In Toby Keith’s country hit “I Wanna Talk About Me,” he asks his girlfriend to talk about him every once in a while:
“You know talking about you makes me smile
But every once in awhile
I wanna talk about me
Wanna talk about I
Wanna talk about number one
Oh my, me, my
What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see.”
I think there are a good number of B2B buyers who feel the same as Toby when it comes to their “relationships” with companies. Too often, companies are caught up in talking more about themselves than truly understanding what their buyers “like, know, want and see” when it comes to their products and services.
For many B2B companies, their marketing efforts focus on demand generation (e.g., filling the top of the funnel with responses, any response for that matter). These responses are forwarded to sales who then call the respondent with a scripted product pitch without ever finding out what the potential clients really need. This tactic no longer works given the B2B buyer is controlling the buying cycle more than ever and engaging with companies much further down the sales cycle. In fact, a recent marketing report confirmed that 70% of all buyers upon initial contact are not in the buying mode. Companies today need to engage in building a relationship by listening and responding. In other words, letting the buyer talk about themselves, their needs, their challenges and building trust that you understand their issues.
To address the needs of today’s buyer, B2B organizations should embrace lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is about quality, not quantity. It's about engaging and communicating with the buyer with the right message and at the right time. To get to the point where you are engaging your customers and developing a relationship, here are some simple steps to start nurturing your prospects:
1. Document the Buyers Journey: Work with sales to map out the journey of a typical buyer from the point of initial engagement through to sales close. By understanding the steps the buyer takes to get to know your organization, you will communicate with them more effectively and build a stronger relationship in the process.
2. Develop a Content & Offer Map: Now that you have documented the buying cycle, map your content and various offers to each stage of the buying process. This will allow you to better manage the dialogue (you will deliver different content at the beginning of the process than you will at the end of the process) and also expose where new content and offers need to be developed to meet the needs of the buyer.
3. Nurture at Every Stage of The Process: Many organizations use a nurture strategy once the response is marketing qualified. While nurturing should be used at this stage, it should also be expanded to every stage. A good majority of initial responses will not be marketing qualified for some time. This is a perfect opportunity to nurture, which often purges those not interested and accelerates the sales cycle for those who are.
And don’t stop engaging with a prospect once they become your customer. By continuing to nurture the relationship, you will help them overcome the all-to-common buyers remorse phenomenon and create a loyal customer following.
4. Automate the Process: Automating the process goes a long way to nurture effectively and establish a one-to-one dialogue. But let’s be clear. Implementing marketing automation technology alone does not create a nurturing strategy or campaign. It’s important you address the steps above and automate those via marketing automation, which will enable the process and allow you to engage more effectively.
The B2B market continues to change and the buyer is leading the charge. Take a step back and don’t be so eager to talk just about you---listen to your buyer, engage with your buyer and every once in while let them talk about themselves.
