Buying is process of making a series of choices that will improve on the buyer’s current situation. Selling is the process of walking the buyer through a set of choices that will get them to that next state. The process is simple enough for both sides. It is just a matter of figuring out the path through the choices. But if we break it down one step further, figuring out the right path translates into 2 steps:
(1) determining an effective sequence of choices
(2) establishing the specific interim choices at each step along the way

It may appear that this is no longer simple. You are right. It can get quite complicated. Perhaps you have thought of the permutations and combinations that you learned in math class. Which means there are a lot of possible outcomes that can occur, even with a small number of steps. So here you can see the expansive power of choice. If there are too many choices for the buyer to make, they will quite likely be stalled. The journey is just too arduous.

Or perhaps you have thought of multiple choice questions on a test. It seems that everyone has written a multiple choice test, where all the answers to each question sound so similar, that they could all be the correct answer. And this would be the destructive power of choice. The choices are just too complex and the buyer may again be stalled. Because it may be difficult to see the light, the buyer may even question whether they are looking in the right direction.

From the selling perspective, more choice is often seen as a good thing. More colors, more sizes, more shapes, more speeds. All choice is good. The thinking is that the more choice that we can provide, the more likely it is that we will satisfy the buyer. If we don’t have enough choice, the buyer will go to our competitor. Well this reasoning is simple enough to understand and we can see why many businesses are magnetized by it. There is even a discipline of mass customization.

So how do we manage choice for the buyer within our sphere of influence. What we do not want is a frenzy of choices that has a debilitating effect on the whole process. The structure has to be simple and effective to allow the buyer to easily flow from one choice to the next. I would like to relate an experience I recently had in the purchase of a mattress. As it turns out, I did go to a mattress store which had just too many mattresses to choose from. And very quickly, I was stuck. This was prior to engaging a dialogue with the sales rep. What was truly amazing to me is that he had a sequence of steps. Each step was an A/B comparison. And in a matter of 3 steps, I had settled on the perfect mattress, all in about 10 minutes.

In order to orchestrate choices that are effective in moving the buyer through their decision making process, it is important to achieve a model that will achieve both a simple path, and an effective one. In a B2B marketplace, there may be a lot of different informational content that can be provided. The key is to have a method or process of selection that will accomplish a move down the buying cycle.

Fast and effective response to a prospective buyer has a major impact on both their momentum and their perception of you and your business. This has always been true. But what is different today is that today’s prospective buyer will be buried amongst a bunch of digital traces, or signatures of activity, on the internet. So it is not as simple as getting a phone call and having 30 minutes to complete the request.

Fast and effective response is even more important in today’s environment because the buyer comes along in a much more informed manner, by the time they make any request of you. They may have read some of what you have posted on the web; they have listened to comments that others have made about you, or the category of products and services that you offer. And if they come to make contact with you in any form, you are in a way, semi-qualified to warrant their attention. And with that comes a set of expectations. Because of this buyer preparedness, the impressions you create from all forms of your engagement, will have key impact on the buyer.

Of course, we know what happens if the buyer’s interaction does not satisfy their expectations. The buyer goes cold. They forget what they wanted from you. The sense of urgency on the issue fades. Other things become more important. And you may have forever lost the opportunity for engagement with that prospective buyer. And that is not fair, if you did not have the chance to put yourself in a position to provide a fast and effective response.

There is no need to let the buyer have unfair advantage that leads up to any form of engagement. The key for you to ensure a fast and effective response, and to maximize your chances for creating value in the engagement, is to be armed with information about the prospective buyer. Even though the buyer may be incognito, it behooves you to characterize and recognize behavioral patterns from their digital meandering activity. Even prior to a direct engagement request, they are leaving digital footprints.

This is what makes analytics so valuable. By collecting and analyzing the digital traces which your visitors leave, you are able to equip yourself so that you are able to detect when things are ripening. You will be able to adjust your activities to the buyer’s cadence. And even though the buyer will control the pace, you will be in a much stronger position to anticipate the next step in their process.

That is what levels the playing field. Certainly, you need to put your marketing content out there for prospective buyers to consume. But as has been widely discussed, today’s buyer is holding back on their engagement until much later in the buying cycle. Engagement typically begins with a well-informed buyer, and likely at a point where they see enough value in a specific engagement step. At that instant, it is key for you to know something meaningful about the prospective buyer. Only then can you have fast and effective response.

 

An effective marketing system will bring buyers to your door. But how do you figure out an effective marketing system for your company. Designing and building a marketing system is much like the process which successful stock market investors go through.

Where to start – What does the data say?

How do you start when you don’t know where to start? Just jumping in and performing activities that are in vogue is akin to an investor putting their money into the most fashionable stocks of the day. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the most fashionable stocks of the day often crash, leaving the copy-cat investors with losses.
For successful investors, the real starting point is to look at the data, and analyze and characterize what is happening. A stock market pro will source data that is meaningful to them, establish some assumptions about what will make the stock move, and then build a model to execute the investing strategy.
As a marketer, you need to do the same. Look at the data about your market. And then make some assumptions. Importantly, you are not making assumptions because you are too lazy to get all the data. It is just not possible to get all the data. So you have to supplement the meaningful data that you can gather, with assumptions that fit with this data, and then establish a marketing model. You assumptions will be focused on what will make your customer move towards you.

