For all the promise of the Internet, we believe it engenders some dangerous myths that have dramatically lessened the effectiveness of many B2B marketers:
1. The Best Product Always Wins
2. The Playing Field is Level
3. The World is your Market
4. Face-to-Face doesn’t Count Anymore
5. Buyers are Rational
6. Every Purchase is Researched
7. You can Recognize a Qualified Lead
Somehow, given the explosion of choice and information on the Internet, we assumed it would alter how people make B2B buying decisions. We assumed that human factors would matter less and facts would matter more, that products would always trump people. Our research seems to indicate we were wrong, or, at least, premature in that assumption.
The Pre-Web Model
The previous market model kept people at the center of the equation.
Geographic and resource limitations forced upon us the discipline of identifying and developing a market and, only then, could we market and sell to that market.
We couldn’t shortcut past the essential step of knowing who we were talking to and building face-to-face relationships with them.
In the process, we started building the credibility and trust that is essential in B2B buying, given the all important influence of risk.
Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, introduces the concept of the emotional bank account.
Emotional bank accounts are built on regular deposits of trust, usually made through face-to-face interactions. The higher the account balance, the more credit you have with a person, even if you have to make a withdrawal (call a favor, break a promise).
When the account is overdrawn, there is no social equity left and trust is gone.
While Covey introduced the concept in the context of interpersonal relationships, it also holds true in B2B buying, which, as we’re beginning to see, is really an aggregate of several interpersonal relationships. The vendors that are most successful are the ones that have built the biggest emotional bank accounts with prospects. The traditional model was built around this concept. Identifying the market and developing the market was all about making deposits in your target market’s emotional bank account. Only when you had a sufficient balance built up could you start making withdrawals by asking them to consider your product for purchase.
The Web Model
In the traditional model, we went to the trouble of building emotional bank accounts
because we really had no choice. The only way to sell was face-to-face with feet on
the street. It wasn’t that B2B vendors were extraordinarily noble or giving individuals. It was just the job that had to be done, and the ones that did it best, by building the best
relationships, harvested the greatest rewards.
But the fact is that marketing and sales people will always take the shortest path towards their goal. They won’t take the long way if there appears to be a short cut. And the Internet offered the be-all and end-all of short cuts, a straight path directly to
prospects ready to buy. What could be better?
With the Internet, many businesses changed their business model dramatically. Most added a new category, “online sales” that suddenly opened up the top of their funnel dramatically.
They no longer had to worry about identifying and developing a market. They just had to be in the right place online and the world would beat a path to their product. They jumped right into marketing to all these new prospects, without worrying about
making any emotional bank deposits. After all, in a rational world, the best product
should prevail, right?
In this process, online sales suddenly became separated from the traditional sales
practices of many businesses. It operated in a silo; by it’s own rules. The promised
efficiencies of the Internet were tremendously appealing: no sales people, no sales offices, no overhead – just an efficient online sales pipeline. Success lies in
ruthlessly monitoring and filtering the prospects, moving them down the funnel. And, as we’ve said, in some cases it was very successful. But in many cases, prospects rated as highly promising kept mysteriously evaporated from the top of the funnel.
Resources were allocated to a flood of RFP requests, only to be consistently frustrated
when another vendor was chosen. Buyer behavior didn’t seem to map to the funnel model at all.
Prospects were falling out of the funnel due to huge risk gaps that couldn’t be seen
from the vendor’s perspective. And often, an incumbent vendor that remained
hidden in the process blocked the path down the funnel.
The Proposed Model
If we accept the problem of the funnel myth, does this doom the online model? Not at all. The potential of online is tremendous, but not as a separate channel, set
aside from traditional best marketing and sales practices. Online has to be fully
integrated into best practices (shown by the green circles at each stage in the model), leveraging the power of face-to-face connections, allowing development of strong relationships within prospect companies, facilitating delivering of the right information to the right individuals to eliminate both organizational and personal risk.
Online becomes an extension of the traditional model, not a replacement of it. And it’s this model we’ll be exploring.
