Buyer behaviour in complex B2B sales has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. In this white paper we look at the characteristics of high-tech B2B sales and marketing and what you should do today to generate demand for your technology products and services.

1. GENERATING DEMAND FOR HIGH TECH B2B
PRODUCTS
A white paper| Michael White

2. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Buyer behaviour in complex high tech B2B sales has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. More of the
buying process is happening online and more of it is controlled by customers. Vendors need to understand the
new dynamics and adapt their sales and marketing organizations accordingly if they want to succeed.
In this whitepaper we look at the specific characteristics of complex high tech B2B sales and marketing; we
review how B2B marketing has changed in the era of digital marketing; we show how companies should
generate demand today; and we outline how the marketing and sales units at B2B firms should address the
new environment.
REENGINEERING SALES AND MARKETING FOR A NEW ERA
The high tech B2B sale has some unique characteristics: generally higher average value, longer sales cycles,
and a number of participants in the purchase process. And it is increasing in complexity. Buyer behaviour in
B2B has changed dramatically in the past 5 years as the internet redefines how companies buy goods and
services. Buyers are doing most of their initial research online before initiating conversations with vendors and
are better informed at an earlier stage. Buyers are also more difficult to reach because of the increasing
volume of electronic communications they receive. Traditional marketing and sales techniques are less
effective for these reasons. We're moving from a focus on 'outbound' techniques like press advertising, mail
shots and cold calling, to 'inbound' techniques based on websites, online ‘pay-per-click’ advertising and
‘content-based’ marketing. The changes present a threat to companies who don't adapt quickly to the new
environment, but they offer a huge opportunity for those who learn how to use their online presence to
generate demand effectively. The real promise of the new era of marketing and sales is the ability to use
automated, repeatable processes to scale up the generation of high-quality sales leads - what we call 'demand
generation' – leading to corresponding increases in sales conversions and revenue.
WHAT IS A COMPLEX, HIGH TECH B2B SALE?
A Complex B2B sale is one in which there is a long and complex sales process that requires sustained
interaction with the client buyer organisation. Some of the common characteristics of a Complex B2B Sale
include:
• High-value, high-consideration – the average deal size tends to be high, which means there is a
greater perceived risk on the buyer side.
• Complexity of the product or service – often what is being sold is complex, which means there is a
need to educate prospective buyers on its particular features, merits and competitive differentiators
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3. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
• Extended, multi-phase sales cycles – the sales process doesn’t follow a linear path; there are
different phases with different requirements at each phase; and the end-to-end length can range
from 3 months to 2 years or more
• Multiple participants in the buying decision – there are different decision makers and influencers at
each stage of the sale, with different needs and constraints
• Increased Executive Selling – most complex sales require sign-off from someone at senior executive
level, and they may be involved at earlier stages in the evaluation process too
• Increased Demands on Sales People’s time – sales people have to invest huge amounts of time in
developing their key prospect accounts. This means they do not have time to chase after low-quality
sales leads and it restricts the time they can allocate to developing new opportunities.
Since the mid 1980s a number of methodologies have been developed to help guide sales teams through
complex sales, most notably the Miller Heimann “Strategic Selling” 1 approach, which emphasizes a deep
understanding of the roles in a buying organisation. While still useful, these approaches have two serious
limitations: they do not address how marketers should work with sales teams when generating leads for the
top of the sales funnel and, more importantly, they don’t address the very significant impact the Internet has
had on B2B buyer behaviour.
THE INTERNET AND THE B2B BUYING PROCESS
Today, whether someone is buying a plane ticket, a house or a new software system, the search begins online.
In complex B2B sales, more of the process also happens online, and more of it is controlled by customers, not
your sales teams. US research firm MarketingSherpa reported in a 2008 survey of buyers of technology
solutions worth $50,000 or above that over 80% said they found the vendor in their purchase rather than the
vendor finding them2. Buyers now typically initiate their research online before launching a formal
procurement process. This means that by the time your sales staff meet a potential buyer face-to-face that
buyer will already have visited your website, downloaded your product information, looked at competing
vendor sites, checked your analyst ratings and studied comments on blogs and social networks. You may be
excluded from a buyer’s short list without even being aware that a procurement was underway. Or worse still,
you may not have featured on the list because the buyer wasn’t aware of you. With large markets, long sales
cycles, and multiple individual buyers and influencers, no company can hope to reach them all directly or at
the right time using outbound methods. You need to use inbound marketing to make sure you’re found first
and found early.
