Providing all of your marketing content to your buyer at one time, or at too fast of a pace, just results in a data dump. This has 2 consequences: (1) it is too much data for your buyer to process at one time; and (2) your ability to get some feedback or garner some insight is corrupted. The end result is more likely to be a stalled buying process.
I started my career in semiconductor sales, and one of the first lessons that I learned was the manner in which marketing content is provided to a buyer. The semiconductor industry is characterized by having quite a breadth of content, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that semiconductors are the building blocks for electronics. There are data sheets, application notes, and many catalogs. And the manner in which any one component may be used, is just too hard to determine. It is like selling wood. It could be used in a lot of different ways.
So even though the buyer had requested a particular set of data, my lesson was not to hand it out all at once during my visit. Rather, I was to sequence through the content, one by one, highlighting each briefly. With each one, my focus needed to be on the buyer’s reaction and see what kind of attention each piece received. I knew the products but I did not know the buyer. And this was how I would be able to gather the intelligence that I needed to formulate an engagement plan, and to nurture the process further.
But there is always the desire to provide the potential buyer with everything they ask for, and as fast as possible. If they are asking for it, it is a good thing. And certainly response time is important. But in the B2B environment, rarely does an order manifest itself right after providing the buyer with the content they requested. It is a buying process. It is akin to educational process, both for you and the buyer. And much like a teacher with a class of students, the information is metered out at a rate that the students can consume it, and the teacher is able to get feedback on how well it is being absorbed. We must understand that the same thing happens during the buying cycle. If you just do a data dump, things are not likely to proceed smoothly or rapidly. Too much choice, too many decisions, is what will stall the process.
When we are dealing with buyers that come to us online, we have to keep the overall buying process in mind. We need to establish ways in which buyers can consume our content, while not enabling them to overwhelm themselves. And we need to strive to establish, from their electronic footprints, what kind of persona it is that we are dealing with. Our challenge is to deduce the type of persona which our data analytics are describing. And then to proceed with actions that fit with the part of the buying cycle that we are likely at. Each of the buyer’s steps need to have a complementary response from us, that narrow the process going forward to the most-likely set of pre-determined possibilities.