MarketSense

Provocative Buyer Persuasion

The question on many of our minds is how do you change the discussion with your prospects in this challenging business environment?

In the March 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review, the article In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers takes a page out of the classic buyer persuasion playbook.

In the article by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore, the authors recommend developing a provocative point on a critical customer issue. In other words, they are starting by looking at the buyer's business.

We in marketing and sales ought to know a lot about our buyer's businesses. Like good consultants, we should be paying attention to the little things we learn about their business. If we are paying attention, we can take this intelligence and obtain insight into our buyer's business that even the buyer doesn't have.

In buyer persuasion, we take that insight and turn it into a secret weapon in our marketing and sales processes. We know that by satisfying the buyer's strongest motivations, we can more effectively direct the sale.

This article takes this one step further and suggests that we take this insight and create compelling products based on it. In the situations cited in the article, the company that recognized the provocation didn't leave the solution up to the buyer. They took the initiative and the risk and developed a response (think product) to the provocation. Then they sold it to the buyer.

So, what did the provocation do for the seller?

It created a unique, high-value opportunity to sell a solution for a costly strategic problem.

It compelled project investment outside of the buyer's existing budget.

And how did the seller do this?

By building a customized, persuasive business case that the buyer could not turn down, even in this tough business environment.

Two thoughts to consider:

What is the true value of the buyer intelligence we have floating around our organizations?

Why we aren't doing this provocative buyer persuasion all of the time?

How Buyers Behave - Buyer Modalities

I am finding that one of the most engaging areas of persuasive momentum that of buyer modality. I think this is because as we learn about it, we can instantly understand it from our own perspective as buyers.

Buyer modality is the application of behavioral patterns to identify buying behaviors. Its value lies in its basis on behaviors (what people do) not simply character traits. In marketing and sales, we care a lot about how people behave.

A great overview of buyer modalities can be found in Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg's book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? The Eisenbergs based their buyer-oriented modalities on psychologist Dr. David Keirsey's work linking human behavioral patterns to temperaments and character types.

Eisenberg Buyer Modality	Keirsey Temperament
Methodical	Guardian
Spontaneous	Artisan
Humanistic	Idealist
Competitive	Rational

What I like about Keirsey's work is that he helps us understand the distribution of the temperament types in the general population.

What I like about the Eisenbergs' work is that they take the information about each of the temperaments and boil it down to the implications of these behaviors in buyers.

This area of buyer modalities has stimulated some interesting discussions with my clients. In an effort to better understand the modalities, the first question that came to mind in a team of sales people was, "Which buyer modality am I?" One of the sales persons thought that he was a "spontaneous" buyer. Some of the others in the room questioned this. But as I asked questions about his buying habits, it became clear that he was really a "competitive" buyer.

As we talked through each modality, the discussion took an interesting turn. The question on the table was, "If I am a methodical buyer, what type of temperament do I want in my sales person?" This led to the question, "What type of temperaments do the majority of sales people have? Are they centered around one or two temperaments?"

Then the stories came out. We discussed the frustrations of having a sales person with a different temperament try to sell to us. The implication was that we would prefer a sales person with a temperament just like us because implicitly they would better understand what we wanted.

But the whole point in buyer modalities is that within each modality, we have insight into how the buyer will approach and likely behave during their buying process. If buyers stay pretty true to these modalities, we should be able to fairly easily identify a prospect's buyer modality. Once we understand his/her buying modality, we can customize our marketing and sales approach to better connect with them.

Now you are either going to love this or hate this. One the one hand, buyer modalities may help you boil down the seemingly endless variation of buyers into four different types. Simpler is better. But then you need to overlay the buyer modality with the buying process to really understand how to reach the buyer where they are. With an 8 step deliberated buying process, that means a lot more detail.

So, why would we go to the trouble to work through all of this buyer modality - buying process detail? For better results.

