Humanizing B2B

The new truth in marketing that will transform your brand and your sales

Paul Cash, James Trezona

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788602501
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

If you want to move products, you need to move people. And if you want to move people, you need to move minds.

This is what modern B2B marketing is all about.

It's time to wake up to the power of branding, purpose, stories, emotion, people and culture to drive growth.

There is something incredibly exciting happening in B2B land. Freed from a narrow focus on performance marketing, brands are becoming more interesting and more relevant.

This book brings together the latest thinking on humanized B2B marketing, to help leaders and their businesses grow, dominate their categories, and become meaningful in today's demanding world.

PAUL CASH is a creative entrepreneur and storyteller on a personal mission to humanize B2B marketing. Recognized as one of the Top 20 most influential B2B marketers, he is the founder of Rooster Punk, the go-to agency for B2B storytelling.

JAMES TREZONA is a strategist, marketeer and MD of Rooster Punk. He uses the power of storytelling to empower businesses to reap the rewards of putting purpose at the heart of their business.

Part I
Why B2B marketing has to change

What you’re doing isn’t working

Telling you that what you’re doing isn’t working seems like a pretty bold statement, and we’d not be surprised if you found yourself disagreeing with it. ‘What do you mean, not working? If I reduce my prices, it increases revenue. When I invest in advertising, new leads come in. And the last time we revamped our search engine optimization (SEO), we climbed up the rankings. Sure, some campaigns have been more successful than others, but they certainly work.’

Let’s be clear: we’re not saying that what you’re doing isn’t triggering any results. The problem is that those results are incremental increases in marketing KPIs and, if you’re lucky, pipeline and sales. They keep you going, but they don’t put you in the category’s number-one spot or entrench you there forever. If you’re like most B2B businesses, your marketing has been stuck in a rut for as long as you can remember; you treat business buyers and decision makers as driven purely by logic and reason, and there’s little humanity or emotion in your communications. This has become a dogma in B2B Land, so ingrained in its thinking that it’s become almost impossible to imagine anything different.

How did B2B marketing become this way? Was there one particular morning when we strode into the office, took off our personalities, along with our coats, and morphed into robots? And even if there was, what on earth made us think it was a good idea? Of course it didn’t happen quite like that, but at some point B2B marketers must have collectively decided that a logical, binary way of approaching marketing made sense. Maybe the engineers, scientists and technologists who made up the majority of B2B preferred it like that, and assumed everyone else did too. Or maybe it was just easier that way.

If we’re to dig ourselves out of this mess, we need to understand what went wrong, because it wasn’t always like this. Back in the 1970s and even into the early 1990s, B2B marketing (then called ‘industrial marketing’) was mainly carried out through trade catalogues, events and sometimes direct mail. It offered some interesting and effective ways of connecting with customers, especially on the advertising front, and tried to be solution-focused. Some of it had a deeply human element.

So what changed? In the late 1990s, the Internet burst onto the scene and changed our world. Although, to be more accurate, it wasn’t its arrival that made the difference to B2B marketing, but marketers’ knee-jerk reaction to it. Suddenly our industry was handed a whole new way of communicating its products to buyers, and we had no time to adjust to it – we just grabbed it with both hands and ran with it.

Imagine (or remember) that time; companies like Vodafone, Oracle and Microsoft were just starting to promote themselves in a significant way. The personal computer became a thing, along with mobile phones and their accompanying networks, to say nothing of in-house company databases and enterprise software packages. It was all brand-new, and it needed to be explained to the people who these companies wanted to buy it. But how to use this new tool called the Internet to do the explaining? What was it for? How did it work? The easiest answer was to reduce everything down to ‘speeds and feeds’, or features and – if we were lucky – benefits. Technology products made up a new category which demanded its own rules: put a picture of a router or PC on a website, list what it does, splash a price point alongside it (easily tweaked for those all-important offers) and – boom – people will buy. The last thing anyone thought about was how to engage audiences or develop brands; they were too busy focusing on promoting their product’s specific technology advantage.

To be fair, it worked for a while because buyers did want to know how many megabytes a broadband service offered or what price a PC manufacturer was charging for the basic compared to the enhanced version. It made sense, even if it was binary and unimaginative, and we can see the same early-market-stage thinking today with cutting-edge technology such as AI. The problem with it emerged as technology advanced, with competitors playing an ever-quicker game of catch-up so that the majority of the products at similar price points were almost identical to one another.

