By Frank Magnera, Account Director and Team Lead
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”
If you’re thinking this philosophy only applies to marketing in the B2C space, you’d be wrong. The fact is, emotion plays a much bigger role in B2B than most people think--especially in today’s world of social media saturation and information overload. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it; and then they justify their belief with all the rational stuff you give them.
There’s a great book by Annette Simmons on how storytelling shapes decisions and actions that are important to both individuals and organizations, titled Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins. In it she states, “People don’t want information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith--faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell.”
Sounds good in theory, but I work with a lot of B2B marketers who believe professional customers make complex buying decisions based on functionality, price and quality. They say their customers need facts, not faith.
Not so fast. Assume that all B2B marketers provide facts. So what exactly is it that differentiates one competitor from another?
You Gotta Have Faith
I’d argue that closing the final sale hinges more on your ability to draw the seller and buyer closer to each other emotionally than on any set of features and benefits. By emotionally connecting with your buyer, by telling the world what you believe in, you can differentiate yourself, sell more effectively, get prospects excited, and enlist them to your cause. You attract people who believe what you believe--and they’ll help you attract others like them.
According to Dan Hill’s book Emotionomics, 80% of all decisions are emotionally based. Emotions matter. Even in business. CFOs, engineers, procurement personnel--at the end of the day, they’re people too, and they take their personalities to work with them. So while your proposition might be pitch-perfect … unless you inject a little emotion into your story, why should you expect anybody to truly care?
The trick is tapping into the right emotions. With corporate clients, your appeals need to address their need for positive emotional feedback (such as greater success) and protect them from negative emotional consequences (failures or headaches).
It’s basic, but powerful. If your marketing can persuade your target that your product will satisfy their emotional needs better than the competition, the sale is within reach. The only thing left to do is provide the facts and figures they need to justify acting on those emotions.
Faith and the Funnel
If you think about the typical sales funnel, most companies start by explaining what the product/service is and then follow up with why it makes sense to buy it, before moving on to explain how it works. The assumption is that by following these three steps, the salesperson will build up enough trust to close the sale. It’s a fairly universal process.
Interestingly though, Coulson-Thomas Publications recently published a study conducted among 4,000 companies--“Winning Companies; Winning People”--that essentially proved that the best sales performers actually start at the other end of the process. Those performers start out looking to sell what their company stands for and believes in first.
They focus their time and energy on instilling faith. Whether it’s excitement and anticipation, reassurance and confidence, or any other strong emotional response, they concentrate on offering a glimpse of what the customer can expect from the relationship--a small indication of brand interaction on a personal level. Only then do they use all the other rational stuff to help their prospect make the case for the sale internally.
Involve your prospect. Make them feel something. Inspire them to care. Give them a reason to invest on an emotional level. Done right, it’s a masterful process. By focusing on faith first and facts second, we can create the kind of experiences that build trust, deepen relations and deliver results--creating true believers. And isn’t that what it’s really all about?