For marketing, that means significantly improved campaign results which generate more highly qualified leads. For sales, that means easier and shorter sales cycles. For the buyer, that means the creation of a valued relationship that satisfies their needs. Satisfied customers mean increased business revenues.

In upcoming blog entries, we will look at each of the four buyer modalities in more detail.

How Buyers Find You

In the marketing of my youth, the traditional marketing goal was brand awareness. Building a brand identity and promoting it everywhere a potential buyer might be were the law. Television. Magazines and Newspapers. Bill boards. Mailers. Placement on store shelves. Marketers worked hard to create that optimal number of impressions that brought brand recognition and consideration.

Herald the arrival of the Internet and the advances in Internet search. In a 2007 Digital Consumer Behavior Study by Avenue A | Razorfish,

• A whopping 54% of connected consumers would use a general search engine to begin their search for a product to "see what comes up".
• Another 15% would visit a specific eCommerce site that specializes in the type of product and search there.

Talk about leveling the playing field.

This is not to say that brand identity and awareness play no role in today's buyer's processes. But the sheer volume of money thrown at search list placement would argue that simply being found is perhaps more critical. The importance of being remembered (branding) versus being found (placement) is changing.

Given the growing use of Internet search in being found, the interesting question for marketers becomes what terms do buyers use as they begin their buying process. Marketers need to make sure that their company and products place well in buyer searches.

The challenge is that at the earliest stage of the buying process - awareness of a need - many buyers aren't going to start by searching for your brand name. When buyers first become aware of a need, desire or problem, they often don't have the fine-tuned vocabulary of the marketer who is trying to create blue ocean space for their product.

Instead, early stage buyers search for things like "big screen tv", "birthday cards", and "learn french". Being the leader in "LCD tvs", "on-line greeting cards", or "language learning software" won't help them find you when your products don't appear on their search results list.

It is important to note, that as the buyer works his/her way through their buying process, the terms he/she uses in their searches become more specific. So, don't breathe a sigh of relief just yet. If that big screen tv buyer decides that they really want a plasma tv, you are not going to be considered if you sell LCD tvs.

Rule #1: You must place well in the category searches to avoid being eliminated from buyer consideration at the earliest stage of the buying process.

Rule #2: You must continue to place well in specialty searches to remain in consideration during the rest of the stages in the buying process.

Avinash Kaushik provides an interesting discussion on this issue of being found in his posts on The Long Tail.

Avinash suggests that marketers use SEO for the short head and ad word buys for the long tail search terms.

But before you start buying, you must understand your buyer (think buyer persona) and methodically go through the buying process stages to identify relevant search terms.

How the Sales Team Creates Persuasive Momentum

If your products are in any part sold by people (versus entirely on-line or via catalog sales), you see your sales team as the primary creator of persuasive momentum for your buyer. But because persuasive momentum is designed, a sales rep needs a solid foundation of supporting “tools”. There are three key requirements for these tools:

1. The tools must help the sales rep better understand the buyer


2. The tools must align the sales process with the prospect’s buying process


3. The tools must support and satisfy the prospect’s needs at each stage of their buying process

Buyer personas are the tools that help a sales rep better understand the buyer. Buyer personas profile a type of buyer. They are not simply a demographic description of the buyer. They go deeper to understand the personality, motivations, and behavior of a type of buyer. The breadth and complexity of a business’ products will influence the number of buyer personas the sales team needs.

For each buyer persona, a detailed buying process map is needed. The buying process map defines the stages the prospect goes through in their buying process. For each stage, it identifies the key sources, resources, questions, and concerns that need to be satisfied before the buyer will move onto the next stage.

With the buying process maps established, the buying process needs to be aligned with the sales process. This alignment is critical in ensuring all of the buyer’s process stages are supported in the corporate sales process. It enables the sales person to anticipate the needs of the buyer and be prepared to meet those needs. This sales preparation creates buyer incentive and acts as an emotional support throughout the buying process.

