MarketSense

Framing A Need - Ensuring Buyer Consideration

So, your buyer has become aware of his/her need/want/problem. They've been talking with their friends, looking for expert advice, and generally socializing their need.

As they process all of that information, they hone in on the mechanism that will make or break your ability to get through to them. That device is the problem frame.

Narrowing Down the Possibilities

For many needs/wants/problems, there are a variety of ways that each can be satisfied.

Let's take the example of a United States buyer who needs to replace his/her car. To start, he/she has 10 U.S. brands to choose from. Each of these brands offers numerous product lines. Each product in the line has plenty of different configurations. And this is before you add the 9 international car manufacturers with their product lines and configurations.

To keep the selection process manageable, buyers frame their need. That frame is their way of narrowing down the world of solutions to a smaller set.

How buyers narrow down that set of possibilities - frame - is critically important to you.

Frames define the scope of the buyer's solution search.

So, You Want to be Included

In selecting their frame, your product will either be included or excluded for consideration by the buyer.

In our car example above, say the buyer frames his/her need as

I want to buy a new Toyota.

If you are GM, what is the chance that you are going to get the time of day from the prospect while in his/her buying process? Close to zero unless something unexpected happens to cause the buyer to revisit his/her frame.

Unexpected things do happen. Look at the runaway car issues Toyota recently has faced. But can you really count on a major gaff by a competitor to give you entrée into the buyer's process? To put it another way, if you are GM, you would have to wait another 40 years before that will happen again.

How Do You Ensure Visibility

So, if being included in the buyer's frame is so important, how can you ensure that your product is included in the buyer's frame?

Help the buyer frame their need.

This takes us back to the awareness stage in the buyer's process. In order to help the buyer frame their need, your product needs to be found in at least one of the places the buyer is going to use to socialize their need.

You want to be the leading source of information about the buyer's need. You want to become the trusted advisor. You want to subtly help the buyer choose a frame that will include your product.

Car manufacturers spend millions of dollars a year creating frames. They do it with branding. Think of Volvo. Safety comes to mind. Think of BMW. Ultimate driving experience comes to mind. Because of the myriad of car options available in the marketplace, car manufacturers invest in branding to align with framed needs.

Not all of us have thousands to invest in our brand. But in this Internet age, you don't necessarily need to.

What you do need to do is ensure that your products can be found. Once found, you need to be the best at helping the buyer understand the way to frame his/her need.

Recognizing a Need - How Buyers Find You

Recently, in working on a client project, I ran across one of the most difficult problems a marketer faces. Buyers were having a difficult time finding my client's offering. In marketing, we call this an awareness problem.

If a buyer can't find your solution, they can't buy your product.

Awareness Challenges for Marketers

There are many reasons why a buyer can't find a product you offer. And in this particular situation, the client faced all of the challenges.

1. Buyer doesn't even know they have a need the product satisfies
2. Buyer knows they have a need, but has trouble expressing what they are looking for
3. Buyer can clearly describe what they are looking for, but your product isn't showing up in their research

Most buying processes start when a prospect recognizes that they have a need, want or problem that they want satisfied. Unless the buyer is intimately familiar with the solution area, their first attempts to define their problem will be very general in nature.

• I am looking for a big screen tv.
• I want a quieter car.
• I am having trouble seeing the buttons on my phone.

Hopefully, the need/want/problem is interesting enough that the prospect will start socializing it. However, if the prospect hasn't heard about solutions to their need/want/problem, they may quickly dismiss it. This is where awareness comes in.

Buyers Need to Know a Solution Exists

To ensure that a prospect doesn't dismiss their need/want/problem, marketers must create awareness on two fronts:

1. They must validate the need/want/problem.
2. They must demonstrate that the need/want/problem can be satisfied.

Pharmaceutical companies are expert in this technique. Their advertisements lead by discussing the malady. In fact, you will often hear them say that the particular health issue is "common". That provides the problem validation. Then they use their product to demonstrate that there is a solution for this problem.

Focusing on the Need

This offers an incredible opportunity for marketers who want to get into the prospect's mind from the start. However, it requires marketers to change their typical focus. Rather than leading with content about their product, they must focus on education related to the need/want/problem. Becoming the primary source of knowledge about the need/want/problem gives you a strong preference in the buyer's mind. In essence, by educating the buyer on their problem, you become the trusted advisor in their search for a solution.

