Trust Me, You Don't Need More Tepid B2B Thought-Leadership Content
Watch the “Why” here: You Don't Need Any More Thought-Leadership Content
Or, read the whole 9 yards below.
Marketing is generating enough leads. Sales is closing (some) deals. But somewhere in the middle of your funnel, it feels like *something* is decreasing deal progression and sales velocity. **Something** is going on at the buyer’s end, and you have zero visibility.
Why is this happening? You have your suspicions.
You may suspect that they’re holding a number of alignment meetings with internal stakeholders, continuing their own research into other vendors, maybe doing a few more demos. Reaching out to peer forums, validating what they’ve heard from your salespeople with what they can read on your website. And perhaps building a more robust spreadsheet to detail their requirements.
In short, they’re building a whole business case for this purchase. And it can be a seriously heavy lift.
Let me explain. According to The Challenger Customer, B2B buying groups are made up of, on average, 5.4 people. For medium to large B2B purchases, the buying group often has to create a business case at multiple stages:
Quantifying the symptoms of the problem in the business
Building robust requirements
Educating the buying group and presenting the options
Recommending a solution.
1. The first problem this creates for your buyer: As the group gets bigger, purchase likelihood decreases dramatically. They really have to paddle upstream to create consensus and make this happen. It’s beyond tricky to get everyone on the same page and more often than not, failure to create consensus can derail the process even before anyone has reached out to a supplier.
2. The second problem this creates for your buyer: It requires a heckuva lot of extra effort to translate standard marketing content into the kind of business case content that buying groups need.
To paraphrase Kathleen Pierce, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, your buyer is 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 sell sheets, infographics, whitepapers and maybe some training documentation.
Because the old way of doing content marketing was to bludgeon prospects to death with thought-leadership, and edutainment content on a variety of topics somewhat tangential to your product/service.
The real problem with the thought-leadership content, according to The Challenger Customer is that buyers wind up thinking “wow, they’re smart”. But this doesn’t necessarily drive them to take action.
Sure, some thought-leadership pieces just feel great, and can certainly help you generate leads. But even the most beautifully written, original thought-leadership content isn’t going to help your buyers build a business case.
There’s a Shift Happening in B2B Content Marketing
Those who are winning have realized that there is a BIG difference between thought-leadership content that sells products/services, and content marketing that helps buyers buy. Aka, buyer enablement content.
Buyer enablement content helps buyers make the business case to their buying group. It should highlight key commercial insights that incite this reaction from buyers “Wow, I’m wrong”. It should upend the status quo. To quote The Challenger Customer (again) “It’s the cost of current behaviour juxtaposed to the potential of alternate action”.
And the sooner you can orient your strategy in this direction, the sooner you will win more B2B deals and influence others.
And since very few companies have caught onto this strategy, you have the opportunity to better enable your buyers than any of your category peers.
In a Gartner review of over 500 supplier content assets, only 20% of content was categorized as buyer enablement, while 42% was devoted to lead capture and nurturing.
What is Buyer Enablement Content, Exactly?
“An alternative approach to content marketing and sales support, which guides customers through the critical buying tasks where B2B buyers frequently struggle,” shared Martha Mathers, Managing VP, Gartner for Marketers.
Ok. So why is this important?
Think back to those leads who have entered your pipeline and are stuck **somewhere**. They’ve encountered one or multiple buying obstacles that are keeping them from moving forward. Likely they are struggling to build consensus with the other 4.4 people in the buying group. Perhaps they’ve agreed on the definition of the problem, but maybe they are stuck trying to get alignment on which solution is actually going to solve their problem.
It could be the latter. Of all the jobs to be accomplished in the buying process, coming to a group decision around “Solution Identification” is MUCH harder than other stages.
This is an important insight because as vendors, we often focus on nailing the “Supplier Selection” message, likely because that’s when buyers have wound up on our doorstep asking for pricing, and we KNOW that they have been knocking on other doors as well.
So let’s take account of where we are. On one hand, we have marketing churning out thought-leadership content that is so fluffy that you have to reel MQLs back to what you actually sell before you can properly qualify them. And on the other hand, sales is hammering your differentiation messaging, quite possibly before the buyer group has even agreed that your solution category is the right choice.
