The complexity of a product or service is typically matched with an equally complex sales process that emphasizes education and consultation. Most talented sales professionals intimately understand the complexity of the sales process once the prospective buyer has initiated the process and engaged with the vendor organization. But, increasingly, a tremendous amount of education and research is preceding this step—and this pre-vendor phase is a far-lessstructured proposition. The sales professional is likely unaware the process is underway and that the buyer is already forming opinions and assessing options.

Buyers typically proceed through a three-phase education process in the early stages of the procurement cycle. While these phases aren’t as discrete as presented below, this framework helps us better understand matters from the buyer’s perspective.

Phase 1: Solution Awareness and Market Education

In this first phase, the buyer has an acquisitive mindset, seeking as much relevant information as possible. Business executives continually seek out, sift through, explore, and exchange ideas about their market or sector—a continuous process that is integrated into their daily lives as part of their larger mission and responsibility. The scope of topics can be quite broad—from regulatory changes to the macroeconomic environment—and the goal is to gain as clear of a multi-year picture as possible. Part of this constant survey can include seeking out new techniques for production, learning about technologies that improve productivity, identifying market opportunities, and optimizing current opportunities.

For example, case studies of competitors or comparative industry peers enable them to benchmark their efforts and results. Interviews with industry analysts, industry newsletters, blogs, trade journal archives, and conference papers are some of the popular tools and sources in this phase. Discussions of the concepts and techniques from other industries can also provide excellent inspiration for innovative approaches in their own industry.

Over time, the buyer encounters concepts that speak to a recognizable pain that exists and that resonate with and add value to her organization. Either through events internal to her organization, or through understanding the concept in a new level of depth that increases its urgency, the pain moves to near the top of the corporate agenda. From there, the buyer moves to discover what solutions may exist to address that pain.

Phase 2: Solution Discovery

When the buyer transitions to this stage, he has a specific business pain in mind and is exploring the market to gain a sense of what solution might be able to meet that challenge. This transition from awareness and education to solution discovery is often precipitated by a compelling business event, such as a highvisibility incident, corporate restructuring, merger, or acquisition. Such an event often brings sometimes-latent business pain to the surface. Regardless, it becomes a catalyst, creates a greater sense of urgency, and narrows the research to specific solutions that address the identified pain point.

The prospective buyer is trying to understand the complete range of potential solutions. Who are the relevant vendors in this space? What are the high-level specifics about those solutions—for instance, is it an outsourced solution, a piece of technology, or a consulting engagement? What information is available to help investigate the offering further? What is the “ballpark impact” of the proposed solution on the budget?

Phase 3: Solution Validation

Once a prospect learns enough to understand the business pain and assemble a prioritized list of vendors offering potentially relevant solutions, he begins to delve into the alternatives more deeply to start the critical process of determining which choice is the best fit for his organization. In many procurement cycles, this milestone is accompanied by the formation of a broader (often multi-disciplinary) team to investigate and analyze the proposed solution from a variety of important aspects: department and technological interactions, personnel questions, purchasing economics, and more. The buyer typically has many questions:

• What are the capabilities?
• How will my team deploy it?
• What services will I need?
• How much will it cost now and in the future? What is the total cost of ownership (TCO)?
• What skills will my organization need?
• How does it interact with and affect my current business processes?

The questions that buyers ask will depend, of course, on the solution under consideration. Finance may have very different questions regarding a consulting engagement compared to an IT group’s questions regarding hardware procurement. Nonetheless, the goal is the same. The prospective buyer wants to know what is being offered for sale, what the price is, whether it solves the identified business pain, and what the impact will be on the organization.

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The Components of the New Toolkit

Traditionally, this education process has been guided by the trained, knowledgeable sales professional who understands what’s involved at each milestone and what the buyer needs to know. His ability to read the buyer’s body language enables him to guide the process based on each participant’s demonstrated levels of interest and engagement. Today, of course, that opportunity is largely disappearing because the sales professional doesn’t enter the picture until much later—after the education and solution discovery are complete (or nearly so).

Most tools that educate prospective buyers are relevant to more than one aspect of the buying process—so this simplification to three phases inevitably loses the nuances and complexities that any process has. However, it allows us to cut through much of the noise surrounding technology and information sources on the market today and concentrate on what matters: ensuring the right person receives the right message in the right format at the right time. The following list is not exhaustive. However, it is a useful categorization of several of the more popular tools and sources that shape this book’s framework.

