged petrol heads with an Audi in their driveway that haven’t.

*ask your parents

Simon Hayhurst

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

Image courtesy of Velito (@franvelito) | Unsplash Photo Community

Selling to a business? To be on the short list, you first have to be on the long list – here’s how

Since the dawn of B2B marketing, there seems to have been a raging debate about whether B2B buyers act more rationally than consumers.

Classicists argue that the business procurement process is designed to eliminate irrationality and engender accountability across the entire purchase process.

The involvement of multiple B2B stakeholders in that process helps ensure that the final purchase decision can never be based on the emotional whim of a single stakeholder.

But this only tells half of the story: different types of decision making occur at different stages in the procurement process, even when the same people are involved.

In order to maximise their ROI, B2B marketers need to understand which process occurs at what stage of the buying process, and plan their marketing accordingly.

The B2B purchase process isn’t as thorough as you think it is

I recently conducted 24 qualitative interviews for a B2B client who wanted to understand how software purchasers across a range of verticals have been procuring in the wake of the pandemic.

What the interviewees confirmed straight off the bat is that even the most professional business buyers are incredibly time-poor and often horribly under-resourced.

So when an internal issue comes up that requires an external vendor to provide a solution, buyers simply do not have the time or resource to hold a whole-of-market review – even for the most significant purchases.

What frequently happens is that when a business challenge emerges, the drawing up of the long list of potential solution providers is done far less thoroughly and arrived at far more quickly than the final purchase decision itself.

The research showed that long list compilation discussions extend little further than “Who do we know of who might have a decent solution?”; “Has anyone experience of working with a vendor who could solve this?”, and even “Have a look on Google and see who’s out there”.

Furthermore, the interviewees suggested that once that quick-and-dirty long list process gets to five or six potential vendors – often fewer – the long list search stops altogether.

That’s because the buyer group tend to believe that once they’ve got a list of half a dozen potential solution providers, the likelihood that they are going to unearth a significantly better provider by extending that long list to vendor #7 or vendor #8 is vanishingly small.

So they don’t look any further.

In other words – yes – the process of deciding on the final provider is often structured: a formal review of pros & cons based on a variety of predictable criteria: cost & time to implement, efficacy of solution, ease of integration, projected cost savings etc. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision, often including personas from IT, Finance, Operations – all the usual suspects.

But what is nowhere near as thorough is how the long list – from which the short list of candidates gets selected – is actually drawn up, and by whom.

Put yourself in the B2B buyer’s shoes for a moment

It’s a little like buying a new car. When you decide you want one, although there are thousands of make and model options, you’ll probably quickly arrive at a long list of half a dozen makes / models you’d actually consider. You might take three of them for a test drive, and buy one of those three after a haggle with the preferred seller.

You certainly don’t test drive every make and model of car on the market: that would take months.

And so whilst the car purchase is a high involvement decision akin to a business appointing a new software provider, you’ll generally trust your own instincts – what Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman (1) calls System 1 thinking – to short-cut the candidate make/model list to the top half dozen, maximum.

How you draw up that short list will have been conditioned by months – probably years – of drip drip exposure to a variety of automotive brands: memories which you will subconsciously mine to arrive at the list of brands you’d actually consider when you are finally ready to buy.

Time-pressured, resource-poor B2B purchasers drawing up a new supplier long list think the same way, of necessity.

They use “short-hand thinking” to draw up their long list of potential candidates, and only subsequently use what I term “long-hand thinking” to decide who wins the actual tender.

Building brand saliency

So here’s the crux for B2B marketers: in order to make it to a formally-reviewed short list, you first have to get on the informally-constructed long list.

As we’ve seen above, the criteria for getting on the long list are rarely more involved than “who have we heard of that might be able to help us?”.

So if they haven’t heard of you, they are unlikely to consider buying from you.

It’s only at the final stage of the purchase process that the questions such as “Now: which of these providers offers us best value?” typically get addressed.

