Reputation and the B-to-B Buying Cycle
Communications executives often view reputation management as a set of consistent efforts to maintain awareness and a positive impression of their organization. Get this right, they think, and buyers will be convinced to engage. Trouble is, connecting A with B has been nearly impossible, leaving these executives exposed when it’s time to cut both budget and headcount. While it’s true that communications functions have historically had a higher-level charter, this is rapidly changing as organizations learn that materials created for awareness, branding and even crisis management can be retooled for use throughout prospect buying processes. In this post, I will share some ideas for doing so, and in turn bring communications to more closely align with key goals of demand creation, sales enablement and revenue generation.
A Buying Cycle Primer
If an organization does not understand the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered. Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web and other sources, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a b-to-b buying process typically comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process. SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that b-to-b organizations typically go through. These six macro stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying, and closing.
Buying Cycle Impact
Given the importance of buying cycles – and the role of the entire marketing organization to facilitate (rather than fight) them – better alignment of key reputation-building efforts with these cycles will result in more targeted, measurable communications.
Education. Many communications functions spend an inordinate amount of time blindly flooding the market with awareness messaging through public relations (PR) and analyst relations (AR), using both traditional and social media outlets. While a broadcast strategy can generate general awareness, taking a more surgical approach will generate incremental leverage. As an example, the work that goes into securing quotes for press releases and testimonials can be used to reinforce the connection between a specific offering and core business issues within a vertical market, then repurposed into content made available in a central repository for reuse. Multimedia content can be encapsulated into Web-based podcasts that both marketing and sales can distribute and track for effectiveness. These efforts should also be tracked to determine possible impact on organic search, a key element of prospect activities early in buying processes.
Active buying. The active buying stage finds buyers looking for solutions to problems they have decided are a priority, matching solution types to their specific needs and uncovering vendors that offer their solution of choice. An organization’s communications activities can be used to drive focused awareness not around brand, but around specific decisions made by current customers that drove them to choose the solution you offer, and subsequently your organization in particular. Reuse quotes, testimonials and case studies in a variety of deliverables (including social media outlets such as blogs and microblogging sites such as Twitter) that are cooperatively created with product marketing and subject matter experts, and provided to field marketing and sales. For deals that move into the opportunity phase but then stall, specific pipeline acceleration efforts sponsored by marketing in conjunction with sales can be effective in helping these deals to get moving again. Communications functions can help even further by tracking key issues being discussed in online communities that are sponsored by their organization or outside entities; emerging or changing issues can be quickly identified and converted into deliverables as warranted.
Closing. The closing phase includes activities such as negotiations and terms/conditions creation required to seal a deal. While there may be less traditional communications content reuse potential here because prospects have much of the information they need, a key leverage point is the communications function’s ability to act as a liaison to the executive branch for their participation in critical deals. Directly addressing any issues that a prospect may have about your organization by facilitating prospect interaction with marquee references also could help tip a decision in your favor, as can repurposing any ROI-related content into tools. Communications also should stand ready as a liaison to deal teams working feverishly to close deals in order to potentially create (or adapt) content as needed.
The more the communications function links its reputation activities to demand creation goals, the more reach and value can be demonstrated to the overall organization. While traditional communications activities in the branding, PR and AR arenas will still occur, the leverage available to other marketing functions is often minimal if these activities remain general in nature and myopic in execution. Instead of merely releasing your communications content to become available to other marketing roles, proactively match your deliverables to specific stages in the buying cycle; not only will you gain additional mileage out of your initiatives, you will raise the visibility and impact of your function to the business.