Of course, this position of "trusted advisor" isn't offered because you provided some information to the buyer. You capture this position when you provide comprehensive, open information about their need/want/problem. They must see you as supporting them in their quest to find the best solution to their problem. You must be objective and inclusive.

I should note that if yours is the first product in a new category, it will take significant time, money and attention to create this awareness. Remember, this isn't product awareness. It is awareness about the need. By being first, you alone are blazing the path. This can be great for you if your product is a desirable solution. However, this type of situation often favors the second product to market. Being a follower allows a competitor to capture an interested, educated audience (at your expense) by addressing your product's issues in your solution.

Socializing the Need

Let's say that the prospect doesn't dismiss their need/want/problem. Instead, they start socializing their need. I like to call this "trying on" different ways of describing their need/want/problem. The best way to visualize this is to translate the socialization into a search engine search. In their verbalization of the need/want/problem, prospects are going to create long tail searches.

What does a long tail set of searches look like? Here's an example for the problem: "I am having trouble seeing the buttons on my phone". Searches for this problem might include:

• phone trouble
• can't see buttons on phone
• big button phone
• visually impaired phone
• phone buttons too small

Long tail searches are surprisingly diverse. But if marketers want to get traction at this earliest stage of the buying process, they must show up in the long tail search results. I've already given you the key to do this. You must create need-oriented content. When you create that content, optimize it for the best matched likely long tail searches.

What's at Risk

Believe it or not, there is a lot at stake for the marketer at this first stage of the buying process.

1. If the buyer dismisses the need/want/problem, there can be no sale.
2. If the buyer can't find you at this stage, you take the risk that they may never find you.
3. Or if they find you later, they may be unwilling to insert your product into their process.
4. Finally, if the buyer finds a competitor first, and that competitor does a stellar job of education, the buyer can develop an insurmountable preference for the competitive solution.

Why put yourself in the position of being the underdog? By applying the techniques suggested here, you can be in the driving seat.

Benefits of Mapping the Prospect's Buying Process

This week I will begin a summer blog series on the Buying Process. This series is based on my eBook Understanding the Buying Process. The goal of the series is to show you how to obtain and apply buying process knowledge to improve your lead conversion.

Marketing Funnel versus Buying Process

A typical marketing organization organizes their efforts around the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel defines how marketing intends to move a prospect towards a purchase. Typical stages in a marketing funnel include:

Marketing funnels tend to be inwardly or organizationally focused. They show how an organization divides up marketing activities to support the sale.

On the other hand, the buying process represents how a prospect works through his/her own process to arrive at a purchase decision. The focus is all about the buyer and his/her needs.

Why Should I Care About the Buying Process?

The buying process is like a roadmap for buyer behavior.

Let's say you were going to take a trip to grandma's new house. You use your favorite on-line tool to map your trip. What would happen if the results had chunks of directions missing along the way? If you followed those directions, you might get lost. It might take you a lot longer to reach your destination. You might run out of gas along the way. You might not ever get to grandma's house.

By using a buying process to direct your activities supporting prospective buyers, you

1. Know what the buyer needs to complete their decision/purchase process
2. Use that buyer knowledge to minimize buyer abandonment
3. Accelerate the buyer's process by anticipating their need

Knowledge is power. The buying process encapsulates your knowledge and experience of successful prospect purchases. It enables you to replicate and improve those successful purchases.

8 Steps of the Buying Process

I use 8 steps to detail the deliberated buying process. A deliberated buying process is one where a buyer gathers information, researches, and evaluates his/her purchase.

1. Recognizing a Need
2. Framing that Need
3. Researching the Need
4. Defining Decision Criteria
5. Narrowing the Alternatives
6. Selecting an Alternative
7. Making the Purchase
8. Reevaluating the Decision

In upcoming posts, I'll introduce each stage of the buying process. I'll discuss how that stage works for the simple case of a single prospect.

However, we all know that many purchases are more complex interactions of multiple influencers. At the end of the series, we'll talk about how to apply the buying process principles to a multi-person purchase decision.

