Before your buyer is ready to buy, they need to be prepared for change, as Ian shares.
If there is one thing that should heal the much-documented fractured relationship between marketing and sales, it is that our joint success depends on a change in something or someone.
Any go-to-market motion, which also suggests any revenue, is dependent on an organization implementing some sort of change.
The resistance that buyers have, and why the biggest competitor for a B2B vendor is often “do nothing”, is FOFU (the Fear of F**king Up) and this isn’t just about the buyers hanging their personal and professional reputation on selecting your product, or justifying the cost but also on justifying the inevitable change that implementing your product or choosing your service will bring.
During my formative years in pre-sales, during the dot-com boom (I did say formative years), I worked for a web content management system vendor. The big USP at the time was that a business user could create web pages without knowing HTML. As I demonstrated this amazing (at the time) innovation in digital marketing, a hand goes up, and a quiet voice at the back of the room shared:
“But, I quite like coding in HTML”
Our job was then to sell this change. A change we were wrong to assume that the world and this prospective client were ready for.
You could argue that this is the difference between lead generation and demand generation, a distinction that many organizations struggle with and use these terms interchangeably.
Lead generation involves identifying organizations within an audience that are already ready for the change your product or solution requires, while demand generation inspires that change and creates an audience that is ready to buy.
Yet research from folks like LinkedIn, for example, their 95-5% rule, shows that only a very small percentage of your audience is in-market and, presumably, ready for the change. The rest are not quite there yet.
And yet, as B2B marketers and sellers, we focus on our features, functions, and benefits, and preach to the small percentage of the converted who are ready for change. We rarely prioritize content that helps the buyer move from FOFU to being ready to change.
What about case studies, I hear you say, that’s the kind of early-stage content that is, in theory, all about that rocky road from cynic to true believer.
But is it?
Most case studies have a romanticized storyline that even Disney would shy away from.
They go something like: The customer has a problem, like a damsel in distress, and the vendor hero rides in on a white horse, and then we cut to the scene of all the woodland animals dancing in the castle at the wedding and living happily ever after.
The hero's journey it is not.
It skips the bit when the damsel fought for change in her organization, navigated the evil forest of process, and hacked her way through the briar patch to convince the head of the dwarves that the other six were ready to change and adopt the new thing, and how they ignored her and high-ho’d to the other solutions they tried and failed, before the hero showed up.
At which point the damsel was indeed scooped up onto the hero's vendor's horse, but, well, let's be honest, Horse 1.0 was more Donkey 2.0, and it took some work to reach a level of success and satisfaction where enough of the woodland animals were dancing to justify this case study.
But this messy middle is the bit that the buyer wants to understand. What change will they need to make to get the benefits of the solution, and what does that journey really look like?
Yes, they know the current state and the challenge they have, and the future state and the solution being sold is becoming clear, but what change is required to get there? What risk will this be to them personally? Are they feeling FOFU?
OK, so maybe we don’t want to share the warts-and-all story, but if we don’t help them, somebody else will, or maybe worse, they will stall, procrastinate, and do nothing.
So, before we talk about ourselves, our features, functions, and all of that, let's first consider how our marketing and sales can empathize with the FOFU, and help with this change.