In most B2B markets there’s historically been one driver of value. Mobile phones used to be promoted according to how many megapixels they had: 8, 10, 12 or 16. Eventually the megapixels climbed to dizzying heights of 18 and we stopped caring how many there were – it became meaningless. What could possibly be the difference between 16 and 18? It was the same with broadband. In the beginning we’d dial up a 16KB connection, then were offered 256KB, then 1MB, then 2MB, then 6MB. Today we have ‘high-speed broadband’ and we don’t even know what it is. The value drivers have become standardized, giving buyers the same lack of reason – in terms of features – to buy one brand over another as the consumer market has faced for years in the form of homogeneous products like lager and bottled water. Consumer marketers, of course, have long risen to this challenge by creating brands that tap into people’s emotions as a way of generating loyalty, but not so in B2B.

Another factor in the de-humanizing of B2B was the development of ‘software as a service’ (SaaS). To appreciate the scale of the change this brought, cast your mind back to (or imagine) when a customer relationship management (CRM) database was something every large enterprise had to have. Software providers such as Oracle would install complex CRM programmes on company servers at vast expense, and they’d need maintaining by companies’ IT departments. One day, newcomer Salesforce disrupted the market by providing the same database facility but hosted in the cloud, so the data could be accessed from anywhere. The system needed no updating or maintenance, and was paid for by a flexible subscription that could be cancelled at any time.

Services like these surged in popularity and are now used by businesses of all sizes. This has been a win for many, but has also eroded the role of the traditional sales person – the human face of the software provider. Sure, those guys (and they were almost always guys) were pricey, with their company cars and expense accounts, but they were also pretty amazing at building relationships with buyers – to the point at which if they left for another company, they’d often take their willing clients with them. However, the efficiency of the SaaS model dictated that sales teams be slashed in favour of encouraging businesses to sign up to software services online. This was another nail in the coffin of the emotional connection between B2B seller and buyer.

So we can see how the transition from industrial marketing to B2B marketing was generated by the explosion of new technology, both in terms of the products that needed to be sold and the main vehicle through which they could be promoted: the Internet. All of a sudden, marketers were able to reach customers at scale. We had email – we could spam people! We had banner ads – we could distract people! Some of it worked, and still does, but this opening up of a brave new world of mass communication made us lazy. It was fast-food marketing, with messages aimed at the lowest common denominator in a way that our B2C colleagues have always found inexplicable.

Pulling levers

We understand how we got here, but what’s going on now? If you look around you, we’re willing to bet you see something like this. You’ve ended up mired in the ‘dreaded ers’: customers wanting products that are quicker, cheaper or smarter than what they’ve currently got. They don’t want anything more meaningful than that because you’ve never offered it, forgetting that it’s your responsibility to excite them and serve them beyond their expectations, not just to give them what they ask for.

Simply focusing on promoting how your service will improve on what was there before means that you spend your time pulling levers. Each lever represents a tactic you can deploy, whether it be creating social media posts, placing ads online, revamping your website or sending email campaigns. They give sales a short-term boost but they’re so boring and limited, aren’t they? They don’t engage with your audience on a higher level or create any meaningful loyalty to your brand. Instead, they encourage you to keep focusing on numbers so you can manipulate your figures to prove you’ve done the right thing.

This is understandable given the pressure on you to deliver results, but when you spend your time reporting on pointless KPIs such as bounce rates, conversion rates and costs per click, as opposed to meaningful outcomes such as increased win rates against your competitors and long-term sales, you’ll stay stuck. As Jan Gladziejewski, VP Regional Marketing and Communication at DXC Technology, said to us, ‘I’ve never seen a CEO who’s really interested in a set of marketing KPIs. We need to be brutal about what’s relevant to the C-suite.’ Occasionally a shiny new tactic such as influencer marketing will come along, waving temptingly at you from your Instagram feed, and you’ll chase it to achieve a better this or a better that (the ers again). You’ll win a little and that will make you feel good, but you won’t win big. You won’t want to risk what you already have, which is – let’s face it – not too bad.

The market is changing and has been for some time. Millennials, with their relative openness to the value of emotion in business, are now in positions of buying power. An increasing number of women work in senior positions, either in companies or as founders and entrepreneurs of sizeable businesses; they have more of a practised understanding of how empathy is baked into our human experience and how it influences our buying decisions. The median age of people in the UK and Europe is now over 40 for the first time ever, with the USA catching up quickly. We are an ageing population, and as we grow older we naturally become less interested in ourselves and more focused on family, legacy and the planet. This combination of changes means the B2B buyers who are now in their 40s and 50s are more broad-minded and compassionate than they were 20 years ago, with their younger counterparts just coming into the workplace being equally so.

