Disrupting the Purchase Decision

Disrupting the Purchase Decision:from Wide Angle by Shelley West
On Thursday August 9, heads of Marketing from around the country gathered at CEB’s Arlington, VA headquarters for the first presentation of the Marketing Leadership Council’s 2012 B2B research, “Disrupting the Purchase Decision: Challenging Customer Buying Criteria.”  This presentation was the culmination of about 9 months of work involving extensive qualitative and quantitative research focused on the question we heard so many marketers ask this year: how do we capture customers’ attention in an information-dense environment (in which they are actively avoiding our influence)?
Some highlights from the daylong session included:

• Recognizing that talking about themselves isn’t going to work, nearly all marketers are turning to some form of content marketing – that is, content focused on the customers and what they might need or want to learn – in order to portray the supplier as helpful and smart  and gain customer awareness, attention, and engagement.
• However, it turns out that most content marketing isn’t really working, at least as it is currently executed.  It gets interim results like web traffic, page views, and leads in the funnel, but most suppliers aren’t feeling content marketing’s benefits on their bottom lines.  Even suppliers widely recognized as innovative thought leaders are still ending up in what we like to call the “RFP Bake-Off.”
• The reason most content marketing fails to actually produce better, more profitable deals is it generally accepts (and even reinforces) the buying criteria customers have set based on the research they conduct before they allow the supplier in to influence their decision.  Because of the complex nature of the decision and the overwhelming amount of information available to customers, they norm their criteria to a common denominator that results in all suppliers looking the same.
• The only way to break through and escape the RFP Bake-Off is to disrupt buyers’ criteria.  This requires something we call “Commercial Insight.”  Commercial Insight is a frame-breaking idea that changes the way customers think about their own businesses.  It challenger their assumptions and teaches them something new.  But not just any idea will do.  In order to get paid for this insight, it has to lead back to something the supplier can uniquely deliver.
• Developing a Commercial Insight and then communicating it to customers throughout the purchase process (including through content marketing and sales interactions) requires a unique set of capabilities that many organizations don’t yet have in place.  And we have tips, tools, and best practices for how to do it all.

Want to know more?  It’s not too late for MLC members to register for our upcoming presentations of this research.  We’ll be in Sydney August 22, Chicago August 28, London September 11, and San Francisco December 11.  Register online or contact your account manager.  Look for everything to hit the web early September.