Finally, in order for the sales rep to create that forward momentum with the buyer, they must have the information the buyer needs instantly at hand. This means that appropriate mechanisms – demos, presentations, evaluation criteria, etc. must be prepared in advance to support the needs of the prospect. Each buying stage has its own requirements. Each buyer modality has its own interests.

Preparation is a critical underpinning of persuasive momentum. Time is an important factor in building momentum. If the sales rep takes too long in responding to a buyer’s need (framed as a request, question or concern), a momentum gap is created. This creates an opening for the buyer to seek more immediate satisfaction elsewhere. “Elsewhere” can mean other channels (on-line), other sources (outside experts), and other products (competitor’s offerings).

If it hasn’t become evident yet, a sales rep is often the conductor of persuasive momentum. But it really takes a cross-functional team to support it. Product marketing, marketing communications, customer service, sales engineers, and sales management all play equally critical roles in ensuring persuasive momentum.

Building Ready Buyers

In marketing we talk about “conversions” and “leads”. In sales we talk about “leads” and “opportunities”. These seem like abstract terms for the people we are really trying to persuade - our buyers.

Underlying our terminology is a disconnect between marketing and sales and the buyer. When I was a product marketing manager at Sun Microsystems, I took a course on building a market-focused organization. The premise behind this course was to completely understand a day in the life of our buyer. Once we understood our buyer, we could better relate what we had to offer to the buyer’s needs, wants, and language. This work was probably the precursor to today’s buyer personas.

I don’t see many marketing and sales teams that are equipped with profiles of their buyer personas. I haven’t found many organizations that understand their buyers. It is no wonder we have trouble achieving high conversion rates and high percentages of closed opportunities. In fact, it is often despite ourselves that we win deals.

It is easy for our sales and marketing efforts to focus on our company and our product. After all, that is what we are selling. But the result for the buyer is like a conversation with a self-absorbed person. Every discourse turns away from the buyer. The buyer has to work hard to focus the seller on their needs, their interests, their concerns, and their process. We see this played out in a myriad of different ways. Buyers are asked to talk with a sales person before they are ready. Buyers are frustrated because they can’t get the information they need. Buyers are hijacked into a sales process that doesn’t look anything like their buying process. The result is a relationship that does not inspire buying confidence.

The truth is that selling is all about the buyer. To effectively sell, we must know our buyer intimately. We must satisfy the buyer’s needs as the prospect works through their buying process. Our interactions must build buyer confidence and create positive emotions. And we must do this step by step, need by need, question by question, concern by concern. This is the essence of persuasive momentum.

Persuasive momentum is the increasing tendency of a buyer to remain engaged with you as you support them through the stages of their buying process.

Without persuasive momentum, you will not be able to close a sale. What prospect will buy from you if they lack confidence in your ability to meet their needs? Persuasive momentum builds buyer confidence. Persuasive momentum builds buyer readiness.

We all inherently know what persuasive momentum looks like. We have experienced it in our own lives in our own purchases. We say that “the planets aligned” to make our purchase happen. Everything came together and fit perfectly. The timing was right. We wanted to buy this product from this company. Yet, how often do we feel this way about a purchase? Probably not often enough.

The reason we don’t feel persuasive momentum in many of our own purchases (or create it for our buyers) is that it doesn’t happen by chance.

Persuasive momentum is designed. And it is designed around our buyer, not around us. I’ll be talking more about this topic in upcoming blog entries.

Join me, April 15th at 6:30 pm at the Silicon Valley Business Meetup in Cupertino, CA where I will be leading a discussion on persuasive momentum. Please register to attend in advance.

Are You Sending Your Prospects to Your Competitor’s Web Site?

This sounds like an absurd question. You would have to be pretty foolish to have links from your web site to your competitor’s site. It would have to be a significant oversight if you named your competitor(s) in any web copy. But just because you don’t have a direct link to your competitor’s web site doesn’t mean you aren’t sending your prospects there.