Industry News Sites and Newsletters

Like their hard-copy counterparts, industry Web sites and newsletters present specialized industry information, emerging trends to consider, best practices (proven and proposed), and ideas. These sites generally strive to deliver content that is free from vendor bias—and they achieve that to varying degrees. Although there is certainly some inevitable bias stemming from the economic realities of advertising, industry sites and newsletters do an admirable job of providing objective information on the relevant trends and changes that affect the industry. Many newer sites supplement industry news with insightful analysis and commentary on vendors and their respective offerings. In this manner, these sites act more as industry analysts—which increases their value to and credibility with buyers.

From the buyer’s perspective, the industry sites’ main impact is during the awareness phase. Executives and prospective buyers can browse industry sites to remain current with their industry. Through that education, they become aware of, and more familiar with, many new potential categories of solutions. This is an important service to the buyer.

Industry Analysts

Industry analysts are seasoned experts who provide well-informed, objective commentary on the vendors providing solutions relevant to a particular industry. These analyses give buyers insightful views into specific solutions, how those solutions compare with one another, what the important decision metrics are, and the strengths and weaknesses of vendors relative to those metrics. Typically, this commentary is delivered across a variety of media types: published research studies, white papers, conferences, events, and webinars to name just a few.

This industry analysis becomes a very useful starting point for buyers who leverage the analyst’s perspective to gain a better understanding of the vendors in a space, or in framing their evaluation of vendors.

[Download PDF to see Table]

Advertising

Internet advertising enables the marketer to deliver a brief, targeted message to a qualified, narrowly defined audience in a far more targeted manner than television or radio could ever achieve. Admittedly, even Internet advertising’s level of precision can be improved upon—it still paints the market with a very broad brush, using only broad demographics such as job title, role/responsibility, or industry.

Nonetheless, advertising can sometimes be a very effective component of the marketing mix in a complex sales process by ensuring that an audience is aware of a vendor as an option to solve a particular business challenge. If a skilled marketer can distill a complex solution to a memorable message that can be consumed at a glance, advertising can even facilitate buyers’ awareness that a solution category exists.

Viral Messages

Consumer media offer numerous marketing platforms that are generally ignored by most business-to-business marketers. This is, in many instances, a grave oversight. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and many similar platforms provide interesting new ways to market that B2B marketers would be wise to consider. As B2B marketers find ways to adapt these media and channels into their marketing mixes, we will see some of these media evolve from exotic choices to mainstream staples. Many of these platforms provide opportunities for exposure and awareness that would be difficult to achieve in other media.

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Viral marketing is one such example of an opportunity in these new media. Innovative business-to-business marketers, have been experimenting with viral marketing techniques in their marketing efforts in an effort to leverage the social, lighthearted, and entertaining aspects of new media to gain exposure to a more business oriented message.

Viral marketing uses messages with two distinct aspects. The first component is compelling content. The message must be interesting, enticing, or entertaining enough to entice a recipient to forward it to a friend or colleague. The second component is a message that is carefully crafted to contain positioning and messaging that the marketer wants to share and spread among his target market/constituency.

Generally, the marketing message is a small part of the overall campaign, with much of the emphasis on entertainment to encourage forwarding in linear or geometric progressions. Successful viral campaigns can drive strong awareness, but rarely deliver the more detailed and nuanced positioning required for solution validation.

It’s quite likely that viral marketing will continue to see a steady evolution from historically consumer-oriented media types toward the B2B realm as marketers adapt it to their unique requirements. Many of these campaigns will, by their nature, contribute to the awareness phase. However, each media type has its own properties and should be evaluated on its own merits and strengths.

Podcasts

The iPod ushered in an innovative reapplication of an old medium—audio. Today, there is a thriving “podcast market” where company executives and industry luminaries record and publish brief segments that listeners can subscribe to and consume (often while commuting or traveling). Executives can stay abreast of trends in their industry by listening in on the rough equivalent of a highly targeted, industry-specific radio show.

This is a lower-cost medium that marketers have found most beneficial in establishing thought-leadership positions within their industries. By providing educational content, interviews, and discussions, marketers can maintain an active and interested listenership while broadening their awareness in their target market regarding key trends and developments. A relationship with key industry analysts is a great strategy to increase credibility—particularly in the latter stages of solution validation.

Search

Search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization give marketers a new and interesting media type to leverage. By targeting buyers using their search phrases, marketers can achieve a very attractive level of precision and granularity regarding buyer demographics and interests. What’s more, the nature of online search—with its flexibility, control, and cost-effectiveness—often creates an attractive economic proposition.

Most marketing teams focusing on complex products and sales cycles are well aware of the opportunities that search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization present. In fact, many actively use it as a key component of their marketing efforts. However, simply running keyword ads won’t have a dramatic impact. It is essential to understand how buyers use search as part of their buying process, to achieve the best possible return on the marketing investment.