There’s also been a revolution in business thinking in recent years. The impact of Simon Sinek and his ‘Start with Why’ philosophy has led some boardrooms to become part of what’s been called the purpose revolution. This is an emotional space that prompts leaders to question the primary reason for their company’s existence – what is it they’re trying to achieve, and why should this matter to their customers and employees? What social issues do they want to take a stand on, and what corresponding approach do they want their marketers to take? Add to this the new wave of conscious capitalism, in which businesses consider the environment to be one of their stakeholders, and there’s a perfect melting pot of mindfulness and empathy that makes now an essential time to be more human in B2B. Increasingly, it doesn’t feel right to do things the old way. And yet B2B marketing hasn’t moved with the times because it doesn’t want to – it prefers to stick with pulling the same old levers. That’s what has to change.

How does this play out on a practical level? In our experience, most B2B buyers or decision makers live in a constant state of FEAR.³ It’s not just fear in the normal sense of the word, but fear made up of frustration, evasiveness, apathy and risk aversion. The first rule of successful marketing is to recognize this condition in the people you’re selling to. Here’s how it works.

o Frustration. B2B buyers and decision makers feel constantly frustrated. They’re being asked to do more with less, their teams lack the skills they’d ideally like them to have and they feel overworked and underappreciated.

o Evasiveness. Because they feel hounded by marketers and sales people, they’ve evolved various clever ways to make themselves invisible. They use adblockers to protect their privacy, they don’t answer their phones unless they have to and they long ago became blind to the banner and display ads flashing at the sides of their screens.

o Apathy. B2B buyers and decision makers have learned to ignore the vendors who claim they can transform their businesses and save them millions. They’ve become weary of product feature and benefit marketing, and are bombarded with so much content that it’s a full-time job just to keep on top of the research. They feel burned-out.

o Risk aversion. With the amount of data and information available now for research, they care more about making the wrong decision than the right one – otherwise known as loss aversion bias. As marketing luminary Rory Sutherland often points out, they’re more afraid of being blamed than they are of even just getting it wrong. Added to this is the fact that many businesses now have formal buying groups or committees, which hobble buyers’ independence and force them to justify every decision they make.

You can see how in this buyer and decision maker FEAR zone, if any business wins, it’s the incumbent supplier because it’s already ‘in’. Often it leads to paralysis when no decision is made. If all you’re doing as a marketer is bombarding these people with information without saying anything different or being interesting and engaging, you’ll be exacerbating the FEAR by encouraging decision making paralysis rather than attracting people to your product.

What’s the solution? To make decision makers feel BRAVE again. We’ll be expanding on these concepts more throughout the book, but to give you a feel for how it works, BRAVE is the antidote to FEAR. At its heart is a more human-centred recognition of the drivers that affect people’s decisions, and those who embrace it are – in our experience – infinitely more successful than those who stick with pulling levers.

o Buyer emotion. People buy using their feelings and only justify their decisions with logic – pure rationality is not the main driver. If all you have is reason to bring them to you, you’ve missed the primary instigator of their purchase.

o Recognition. Buyers are human just like anyone else; they want to be rewarded and recognized for their work. How can you help to elevate them and their careers by enabling recognition from their teams, companies or even industries? What can you do for them, rather than asking what they can do for you? How can you make them look good so they feel good about themselves, and by extension about you?

o Appreciation. B2B buyers are coping with more technological change than practically anyone else around. But they’re also human, and the pace at which they can manage this change is governed more by the limitations of human nature than by the timetable of Moore’s Law. What they appreciate more than anything is suppliers who show they appreciate the challenges they face. How can you do this?

o Value. Buyers don’t want hype; they want suppliers who approach them in a human, intelligent way. What could you provide that’s useful to them? What value can you bring that’s unique to you and different to what they could access elsewhere? Even better, think about how you can address their unconscious needs. Because the gold in the value you offer is when you teach them about a problem they didn’t know they had – the one that’s not keeping them up at night but should be. Challenge them, don’t just agree with what they think they want. And don’t simply solve problems; find them.

o Engagement. Buyers have high expectations of marketing – they don’t want to be sold to. They’re looking for you to engage them in creative and empathetic ways, because people buy human stories as much as they buy products.

You can see that the BRAVE methodology is a recognition of individual buyer emo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I Why B2B marketing has to change
• Part II Humanizing B2B: What you need to know
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements