“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Anyone involved in the business of B2B technology marketing knows that the rules of the game are changing. To be relevant in a world where buyers are overloaded with information you need not just a strong proposition but a clear point of view, and that point of view needs to pervade all aspects of your go-to-market activity.
B2B buyers are now better informed than they have ever been. Without ever needing to speak to a vendor they can access a mass of content on pretty much any subject you could think of – from company websites, media commentators, bloggers, analysts, online forums, webinars etc. And senior decision-makers use all of these information sources; the assumption that CIOs and IT Directors are too busy to spend time searching for information online is a fallacy. For example, Forrester research found that online technology forums were the most important information source for CIOs when considering purchases of cloud services.
However the fact that senior B2B buyers have access to more information sources than ever before does not necessarily make buying decisions easier; it can confuse as much as simplify. A CIO who spends time scanning online forums and the blogosphere will be aware of a broader range of possibilities, but will also be alerted to as many risks and threats. For every commentator promoting the virtue of a particular technology, you can be sure there will be another dismantling the case for change or reporting a bad experience.
So the better informed B2B technology buyer still needs help from suppliers, but in different ways. They’re not looking for people to tell them about an individual product, they’re looking for people who can help them navigate the mass of options open to them and identify the route forward that makes sense for their organisation, taking into account the broader environmental, business and technology context.
What they don’t need is to hear from people that will just regurgitate market stats and repeat ‘common wisdoms’ – they can get all of that online. What they value is people that will help them develop their own thinking, by offering insight and opinion and sharing distinctive perspectives; or in other words thought leadership. Increasingly decision-makers and influencers are engaging with vendors that they believe have interesting points of view and different approaches to doing things, not just those that have interesting products.
This has implications for any enterprise technology company’s go-to-market programmes. It’s no longer enough to be able to communicate how great your particular product or service is (as if this ever was the case) or even what benefits it might offer the customer. To earn the right to have a conversation with the senior buyers you crave, you need a clear and distinctive point of view – about what’s going on in the customer’s world and how technology (not just your technology) can be used to solve their business challenges and drive growth. If you can demonstrate that you have something insightful and thought-provoking to contribute to the debate, you may just earn the chance to show how the stuff you sell should be a part of the solution.
The point of view is at the heart of building a thought leadership position. To be effective this point of view needs to relevant to the concerns of your target audience and it needs to be substantiated – you need to be able to build cogent and coherent arguments backed up by relevant insight and evidence.
Of course, many marketers have a natural aversion to expressing a strong point of view, particularly about anything not directly linked to their own product or service. It’s risky, what if people disagree with you? Easier to play safe and offend no-one. This thinking is misguided and ignores the reality of today’s information-saturated world. Better to have 75% of your potential customers disagree with you than to have 100% of them ignore you.
And having people disagree with you is not necessarily a problem. The objective is to be a part of the conversation and actually have an opinion. As long as your point of view is substantiated and well-articulated, then even those who disagree with you may judge that you are worth listening to.
To be effective your point of view needs to pervade all aspects of your go-to-market activity. It’s not something that exists in its own bubble, mentioned only in the occasional press release or white paper. It needs to becomes a core part of your distinctive market positioning. If you can achieve this then maybe those hard-to-reach decision-makers will start inviting you to call on them.
However getting in front of the right contacts is only half the battle. If you’re going to convert interest in your opinions into opportunities for your products, then you need to be able to have the right conversations once you’re there, and that means properly enabling your sales channels. It’s no good building a market position around an insightful point of view if the only thing your sales guys want to do when they get in front of a decision-maker is pitch a product.
Channel enablement is a vital part of any thought-leadership based go-to-market programme. Your front-line needs to be equipped to articulate the point of view, to share the insights, and to tell the story which connects the broader business issues to the solutions you offer. If you can do all of that (and you’ve got a decent proposition of course) then you stand a decent chance of success.
I don’t want to imply that what I’ve described above is easy. But what’s the alternative?