In B2B as well as in the world of the consumer, how vendors get on the long list is therefore often down to the salience of their brand – i.e. how likely their brand is to spring to the top of a buyer’s mind for offering a solution to a particular problem – rather than the detail of how they solve for it, and at what price, with what levels of support and service guarantees etc.

Your B2B brand therefore needs to be very close to top of mind for anyone drawing up a potential vendor long list, otherwise you’ll never make their short list.

This is why the B2B Institute, citing the work of Binet & Field, advocate B2B marketers investing around 50% of their marketing spend on long term brand building.

Focussing marketing effort solely on sales activation is putting the cart before the horse. Indeed, it’s focussing solely on the cart.

Why this matters

Brand building pents up long-term demand. Sales activation releases it.

If you focus all your B2B marketing budget trying to release pent-up demand with short-term activity, at some point there’ll be no long-term pent-up demand to release – and either your sales will dry up, or you’ll have to discount even more loudly to achieve consideration.

As Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of the B2B Institute claim (2):

“Brand building excels at driving long term growth: it usually works on an emotional level to create long-term memories and associations long after the advertising runs. This is a bigger task than sales activation, requiring much broader reach and repeated exposure”

As I hope I have shown above, because B2B purchasers are time-poor, construction of their long list is largely done through short-hand thinking – with brand saliency the primary driver. And so your brand building plans need to acknowledge this.

To make the long list, your brand needs to be one of the most salient brands for having a relevant solution to a current business problem. To achieve brand saliency, you need to make a continued investment in your brand, as the B2B Institute advocates.

As I debated at a recent Business Marketing Club meet up, in order to be truly salient your B2B brand proposition needs to be single-minded, relevant, distinctive and rooted in a product truth.

Because if your brand is not top of mind with a buyer, chances are you won’t make their long list to start with.

And if you’re not on the long list, you’ll never make the short list – let alone close the sale.

Conclusion

B2B buyers use different decision-making processes at different parts of the purchase process.

The initial solution vendor review process tends to be via “short-hand thinking”, often drawing on brand saliency (“Who have we heard of that might be able to solve this?”) to draw up their long list.

It’s only at the final purchase decision stage that much more “long-hand thinking” is applied to choose the winning vendor.

To win more business, you therefore have to invest as much in brand building (to get onto more long lists) as you do sales activation (to push the purchaser down the sales funnel to the short list, and finally close the sale).

If you ever need help researching the decision-making process your own prospects go through, and what messages will achieve the highest saliency for your own products, please get in touch.

Simon Hayhurst

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

1 Thinking Fast and Slow / Daniel Kahneman

2 The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing / The B2B Institute

Photo credit Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

How hard can it be to stand out from the crowd when everyone is identically dressed?

I was recently tasked with reviewing the thought leadership output of several hundred law firms in the US and UK for a major client desk research project.

Something that struck me upon clicking through the home pages of site after site after site was how distinctive the first impressions created by most of them seemed to be.

Which is to say: most of them made no distinctive first impression whatsoever.

Many seemed to be identikit. Pictures of lawyers in suits. Heavy use of corporate blue. Blandishments about “focussing on your needs”.

“But we’re different!”

For some reason, identifying and communicating a relevant point of true differentiation seems to be a marketing challenge right across the professional services spectrum.

All Accountancy firms claim to be good at accounting.

All Auditors claim to be good at auditing.

All Actuaries claim to be good at whatever it is that actuaries do.

And that’s just the ‘a’s.

Occasionally in the research, I came across a law firm website proudly proclaiming “We’re a different kind of law firm!” but even then the way in which they claimed to be different seemed to be vague.

I think the problem seems to be that all professional services firms set themselves out as being… well… “professional”.

“Competent”.

Even going so far as being “knowledgeable”.

And indeed the ones with good thought leadership content are at least able to evidence those claims.

But to stand out in professional services, it’s surely no good simply portraying yourself as being “as professional and competent as everyone else”.