Meanwhile, no one is focused on helping your buyer navigate the complex process of building a business case. Gah.
Instead, imagine a world where we equip potential buyers with the tools they need to identify their problem, explore solutions, build requirements, create consensus and select a supplier LONG before they come to us asking for pricing.
Imagine the kind of trust they would feel towards a vendor who empathetically anticipated their buyer struggles and created strategic resources to help them tackle the exact issues they were facing.
Imagine the state of your marketing/sales pipeline if buyers were better educated on their problem, better sold on your solution and had taken significant steps towards building consensus before they raised their hand for a demo? Game-changing, right?
Before you can equip your potential buyers with the tools they need to build a business case, drive buying consensus inside their organization and complete the purchase, FIRST you need to understand what the most common buying obstacles are. And even before that, you need to understand what their buyer journey looks like.
Not the buy-from-you experience, but the buyer-agnostic buying process. You need to understand how they are currently trying to accomplish these 6 buying jobs through the purchase journey.
The best way to do this is to get on the phone with a bunch of buyers and ask the questions included in this article. Or hire a buyer researcher like me to do it.
Once you start to run buyer interviews, these obstacles will become apparent.
Basically, you want to build a clear picture of where your buyers…
Are struggling to build a business case to sell this purchase to their buying team
Are running into process inefficiencies that you could have anticipated and helped coach them through
Are wasting rounds of internal discussions trying to wrangle alignment
Are missing key pieces of information that would speed things up
Examples of potential buying obstacles in the buyers’ words might be:
“IT needed to do a security audit, but we didn’t know until after we had a contract drafted and ended up derailing who was on our shortlist of acceptable vendors”
“We struggled to build requirements for this purchase because we never bought X before and everyone in our buying group requested different features”
“We should have brought in our third-party vendors earlier in the process to make sure we could integrate, but we didn’t do it until later and we ended up wasting a lot of time when we realized the solutions weren’t compatible”
“It took a number of internal meetings to get alignment on the kind of results we were looking for, mainly because we couldn’t track down the right benchmarks”
“Before we were willing to sign the contract, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to test the revenue potential of this purchase on our bottom-line.”
Problem Identification
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: Why do we have to change anything? How will this change help us compete?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Reliable benchmarking data aggregated from other customers to help your buyer benchmark their current performance against peers.
Calculator to quantify the cost of not taking action OR the benefit of taking action
Diagnostic questions to help organizations determine readiness to adopt a new solution and prompt discussion points they may not have yet considered.
Solution Exploration
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: What are our options? How does your solution compare to our status quo and competing options? What are the KPIs we should measure? The break-even point?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Light or trial version of your solution to help buyers visualize it.
Requirements Building
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: What are our key requirements? How can we prioritize trade-offs if we’re struggling to get alignment?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Requirements building spreadsheet to help capture all requirements and gain alignment between stakeholders with vying feature requests.
Supplier Selection
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: What’s the cost-benefit analysis? The total cost of ownership? What is the roll-out plan?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Implementation plan timeline that demonstrates key roles and responsibilities in the roll-out plan.
Total cost of ownership calculator to calculate the total cost of ownership.
Validation
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: What are the risks and mitigations? How can we be sure it will perform as you say it will?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Recommended testing process to test or simulate the performance of your solution in their organization.
Consensus Creation
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask: How do we build alignment with other stakeholders?
Try these buyer enablement content ideas
Buying process timeline that recommends who should be brought in when.
List of questions or objections the buyer can anticipate from different members of their buying group, and data points to help field them.
Pitch deck guide with recommendations on how to build the business case to other stakeholders in the buying group.
The Questions You Should Ask
The best way to build a B2B buyer enablement content strategy is to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and ask the questions that they’ll be wondering about as they build a business case to buy your [B2B thing]. Then, you can ensure that you create buyer enablement tools and resources to support them through the process.
Why do we have to change anything? How will this change help us compete?
What are our options? How does your solution compare to our status quo and competing options?
What are the KPIs we should measure?
What are our key requirements? How can we prioritize trade-offs if we’re struggling to get alignment?
What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
The total cost of ownership?
The break-even point?
What is the roll-out plan?
What are the risks and mitigations?
How can we be sure it will perform as you say it will?
How do we build consensus and get alignment with other stakeholders in the buying group?