Build a Model – But Don’t Assume It is Going to Work

For a stock market investor, the focus is on building an investing model that produces repeatable results. But the model will have various components that go into it, and there must be a clear understanding of how the components may interact. For this reason, the investment pro starts with a simple model that can be tested and verified at a smaller scale, before having confidence to put more money into it.
Just the same, the marketer must initiate marketing activities that are to become part of the marketing model, on a small scale. And it is key to test and verify the model and the assumptions that go into it. There is no better validator than the voice of the market itself. A/B testing is what will be provide the real measure of how effective your model is.

Manage Risk and Uncertainty – You Need Marketing Insurance

One very interesting fact about stock market players is that they are very risk averse. They are so wary of the fact that market dynamics could shift against them, with complete surprise. So their model incorporates the shifting nature of the market, and the uncertainty of how things will really turn out. They do this by incorporating various triggered defensive actions, and by using diversification.

As marketers, the same rule applies. No marketing technique will work forever. Current established techniques could fall out of favor. New techniques will emerge. Old techniques will be re-invented. So in evolving a marketing model, you must diversify among a set of marketing activities. And as with the investment pro, you must guard against the shifting nature of the marketplace. Buyer behavior is always changing as the world around them forces them to change.

Big data is not new. It’s been around for decades and it has been big for quite some time. So how did big data get so sexy all of a sudden. Well, like many things, it did not get so interesting because of the traditional data professionals who have historically been collecting and using data. It got interesting when someone started applying data techniques in new endeavors. Endeavors which no-one had paid any attention to. Think of Moneyball  and the story of Billy Beane using numbers and analytics, to produce above average performance with a below-average budget and lack of star power. It got a lot of people’s attention. Among others, one of them must have been Nate Silver, who not only developed a model for Major League Baseball but went on to accurately predict the US election results with almost 100% accuracy in 2008 and 2012.

These kinds of events put data modeling on the stage as a necessary tool in decision making. But what has really catapulted big data to become the Queen of the Prom are a number of underlying trends that have multiplied its importance.

1. Proliferation of computing devices
We can credit Apple and the iPhone with the rapid penetration of the smartphone. And the distribution of computing power has skyrocketed with the ARM processor being designed into all sorts of internet-of-things. So intelligent, interactive and mobile computing is growing at a staggering rate as new applications continue to be created.

2. Development of new processing power techniques
We can credit Google for publishing papers on how they processed data, and we can credit the release of Hadoop as an open source system in 2006. The availability of these new techniques and tools made it possible to process large amounts of data relatively quickly and economically.

3. Fast-changing markets
The pace of change in the last decade has increased to a whole new level. We are seeing large amounts of technological disruption that is constantly changing our behaviors. From how we read books to how we organize meetings are all in flux.

And it is the third characteristic that now compounds the importance of big data. With all this change occurring, it becomes vital to determine where to put our efforts. If you have useful and actionable data, in real time, you can get an edge. So it now becomes important to put in place data processes that monitor and measure what is happening. And to allow use to predict where things are headed, as well as better react to our predictions. If things were happening at a slower pace, there would be much more time for a human to allow the big picture to fill in. But with the pace of change today, we have to start applying more data modeling or we will miss the next turn.

From a sales and marketing perspective, the focus becomes on determining our product-market fit on a continual basis. What fits today may no longer fit tomorrow. The use of big data amounts to keeping many ears to the ground, in a host of different contexts. This will help us win new customers faster and adjust to new market conditions as they evolve.

A recent research report “Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field”  provided strong insight into both how marketers and buyers were satisfied with the current state of affairs of the digitally driven world of content marketing. I found the results amazing, but not in a positive way.

From the side of the marketers, there has been a huge increase in the creation of on-line content, which now accounts for one quarter of marketing budgets. From the side of the buyers, they are consuming the content in search of the promised benefits of the product or service. But there are mixed results in which content is helping them through their decision-making and justification efforts. Key points that stand out from the buyers’ responses with regard to research reports and white papers:

-High value is placed on reports from professional associations and industry groups
-Much less value is placed on vendor-created white papers

So what does that tell us? Buyers are looking for authority. Otherwise, it is hard to budge them. And why is this authority so elusive? Because it has to come from real experience and from an unbiased source.

It reminds me of the famous story of Gandhi and sugar. As the story goes, a mother had great difficulty with her son because of his large consumption of sugar. The mother observed that the kid was overly rambunctious, bounced-off-walls, and was just not himself. But nothing she did worked. So she goes off to see Gandhi and waits in line for half-a-day to see him. When she gets in front of Gandhi, she explains the story and pleads with Gandhi to tell the kid to stop taking sugar. So Gandhi looks at the kid and his mother, and provides no instructions, other that to come back in 2 weeks. So 2 weeks later, they are back in the long line-up. When they get in front of Gandhi, he puts his arms on the boy’s shoulders, looks firmly into his eyes, and says “Don’t eat sugar”.

As you might guess, the mom was really astonished by this. So she approached Ghandi and asked him “Why couldn’t you have told him that 2 weeks ago?”. And Gandhi responded: “Because I had to try it myself to see if it would work”.

So there you have it. Authority at work. And the buyers in the marketplace are no different than the boy in the story. They are just not going to take your word for it. Buyers know that the marketer’s purpose is not to evangelize their product or service solely for the benefits it provides. They must make a profit after all. So even though the marketer can provide useful, informative, and educational content, and provide it in nicely orchestrated delivery, with answers to all objections, the buyer will still have their guard up.

So the path to making everyone happy is quite simple. Marketers need to find their own Gandhis to serve as sources of authority for the buying cycle.