Professional competence surely goes with the territory. It’s not a differentiator.

And if your positioning isn’t differentiated in some relevant way from the competition, why would anyone choose your law firm ahead of the others?

Distinctiveness pays

I’ve blogged elsewhere about how any firm marketing itself in a B2B context needs to have a proposition that is:

(i) Relevant to the target audience

(ii) Distinctive from what the competition are claiming, and

(iii) Credibly true

Most professional services company propositions I’ve seen tend to fall down at (ii) – in part, I suspect because they believe what they do and how they do it isn’t especially distinctive from their competitors.

Which is a shame, because when a company can find itself a distinctive positioning, there’s a lot of business to be had.

However a couple of law firms’ positioning stood out for me, and were all the more memorable for it. I’d be interested in what you think.

Creative. Aggressive. Relentless. Us?

In the US, I came across Kasowitz Benson Torres.

Visit their website and the home page greets you with three bold, stark words that Kasowitz claim embody their ethos:

“Creative. Aggressive. Relentless.”

Now I get that not everyone looking for a law firm will want one that is creative or aggressive or relentless. Indeed I rather suspect that the more conservative senior partners in many law firms (that is to say: most of them) would recoil at the thought of claiming to have any of those attributes.

But that’s not the point: Kasowitz Benson Torres aren’t trying to be all things to all clients.

Many potential clients might shy away at the very thought of aggression. But if you’re a New York property developer with a big union problem, or a Manhattan socialite seeking a highly remunerative divorce, a self-professed creative, aggressive and relentless attorney might be exactly what you are looking for. In which case Kasowitz will stand out from the rest.

Professor Mark Ritson often talks about strategic targeting as being as much about who you consciously decide NOT to target, as much as who you decide you ARE going to try and reach.

Distinctive propositions can be polarising, but they can also be highly compelling in a sea of competitor blandishments, especially in professional services.

Easy. ‘Langleasy’, even.

Langleasy image and case study via…Gasp! and Lee Grunnell

That said, a distinctive positioning doesn’t need to be as “balls-out” as the Kasowitz example above in order to be effective if it’s well-executed and communicated consistently.

Up until very recently (prior to them being swallowed up by Knights Solicitors) the UK law firm Langleys had a strong positioning that caught my eye.

The proposition that united Langleys marketing communication was that Langleys were “easy to deal with”.

“Langleasy”, if you will…

Now at first glance, a law firm that claims to be “easy to deal with” might not strike you as having a particularly compelling, differentiated proposition.

However I’d ask you to cast your mind back to the ads that Volkswagen ran for several decades in which they owned the idea that their cars were ‘reliable’.

VW didn’t sell on price (heaven forbid any marketer sells on price). It didn’t sell on speed. Or power. Or fuel economy. Or comfort.

It simply focussed on owning a simple virtue that VW knew most car buyers sought in a car, at a time when no other car manufacturer sought to own that position: reliability.

VWs weren’t the only reliable cars on the market at the time by any means.

But by majoring on a core value; dramatizing it in an engaging way; investing in that positioning consistently over time and then integrating that positioning into everything they communicated, VW were able to “own” the idea of reliability, and have that value irrevocably associated with their brand.

The fact that their sales didn’t permanently evaporate in the wake of the subsequent emissions scandal is probably testament to the power of strong, consistent branding.

I think the Langleasy positioning attempted to do something similar in the world of law firms.

I don’t claim to have conducted the campaign research but I suspect that many people they’d have spoken to would profess to find the law complex and are often at a point of distress when they need a lawyer (let’s face it, no one engages a law firm to pass the time).

Not only that, many people might find the idea of actually having to deal with a lawyer as intimidating as having to deal with…well, a car salesman.

So a law firm that consistently, proudly positions itself as being easy to deal with when none of their rivals are explicitly owning that territory is likely to be more salient in the prospect client’s mind than another that blandly claims to be “local” or “personal” or – heaven forbid – “professional”.