Generally, buyers use search in just the manner that the name implies - searching—typically in the discovery phase of the process. Here, a buyer recognizes that he has a business pain that requires a solution and is now working to understand available solutions.

In addition, search also plays a crucial role in the validation phase of the process as buyers attempt to explore various sources of information on the solutions they are validating in order to identify or resolve objections.

Webinars

Webinars have become a trusted way for sellers to communicate a complex message to a wide audience of prospective buyers. Either live, or recorded (on-demand), a webinar provides a smart, controlled way to present an industry luminary or vendor expert to discuss topics that are important to buyers.

The audience for most webinars draws from a broad swath of industry participants. These 45-60-minute sessions are often marketed through banner ads (usually on key industry Web sites), shared lists, and opt-in e-mail blasts. Webinars provide a feasible and efficient way to communicate awareness messages to well-defined audiences and start to lay the foundation for solution evaluation. For this reason, most webinars focus on thoughtleadership and industry trends.

As the source of this education, an affiliated vendor establishes itself as an important vendor that merits consideration when buyers are seeking a solution. Likewise, the implicit validation through association with an in dustry luminary brings added and enhanced credibility to the vendor. This technique creates a solid reputation when the prospective buyer begins to evaluate options.

[Download PDF to see Table]

Tradeshows

For many years, this has been a staple for marketers of complex products. Today, the industry tradeshow is still a key component of many marketers’ plans. Recently, Internet-based tradeshows have gained prominence as an online corollary to the typical convention center show.

Buyers attend tradeshows for many reasons, but chiefly for the opportunity to efficiently explore available solutions in the industry and quickly engage in a conversation with vendors for those solutions. Tradeshows provide an excellent method for quickly gaining knowledge on trends, vendors, and solutions. Most shows include a full agenda of educational workshops, presentations, speeches, and more, meaning that the tradeshow acts as a significant driver of buyer direction during the awareness and discovery phases of the buying process.

Blogs

Rising from their roots as essentially online journals, weblogs or blogs have evolved into a media type that is often quite relevant to the marketing of complex products. In most industries, there are a growing number of blogs that are actively maintained and read by industry participants. To the marketer, this presents an interesting opportunity to influence buyers early and influence the sales cycle.

To ensure discovery of the solution, a marketer might participate in (or have a key spokesperson at the company participate in) an industry blog by building a relationship with the blog’s author or by contributing in the blog’s comments section on topics of relevance. Another alternative is for the marketer to create the company’s own blog (under the auspices of the company’s spokesperson or designated thought-leader). This creates greater credibility and a higher leadership profile while ensuring a level of control over messaging and positioning.

Vendor Sites

The vendor Web site remains central to much of the activity the buyer undertakes to gain awareness of industry trends and challenges, learn about potential solutions, and validate the correct solution for their unique situation. The Web site (or any campaign-specific micro-site) acts as an information portal, providing the right information to the prospective buyer at the right time in their buying process—typically during the awareness phase.

The Web site becomes a valuable clearinghouse (one of several) that enables the buyer to educate himself on relevant industry trends. The classic vendor site contains downloadable white papers, thought-leadership articles, and industry studies that are informative. Although much of this education material has an inherent bias and shouldn’t be confused with neutral or objective information, the vendor Web site still represents resources that most buyers value by properly recognizing that its source has a commercial objective.

Much of this education occurs outside of the vendor’s own Web site, of course. However, successful marketers can often provide pathways to bring in traffic to their Web site and insert themselves into that buyer-education process.

As the buyer prioritizes the relevance and acuity of the business pain and begins to seek solutions, the vendor’s Web site provides quickly referenceable information that lets him understand whether the vendor might have an appropriate solution. The more a vendor can influence the awareness phase, the easier it is to ensure its discovery as a viable solution.

During validation, the vendor’s Web site becomes a rich source of information, comparisons, trials, and data to assist in the prospective buyer’s evaluation. Similarly, marketers can optimally position their solution by leveraging the Web site to steer site visitors to external sources of information that lend validity and credibility to their solution.

The Buyer's Evolution

As buyers move away from dependence on a vendor’s professional sales team for market education and awareness, solution discovery, and validation, the suite of tools they rely on to source their information continues to evolve in depth and sophistication. Today, marketers must understand the evolution in the buyer’s behavior and, more importantly, how to interact with the buyer in this new paradigm to optimally influence the buyer’s decisions.

[Download PDF to see Figure 4]