How to Measure Marketing - for CEOs

We all use measurement as the way we tell how well our efforts are achieving our goals. The most important element of this statement is "achieving our goals". So, before we talk specifically about types of measurements, let's talk about marketing's goals.

Marketing isn't an island. Marketing sits between the product team and the sales team. Marketing is the ultimate middle man. And because marketing is a middle man, organizations can get confused with how to measure marketing.

Making the Business' Goals Marketing's

Before we can establish measurements, we need to understand the business' goals and how they relate to marketing. Most business' goals are defined by sales, margin, and profits. Sure, there may be other goals such as good will, giving back to the community, green investments, etc. However, for-profit businesses will rely on sales and profits to help further their other goals.

This means that marketing's goals must be related to sales, margin, and profits. This is true for both product marketing and marketing communications. If you want marketing to contribute to the business' goals, marketing must also be measured by these goals.

Now, marketing doesn't like being tied to sales and profits. And why would they? Marketing doesn't have direct control over sales. Sales can (and often does) take what marketing gives them and use it as they like. Sales does this with messaging, leads and pricing. So, why would marketing ever sign up for sales and profit goals?

As CEO, you need marketing and sales to work together to achieve the highest sales and profits. You can't afford marketing and sales to work at cross purposes. When that happens, the business loses.

The way you drive cooperative behaviors is to have both organizations share in the same goals, yet have different responsibilities in achieving those goals.

Driving Cooperative Behavior

You decide to have marketing and sales focus on the same goals and distinguish their activities with different responsibilities. So, how do you create measurements that will drive these goals? You do it by pulling out key marketing activities and relating them directly to the goals. Let's look at some ways you might relate marketing activities to business goals.

• Product marketing product definition - Tie features to closed deals
• Product marketing competitive analysis - Tie the analysis to competitive wins and losses
• Product marketing messaging - Tie the messaging to third party validation
• Product marketing buying processes - Tie buying process implementation to sales cycle measurements
• Product marketing buyer personas - Tie created buyer personas to matches to sales cycles
• Product marketing collateral creation - Tie content to usage in closed deals
• Marcom lead generation - Tie lead generation to closed deals
• Marcom lead nurturing - Tie lead nurturing to closed deals

You can see in these suggested measurements how essential good marketing is to business success. If marketing is "on the hook" for the results that truly drive sales, they must engage in cooperative behavior. Cooperative behavior with the product team through which they convince the product team to invest in the features that will enable the business to win competitively. Cooperative behavior with the sales team through which they show how their activities facilitate the sale.

What does this look like?

Let's take a common example. Marketing is often measured on the number of leads that they generate. However, every sales person knows that quantity doesn't mean quality. As sales digs through the reams of leads dumped on them, they quickly realize that many leads are quite simply trash.

It doesn't take long for sales to turn on marketing who retreats to the world of "but I am delivering according to my measurements". Now you have marketing and sales at each other's throats. And you aren't getting those qualified leads that drive real purchases.

You don't want sales to get bogged down with lots of bad leads. That doesn't help them in selling. So, you need marketing to stop passing bad leads on to sales. Well, if marketing has to deal with the lead quality issue, they are going to work smarter and figure out how to find and nurture to develop more highly qualified leads.

When marketing delivers real deals to sales, you start to see the cooperative, successful behavior you want.

Driving Measurements Down

It is not enough that you create the right marketing measurements (and compensation) for the executives in your marketing team. You need those executives to do the same throughout their organization. The right measurements incent the cooperative behavior that benefits your business.

However, you cannot give marketing this responsibility without creating similar responsibilities in the product team and sales. If you are going to tie marketing measurements to purchases and profits, then marketing needs to be able to ask for and receive the appropriate responses from the product team and from sales.

In other words, you need to protect the marketing team from non-cooperative responses from the product team and sales. It is not acceptable that marketing be responsible for collateral creation and then sales decide not to use that collateral. It is not acceptable that marketing identify a critical feature to win against the competition and the product team decide not to implement it.

There may be valid reasons why sales doesn't use collateral and the product team doesn't implement recommended features. But these decisions aren't individual employee decisions, they are business decisions. These decisions need to be made at the management level. When management makes these decisions, then you need to review and revise marketing's measurements.