VW evidenced their reliability positioning by the fact that service intervals on their cars were generally twice those on their direct competitors. I never used Langleys Solicitors before the Knights buyout, but would expect that there was something about their client-onboarding process that made dealing with them less intimidating than dealing with a typical law firm might be.

Creative? Aggressive? Relentless? Us?

In theory, it ought to be really easy to stand out from the competition when so many of the competition are claiming the same territory in the same tired old ways.

Yet few professional services firms seem to be bold enough to do this.

Why do you think this is?

Is it in the conservative nature of professional services firms? Do professional services partners only sign off marketing comms that hold up a mirror to themselves and how they want to appear – rather than reflecting their clients and what their clients actually need?

Or are professional services firms really all much-of-a-muchness, trading on little more than personal relationships and client inertia?

I’d genuinely be interested to know what you think – please feel free to comment.

Simon Hayhurst

Hayhurst Consultancy

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

April 2022

Why marketers need to wrestle back control of the “other” Ps

When most people start out in a marketing career, the very first thing they learn is that the success of any marketing activity rests on the 4 P’s – the product you are selling, the price you sell it at, the places you sell it in, and the way those three things are promoted.

The second thing they learn is usually that their peers within their organisation think marketing is all about Promotion, and nothing else.

This massively hampers marketers – all the way up to Marketing Directors – because whilst controlling the 4 Ps is pivotal to a CMO’s success, it’s very rare for the rest of the C Suite to let the Marketing Director control what they see as their particular fiefdoms.

Today I’m going to talk about a particular example where I believe what a company currently seems to be doing with the “Place” part of the mix is potentially undoing a quarter of a century of brilliant marketing: marketing where advertising has actually played quite a minor part in its enormously successful comms strategy.

And where – if my suspicions are true – the CFO and the COO are imposing negative changes that directly affect the successful proposition the company was founded on.

FirstDirect first opened its phone lines on 10 October 1989, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but long before the web was ever used for personal banking.

What was (almost) revolutionary about FirstDirect was that its main channel of product delivery was over the phone, not via a branch network. (Telephone banking had actually been pioneered in the 1970s by the state owned National Girobank. Girobank’s ‘branch’ network consisted of 22,000 post offices, none of which had access to their banking customer account details, and so – almost apologetically – if a Girobank customer wanted to do anything other than cash a cheque, they had to speak to a Girbank call centre).

Historically – particularly since the advent of free-banking-when-in-credit current accounts in the in mid 1980s – high street banks had run current accounts at a significant loss. Part of that loss was due to having to ascribe the fixed cost of running a nationwide branch network to a current account product for which the majority of customers made no direct revenue contribution via bank charges.

The financial genius of FirstDirect was to develop a compelling business model where there were no direct branch overheads, and so the cost-to-serve was substantially lower than rival banks.

If FirstDIrect could convince potential customers that they didn’t need a branch network to run their current account, then they could attract low-cost customers and then cross-sell them high margin products – credit cards, loans, mortgages and the like.

Someone at Midland Bank had clearly taken a look at the Girobank model and could see that by adapting core elements of it – telephony banking, supported by a national cash machine network, with Midland Bank branches only used as a last resort – they could serve a potentially sophisticated, wealthier market segment at a much lower cost than the rest of the retail banking industry.

The planning for the launch of FirstDirect was a well-guarded secret. Indeed, the first inkling Girobank’s management had that anything like it was planned was the day one third of its Leeds call centre staff resigned en masse, announcing that they were going to work for a new division of Midland Bank, with the promise of £1,000 pay rise and a staff mortgage sealing the deal.

From a marketing perspective, part of the clear blue water between FirstDirect’s proposition and Girobank’s fustier model was to make their telephony proposition 24 hour, 7 days a week. Girobank’s call centres operated 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, and til lunchtime on Saturdays. Up until that point, this had put Girobank well ahead of the hours what its high street competitors offered, and it didn’t think there was much customer need for a service that ran through the night.

