By Matt Massey, Managing Director, drive2 Inc.
I was stunned by the results of a poll done a while ago by the Business Products Buyers Survey*. They asked a panel of 478 B2B buyers to specify the percentage of their purchases where the vendor found them. Astonishingly, these were in the minority. These buyers claimed that 75-80% of the time, 'We found the vendor.'
Am I saying we should throw in the towel on outbound campaigns? Do I believe we should abandon direct marketing and let buyers assign themselves to our sales funnels? Absolutely not.
Let me point out some inaccurate conclusions people draw from these results:
- The 20-25% that were found by a vendor most likely bought from that vendor.
- The 'We found them' faction formed their own impression of the vendors in the space, based on…whatever information they came across and put credence in. In other words, it's anyone's guess whether they heard the marketing pitch the vendor had painstakingly created for them.
- Given that B2B prospects are fairly easy to identify, I don't believe that vendors missed 75-80% of the target audience. We must conclude that those who claimed they found the vendor must have forgotten any of the vendor's attempts to reach them. How many times have you heard your rep say, after a rival snagged the business, "I had them in our CRM, but they never moved past the suspect stage."
What I am saying is that if we want to have visibility on more than 25% of our sales, we have to shape up our sales & marketing processes. It's not something either sales or marketing can fix on their own. We have to integrate the message that they first responded to with later lead nurturing messages we give them. Our sales process has to incent reps to regularly check in with prospects. Our outbound activities have to entice them to introduce us to other stakeholders, instead of betraying their trust by going directly to the stakeholders ourselves. We have to politely create urgency for them and give them a business-case rationale that proves our value, not a gimmicky promotion.
As the vendors, we only have so much control over the buying process. We have to work as hard as we can to stay relevant to the buyer, over prolonged periods of time, in the hope that they'll involve us when they decide to buy.
*Results reported in MarketingSherpa's B2B Lead Generation Handbook, 2008 edition.