In this day and age of Google search, your prospects don’t even have to be that savvy to identify your competitor(s). If your competition’s marketing team is any good, both of you are showing up in the top 10 Google results list. But that isn’t what I am talking about here.

When a prospect arrives at your web site, you have the ability to both reduce the time a prospect spends on a competitive web site as well as to stop them from going there altogether. What would it be worth for you to be able to stop your prospects dead in their tracks on your site?

Marketers are always looking for the mechanism that will make their web site sticky. Often we turn to the use of gimmicks in the attempt to keep the attention of prospects and customers. Home pages are full of moving flash animations, “what’s new” company news sections, flashing corporate headlines, offers, deals, and advertisements. We can be so busy creating these mechanisms that we are missing the single, most effective sticky attraction.

That attraction is comprehensive, well-organized, effectively presented information.

Prospects arrive at your web site looking for information. Depending upon the prospect, he/she may start with very little or a lot of knowledge about your product, technology, and services. The job of your web site should be to help them discover what they don’t know but need to know. Your web site should be the one stop shop for all information regarding your solution, its technology, its value, and its applicability. And this information should be organized in such a way that it is easy for your prospect to locate, consume, and return to resume their exploration where they left off.

I know marketers and sales managers who want to keep information close to their chest. I used to be one of them. We may do this because we fear disclosing too much information to our competition via the public forum the web presents. (This begs the question of how weak is the competitive advantage our product and organization offers.) In other cases, we want to “force” their prospects to come directly to us (call a sales rep) so that we can feed the prospect our valuable information and control the conversation.

Either way, when a prospect’s information needs aren’t answered via information on your web site, you are inviting them to visit a competitor’s web site.

That is how you drive your prospects to a competitor’s web site.

But you say, if they are interested and their questions aren’t answered, the prospect will contact us and start that conversation. Think again. For most prospects, it is much easier and a lot less threatening to continue the search for their answers via the Internet (after all that is how they found you) than to call you and start a conversation.

Success in a Sales 2.0 World - the Buying Process

In my blog entry Success in a Sales 2.0 World - a Marketing Viewpoint, I talked about how critical it is for marketing and sales to cooperate together to support the prospect’s buying process. Together, they must craft a seamless buying experience that builds the prospect’s persuasive momentum. I’ll talk more about persuasive momentum in future posts. Today I want to focus on a new tool that helps gets marketing and sales talking about the buying process.

Traditional marketing texts (Philip Kotler, et al.) discuss the typical five stage buying process as: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behavior. This standard buying process describes deliberated purchases made by consumers. It applies less to impulse purchases. It is only a piece of the puzzle of more complex corporate purchases.

In his book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Bryan Eisenberg takes a closer look at the buying process. In particular, he describes a couple of additional stages with the purpose of calling out important details that often get lost in the five stage process.

I have leveraged both of these sources to describe the deliberated buying process as follows:

1. Awareness of a need


2. Frame the need


3. Research the framed need


4. Define the decision criteria


5. Narrow down alternatives


6. Choose an alternative to buy


7. Make the purchase


8. Reevaluate the purchase decision

I have created a new eBook, Understanding the Buying Process, as a tool to help marketing and sales explore their roles in their prospect’s buying process. To help marketing and sales understand the process, each stage is defined and illustrated by examples. That is just the foundation. Each stage includes a section called “Define your role” that helps marketing and sales

1. Realize that the buyer is in control


2. Think like the buyer thinks


3. Uncover holes in the buying process that are not addressed by the marketing and sales processes


4. Prepare to plug those holes in the marketing and sales processes


5. Create a seamless experience that supports the buyer through every step of their buying process

It is my hope that this eBook will help open up a dialog about the buyer that encourages the participation of both the marketing and sales organizations. As you try it, please let me know about your experiences using it.