The genius of the FirstDirect 24 hour proposition was that once the 24 hour banking claim had been made, no competitor could better it.

The launch of First Direct in 1989 was advertised twofold. Firstly, there was a TV advert for Audi which was interrupted by a broadcast purportedly back in time from 2010, celebrating the 21st anniversary of the company (the interruption was agreed with Audi beforehand).

Secondly, there were two different adverts running concurrently on ITV and Channel 4, one offering a negative view showing the aspects of normal banking and the other a positive view of First Direct, with the two crossing over at a key point.

After the initial launch, however, FirstDirect downweighted their adspend compared to their high street rivals, and instead trusted to a different method of primary promotion: the word of mouth recommendations of their own customers.

In order to be confident that new FirstDirect customers would recommend it to their friends, FirstDirect’s management knew that the telephony service had to be flawless – not only through short wait-times, but through the particular qualities of people that were staffing the phone lines.

From the outset, one of the key qualities that FirstDirect hired staff for was not (just) competence operating a computer when a customer called. What they deliberately set out to hire for was empathy.

FirstDirect wanted to hire people who were natural volunteers – folk who could evidence that they helped out with a local charity, or regularly got involved with socially-useful organisations. Unlike the rest of the UK telephony industry, they didn’t want to hire people because they were cheap and available, they wanted staff who would show a natural commitment to help the customer achieve what they wanted to.

And the customers loved it. FirstDirect quickly became Which?’s most recommended current account (up until that point, the annual Which? “Best Buy” bank account had been Girobank’s – oh, the irony).

FirstDirect has been winning customers and accolades pretty much ever since. As recently as 2019 it was (again) named ‘Britain’s Most Trusted Financial Services Provider’ by Moneywise, and in February 2020 it was ranked top in the Competition & Markets Authority biannual survey of service quality.

The FirstDirect brand has proved remarkably resilient. In 1992 it withstood the rebranding of parent company Midland Bank as HSBC. The Midland Bank brand’s endorsement of the FirstDirect brand had always been absolutely minimal, and the FirstDirect brand had been deliberately designed from inception to stand on its own reputation.

It was subsequently able to withstand the onslaught of competition from a plethora of internet bank start ups and me-toos since the turn of the century, chiefly because they had made the service quality of its telephony channel impossible to better.

Up until Covid hit, it made for a fantastic marketing case study in how focussing investment on one particular element of the marketing mix – Place – it has been able to carve out for itself a significant and highly profitable niche without massive investment in Promotion; without having to undercut its competitors on Pricing; whilst the core Product from a functional perspective is pretty much identical to every bank’s current account, bar a few bells and whistles.

So far, so good.

However over the last 18 months, as a FirstDirect customer, I’ve noticed a distinct deterioration in the quality of the telephony service. It’s not that new staff lack the empathy of old – the staff are still of the highest calibre.

The problem is call wait times, and queue management. As Covid hit, FirstDirect had to rapidly adjust to a world where mass call centres weren’t a practical solution in a world where people were having to isolate at home.

The obvious short-term solution was to push customers away from the telephony channel, and on to web and app solutions that could do 90% of what the telephony channel could do, at a fraction of the cost. So as wait times increased, so did the recorded messages pushing waiting customers down other channels.

Here’s the problem. 18 months into Covid, and the perception of many FirstDirect customers is that wait times are still high. I’m only speculating here, but my suspicion is that having seen how much more profitable it is when existing telephony customers use digital channels, senior management at FirstDirect have chosen to continue to push existing customers down digital channels, rather than increase investment in the channel that is at the heart of what makes their proposition distinctive.

Every bank has an app. Every bank has an online banking website. No bank has been able to match the Word-of-Mouth recommendation that FirstDirect has been achieving for decades.

Elsewhere this week Les Binet has published research showing how brands that downweighted adspend have seen subsequent decreases in market share. It feels logical – as fewer people are given a reason to choose a differentiated brand, over time fewer people buy it.

The argument I am making here is that as FirstDirect seemingly downweight their investment in what differentiates them as a brand, they too, over time, will see a fall in the word-of-mouth recommendations. Recommendations that will have seen them save millions of pounds in advertising down the years. Ultimately they will just become another me-too FS brand.

I don’t work for FirstDirect, never have. (Though it won’t surprise you to know that I started my marketing career in 1986 at National Girboank). But as a customer of some 25 years it grieves me to see them apparently making a fundamental marketing channel error.

As I said at the start of this piece, every pup marketer is taught that the four primary levers of a marketing strategy are Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Non marketers tend to believe that Promotion should be the sole domain of the marketer, and for the other three, marketers should frankly stay in their lane.

I’ve set out above a real-life example of where great marketing has transcended pure Promotion, and where I get the impression the marketers at a particular brand are losing the battle to stay in control of all the pillars of the marketing mix that made it great in the first place.

Let me know if you disagree.

Simon Hayhurst

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

August 2021

UPDATE – MAY 2022

Whilst I’m not going to claim that my humble blog has made the difference, I have to say that of late access to First Direct’s telephony service has been exemplary.

But the point of the blog still stands: it’s absolutely vital that marketers retain control of all four “P”s in the marketing mix in order to deliver on their strategy.

Maybe in the future this particular blog post will be an example of the marketers gaining control, rather than losing it.

More power to the elbow of the team at First Direct.

Beating the Billable Hours Behemoth

My heart goes out to those professional services marketing mangers who are constantly having to cajole partners in their firm to contribute something to the company blog.

“I’m tasked with hitting my billable hours, not writing window dressing for the website” goes the standard rebuttal.

And if you live or die in a business environment where hitting your billable hours is the key management measurement metric, who can blame them?

So here’s some ammunition for the beleaguered marketing managers trying to get bloggish blood from a disinterested partner stone.

(And food for thought for those partners finding themselves struggling to find hours to bill under the billable-hours cosh.)

Next time a partner recoils at the thought of writing something for the website, try engaging them on why their longest-standing, highest-billing clients continue to bring them business personally – even when they switch firms.

Penny to a pound they’ll tell you that it’s “all down to personal relationship”, underpinned with professional competence, of course.

But professional competence abounds in most consulting companies anyway (or at least, it ought to).

So what separates one advisor from another within an advisory business when a client is looking for help from a particular firm?

Wouldn’t it be great for the advisor’s billable hours if rather than just looking to work with their firm, potential clients specifically asked to work with them in particular?

So here’s the thing:

Blogging doesn’t just raise your company’s profile: it also raises your personal profile too

Your senior execs don’t need to take my word for it, either.

Not so long back, LinkedIn and global comms agency Edelman did a survey of C Suite execs, asking them when they consumed thought leadership, why, and what they did next.

The details are here: Thought Leadership Impact Study | LinkedIn & Edelman

In many instances, the C Suite use thought leadership not just to assess the company that they might appoint but to assess the individual consultant they wanted to work with.

BigCo Consulting may well have 1,000 partners in every continent, but what the C Suite really want to know about is “Who will be advising me?”

“What do they know about my business?”

“What expertise can they bring to bear to my particular challenge?”

I’ve heard one senior partner at a major consulting house dismiss thought leadership content as “mere vanity publishing”.

But for the savvy advisor, it’s actually the first step in establishing a personal client relationship that is based on provenance of that advisor’s individual expertise.

And as they’ve already conceded: personal relationship = billable hours.

And how does an adviser make sure those prospective clients know to ask to work with that particular advisor by name?

Well maybe writing thought leadership posts for your company website isn’t window-dressing after all…

If you want help conducting a business survey to give your colleagues some fresh insights to blog about, please get in touch via the email below.

Simon Hayhurst

[email protected]

www.hayhurstconsultancy.co.uk

June 2021