The way B2B buyers buy high-ticket, complex services has changed.
It’s no longer a straight-line, transactional process.
Now, B2B buyers have access to online information to conduct research and evaluate their options…
Without having to talk to or rely upon a salesperson.
Let’s look at the 6 key steps of how B2B buyers go about buying today.
And give you an idea of how to develop a marketing and content strategy that helps your “Perfect Fit” prospects buy from you.
1. Create Awareness
You position yourself to Create Awareness with your Target Market with doing your homework.
Research the problems, pains, challenges, opportunities, and aspirations of your potential clients.
Your buyers are always dealing with business issues. Often times, they live with these issues for a long time. It’s easier to maintain the status quo.
How do you Create Awareness?
Create consistent short, form, quick and easy to consume educational and entertaining content on social media. LinkedIn is usually your go-to place for B2B content.
Post on LinkedIn. Comment on posts your Target Market follows. Engage in the comments. Connect and message potential clients- phone calls, drop-in visits, emails, LinkedIn messages, and text.
Do it without any mention of your solutions or sales pressure.
Your objective is to simply bubble up a problem, challenge, or missed opportunity for potential buyers.
2. Grab Attention
Congrats… you’ve created awareness with your content.
Now it’s time to Grab Attention.
To pull potential clients into your world and enter their buying journey, you gotta get ’em to sit up and take notice.
Here are tips on how to Grab Attention.
1. Be authentic and real. No hype or fluff.
2. Take a contrarian view or position. Offer an insight or thinking outside what your Target Market thinks or believes.
3. Tell stories. All people connect and respond to stories.
4. Offer insights on Industry trends. Provides information your potential client may not be aware of and demonstrates your understanding of their business.
5. Be human. Use humor. Make people smile. Funny works.
6. Start with a Hook. In your first line of your post, or opening of a video. It’s important to stop the scroll.
7. Tap into Strategic Partner Audiences. Comment on posts your potential clients are already visiting. Endorse Strategic Partner in a post.
8. Forget trying to go viral or beat the algo. Focus on producing quality content.
3. Generate Demand
At this stage in the buying journey, potential clients are exploring different approaches and options.
For example, an HR Director may be looking at different ways and options to fire, retain, train, and onboard new employees.
This HR Director may look at outside HR Consultants or Placement firms, attend HR Conferences, listen to relevant webinars and podcasts.
They’re also exploring ways the various options could possibly be implemented in their business.
Content to Share to Generate Demand
Share guides, case studies, webinars, and podcasts about the general issues and approaches. Talk about the Pros and Cons.
Help buyers understand the various options that might fit their situation.
Keep your focus on educational content, not sales content.
4. Capture Demand
Lots of B2B Marketers and sales people skip the first three steps of the buying journey and focus all their efforts on the capturing demand step.
Big Mistake.
Here’s why:
During the research, attention, and demand generation stages, buyers are discovering vendors who are educating them.
They’re getting to know and like what they’re seeing and hearing.
Why not leap ahead of your competition and educate potential clients early on in the buying journey?
You have the opportunity to educate and influence buyers’ thinking about challenges and solutions.
You then smoothly transition to capturing demand, introducing the benefits and value of your unique solution.
How to Capture Demand
Use case studies, webinars, guides, in-depth newsletters and articles to demonstrate your difference and why it’s important.
Show how your unique solution worked for other relevant clients and share the results they experienced.
Post examples of testimonials and success stories. Ask for LinkedIn recommendations and online reviews.
Demand Capture Do’s
> Make it easy and friction-free for ready to buy prospects to reach out to you.
> Eliminate any long forms to complete.
> Use specific, clear copy to describe your service.
> Show and highlight your difference and the impact for your clients.
> Don’t gate critical content- tour of your service process, videos describing what you do and how you work with clients, detailed descriptions of your service process.
> Make sure your marketing messages align with sales.
> Don’t send low-intent, not ready to buy prospects to sales. Be patient. Keep educating with content and pre-qualify.
> Have a clear marketing to sales hand off.
> Use relevant and detailed case studies. Show buyers the steps, timing, people involved, milestones, and results expectations.
> Make sales outreach personalized, not automated.
> Follow up is key.
5. Onboard New Clients
Your Demand Generation and Capture content creates a pipeline of engaged prospects interested in how you can help them.
Through your content, they know, like, and trust you.
Some buyers (at any given time anywhere from 3-5%) are ready and will reach out to you.
Most prospects are not ready to buy and implement a solution.
They have other pressing business priorities.
So the big question is:
What can you do to prompt them to buy?
It’s listening and paying attention.
Are they attending your webinars?
Do they open and respond to your emails and LinkedIn messages?
Are they watching your vidoes?
Are they opening your email newsletters and clicking on links?
Keep in mind- not every engagement signals buying intent…
And not every prospect is even a good fit for your services.
6. Turn Clients into Raving Fans
When buyers agree to hire you, the real work begins.
You’ll want to work on your implementation process and constantly look for ways to improve it to get the best results for your clients.
Make client success a proactive process.
In addition to supporting clients to successfully implement and get results, ask for their feedback.
Make it easy to start: Ask them for their Net Promoter Score of you and your firm.
Net Promoter Score: On a scale of 0-10, with 0 being Never, and 10 being No hesitation at all; how likely are you to introduce me and my services to your peers and business associates?
Your goal is to get 9 and 10’s- Raving Fans who will gladly spread the word about you and your servces.
And if it’s anything less than a 9 or 10, you’ll want to find out what or where you missed the mark/
83% of your clients are willing to introduce you- if you know when and how to ask.
Ask when a clients expresses a positive about your business.
Schedule a Feedback Interview. I call this a Business Development Brainstorm.
You’ll want to prepare for the interview. Check on the client’s 1st Degree LinkedIn connections that fit your Target Market list. This makes it easy to identify potential Introductions.
Ask to record the interview and get permission to use the client’s feedback for a testimonial and case study.
Make it easy and friction-free for the client to Introduce you to prospects.
Bonus Benefit: Use the feedback to fine tune your content, outreach messaging, website content and more. You create a content feedback loop to always improve your content.
One final thing.
This isn’t a once and done event.
Keep checking in with your best clients. Ask for feedback. Always look for ways to improve your services and your content.
Next Step
Thanks to the access to online information, today, B2B buyers no longer rely upon the salesperson to provide critical purchase criteria information.
As much as 70% of the buying journey is completed without talking to a salesperson.
What hasn’t changed?
Only 3% of prospects are in active buying mode, and another 7% are open to buying in the near term.
So, 90-97% of your potential clients have other business priorities.
But, if you invest in creating content and building relationships online:
1. Creating Awareness
2. Grabbing Attention
3. Generating Demand
You’ll be the front-runner to Capture Demand and land clients.
And with a solid client Onboarding and Feedback process, you create long-lasting client relationships and a built-in process to keep your pipeline filled with “Perfect Fit” prospects and method to keep improving your marketing content.