By Brent Adamson, Karl Schmidt & Anna Bird
Business-to-consumer marketers have long known that the key to customers’ hearts and minds is to make the connection between the brand and their sense of self. Powerful brands (think Apple and Nike) reinforce customers’ positive self-image. Business-to-business marketers, on the other hand, have approached selling as a rational, numbers-driven process where the best value proposition wins.
Consequently, they’ve paid little attention to the psychological needs of individual stakeholders in a purchasing organization.
Our research shows that understanding the personal motivations of key people in a buyer organization is every bit as important to a sale as convincing them of the superiority of your solution.
Today between five and six decision-makers typically have to agree on a purchase before it can happen. If a seller doesn’t have an advocate in the organization to help drive the consensus, a so-called mobilizer who is motivated to champion the deal, the sale can stall. To find out what might motivate someone to take on this mobilizer role, corporate executive board surveyed over 4,000 individual customer stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase. We found that customers perceive three distinct types of value provided by suppliers:
- Company value captures ways in which your offering is perceived to help customers win at the company level – things like allowing the firm to achieve operational goals.
- Professional value is about the ways an offering might improve the individual productivity of employees, by increasing employees’ workflow, for example.
- Identity value describes the ways an offering might impact how employees perceive themselves by, for example, boosting their pride, helping them win respect or strengthening their sense of community. It is less about “how the firm does” or “what I do” than “who I am.”
We found that the most effective way to create internal advocates for your offering is to make sure that, in addition to explaining the company and professional value it provides, you reinforce the ways it will deliver identity value n making them feel proud and respected, and strengthening their sense of community within the organization. If you fail to inspire individual customer stakeholders with the promise of identity value, they may not advocate for you.
And, without them, it will be an uphill battle getting the consensus you need for a purchase.
Brent Adamson is CEB’s managing director of advisory services. Karl Schmidt is the practice manager of CEB Marketing. Anna Bird is a director of strategic research for CEB Marketing.