4 Buyer-Centric Questions You Should Ask Your GTM Strategy
As a qualitative researcher, I am a BIG fan of great questions and of course, the brilliant people who ask them.
Recently I took a swing through some of the videos and presentations at the Buyer Enablement Community and loved some of the buyer-centric questions shared by Adele Revella, Ardath Albee, Anthony McPartlin and others.
Below, I’ve recapped what I loved from a few of my favorite videos. That said, I encourage you to watch the full versions of the presentations, which can be accessed for free here after a quick registration form.
If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out the Buyer Enablement Community—it’s a super resource with tons of interviews with sales and marketing leaders, authors, and researchers in the B2B buying space. These folks are putting buyer enablement into practice and share lots of examples and strategies.
“What do we ACTUALLY need to know about our buyers?”
From: Creating buying insights and buyer personas
Adele Revella, Founder & CEO, Buyer Persona Institute
According to Adele, most buyer personas are (almost) useless.
What we do need to know about our buyers is:
What are buyers thinking about?
What outcomes are they looking to achieve?
How does the buying committee go through the decision-making process?
What questions are they asking?
What do they need to experience in their engagement before they will trust you?
Kevin Dixon @Boxxstep interviews Adele Revella @The Buyer Persona Institute
She also shared something that most marketing and salespeople miss–that there are two separate buying decisions in complex tech sales that include:
Decision made by the economic buyer (usually the C-suite executive who has allocated budget to solving a problem)
Everyone is obsessed with engaging the C-level decision-maker…and yet they are rarely involved in vendor selection.
Thought-leadership content is written to speak to this audience.
Decision made by the lead evaluator and the buying committee
Involved in setting criteria, evaluating vendors, building a business case
This audience is a lot more interested in detailed buyer enablement content that can help them build requirements, drive consensus.
Overall, she emphasized the importance of selling to the buying committee over any single C-suite (or other) decision-maker.
She also pointed out that if our marketing is overly focused on addressing the individual needs of different “personas”, this can actually drive dissension in the buying group instead of consensus. So counterintuitive, but this is reflected in some of Gartner’s research as well from a few years back.
P.S. If you haven’t read Adele’s book it’s definitely worth a read.
“What do our buyers need to manage change?”
From: 3 Elements of Personalization to Enable Buying
Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions
If personalization is about meeting buyers where they are….but “75% of efforts to create engagement will not meet ROI goals because of inadequate buyer insight”...what is the missing piece to help us nail the buyer insights we need for personalization?
Ardath says: Running buyer interviews (Surprise, surprise!).
She went on to explain that personalization for buyer enablement can be broken down into 3 key elements:
Context- Specific and Situational
Who are they?
What problem are they facing?
Why haven’t they fixed it yet (usually change management)?
What don’t they know they don’t know?
2. Value- Outcomes and Emotion
What will change in their world when their problem is solved?
What’s in it for them personally?
What will their company gain?
Can they “see” the difference?
3. Ease- Equates to Effortless Experiences
Remember that buying is not their main job
Keep it simple
Show them how to connect the dots
Let them drive… with guidance
Reduce disruption
I especially loved this diagram (below) which illustrates the buyer questions that come up through the entire buying process, but from a change management perspective.
Ardath Albee presents on persona-driven storylines.
Lots of alignment here with what Hank Barnes at Gartner writes about change enablement
“What is the value of the information customers receive from us during the buying cycle? And how are we measuring that?”
From: Understanding and Measuring Value for Buyers
Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Andrew points out that the value of the content or information we provide to buyers does not usually get measured by vendors. Nor do the other key factors circled below.
Why? Well, squishy things like trust and value can be tricky to measure. But not impossible.
Anthony McPartlin shares the true drivers of performance across the buying process and customer lifecycle.
In his presentation, Andrew also shares some ways to measure some of these qualitative metrics that often get missed in the race to revenue, but are so critical to understanding the value of our content in the eyes of buyers.
To find out if your content is adding value, here are four questions you can ask buyers about your content/marketing. I would suggest adding these to a buyer interview:
Did you find the information you needed and expected?
How quickly did you find it?
How was credible was the information?
Did the information help you build internal consensus?
Does our content help buyers build a business case?
From: The 10 Commandments of Buyer Enablement Content Strategy
Sarah MacKinnon, Tech Buying Research and GTM Strategy for B2B SaaS Start-ups & Scale-ups
It has become trendy to create a motherlode of fancy thought-leadership content, videos and infographics and sure, they are fun. This type of content will help build your brand and help you to stay top-of-mind with your potential future buyers who are not yet ready to buy.
But when you really put yourself in the shoes of your in-market B2B buyer, you realize that they are stressed, fighting against decision-making fatigue and just need SOLID information to help them build a business case.
The last few years of B2B buying data on B2B buying tells the same story. Demand Gen’s B2B Buyers Report noted that 89% of B2B buyers surveyed said that the top supplier “provided content that made it easier to show ROI and/or build a business case for the purchase”.
Back to your buyers. They are navigating tricky waters internally:
Making sure they have accurately diagnosed the problem in their business
Validating that they have chosen the right solution category
Comparing and contrasting all the relative merits and trade-offs of potential suppliers
And selling through this purchase to their boss and buying group
And they are asking questions like:
Why do we have to change anything?
How will this change help us compete?
What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
The total cost of ownership?
The break-even point?
What is the rollout plan?
What are the KPIs?
…but to answer these questions, all they have access to is a bunch of lightweight blogs announcing your latest funding round, jazzed-up third-party data in infographics, whitepapers on your vision of the world, and maybe some outdated training documentation.
If you’ve never considered orienting your content strategy around what your B2B buyers need to build a business case—here’s a huge clue: Why not ask them?
Here’s how:
Book interviews with a sample size of closed-lost and closed-won ideal buyers
Ask them about their experience with your current marketing and sales touchpoints
Collect invaluable data about the buying process
Make changes to your content and GTM strategy to improve your win rate and shorten your sales cycles
Check out my buyer research and content strategy programs. Let me know if you’re interested in hearing how we can use these insights to close more deals, faster.