1
The New Strategic Selling, Robert Miller, Steve Heiman et al, ISBN-10 0749441305
2
MarketingSherpa B2B Technology Marketing Benchmark Report 2008
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4. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
The complexity of the average decision process has also increased. According to the standard marketing
model, the business buying organisation can be thought of as a ‘black box’, with certain stimuli (inputs)
resulting in certain responses (outputs)3:
According to this model, for any given procurement, the buying process follows a predictable path from ‘need
recognition’ through to selection of a given vendor 4:
But in reality the buying process is not a linear, step-by-step process, and the tougher economic environment
has increased buyer risk aversion. Average sales cycles are lengthening – in a survey of complex B2B sales,
23% of these sales took 7 to 12 months to complete in 2008 versus 15% in 2005, according to
MarketingSherpa5. This means when prospects first enter your pipeline they may be months away from a
purchase decision, so you need to identify ways to maintain an ongoing relationship with them while waiting
for them to move into ‘buy mode’. The number of participants involved in a purchase also continues to
increase, reflecting organisational risk aversion, with an average of 13.5 people being involved in a purchase
worth over $25,000 in companies of 500 to 1000 employees 6. The longer sales cycle and large number of
3
Adapted from Kotler et al, “Principles of Marketing”, 2 nd European edition, p. 282
4
Adapted from Kotler et al, “Principles of Marketing”, 2 nd European edition, p. 294
5
MarketingSherpa Technology Marketing Benchmark Survey April 2008
6
MarketingSherpa Business Technology Buyers Survey March 2007
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5. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
participants make it increasingly difficult for sales teams to identify the key influencers on the buyer side and
to control the overall outcome of the process using traditional approaches.
HOW B2B COMPANIES GENERATE DEMAND TODAY
In most companies with a Complex B2B sale, the Sales unit has held primary or sole responsibility for lead
generation, with Marketing providing a supporting role. Sales teams rely on their personal and professional
networks to identify prospects and occasionally use telesales as a way to root out additional opportunities. In
support, B2B Marketing units have traditionally used a range of ‘outbound’ techniques to help generate leads,
including tradeshows, print advertising, telemarketing, seminars and direct mail. There are three main
problems with this approach:
• It ignores the new buyer behaviour – relying on cold calls and direct mail assumes you know who to
call or mail to begin with. But, as we’ve noted, it’s unlikely you will know the full range of participants
in a B2B procurement at your target prospects, or all companies at which a procurement is underway.
• It is inefficient – many direct outbound marketing techniques assume very low response rates e.g. 2%
to 5% responses for a broadcast email campaign. In cases such as print advertising in trade journals
there is no accurate way to gauge the response rate. This means that over 90% of promotional
activity may not be reaching an appropriate recipient.
• It is disjointed – typically there is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing in many B2B
complex sale companies. Sales are under huge pressure to deliver results (new sales) and feel that
the leads marketing produce are of low quality, causing them to waste time chasing ‘red herrings’.
Marketers in B2B firms are often frustrated because they devote time and money to lead generation
activities only to see the resultant leads dropped or ignored by sales teams. The result is two teams,
both of which are vital to the success of the organisation, who mistrust and misunderstand each
other.
A NEW APPROACH TO GENERATING DEMAND
The new buying process requires a new approach to sales and marketing, one that aligns the sales and
marketing teams, reflects a deep understanding of the buyer and uses digital marketing tools to support lead
generation.
As with older approaches to sales and marketing, the new form of B2B Demand Generation can only be
successful if you really understand your buyers and your value proposition is clear. Digital demand generation
for business-to-business complex sales must start with the buyer, what they want, who they are, how they
buy. Following from this understanding you must then articulate your “value proposition” for these buyers –
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6. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
what you do, why it’s important, how you do it. Once you have your buyer analysis and revision of your value
proposition complete you can then use digital tools to raise awareness and generate leads.
To execute an inbound B2B marketing strategy, companies draw potential buyers to them online by providing
a range of relevant offers, such as research papers, industry surveys and buyer guides. Offering useful
business-oriented content lets you demonstrate your worth to prospective customers, eliminating buyer
uncertainty and establishing a relationship. In exchange for that content you capture some basic contact
details from the visitor and use this information to begin developing a profile for each ‘lead’. You identify the
visitors most likely to be of interest using data such as their geographic location, company name and social
network profile, and encourage those visitors to continue interacting over time, gaining further insight into the
person’s stage on the buying cycle at each interaction. When a particular contact meets some predefined
criteria or ‘trigger’ to indicate they are entering the buying stage, the lead is passed to the sales team, along
with the lead’s interaction history.
The main elements in the new approach are:
• Agree responsibilities – in our view lead generation is best handled by your marketing team, letting
sales staff concentrate on selling to genuine opportunities.
• Agree a common lead definition – Marketing and Sales should agree what constitutes a sales-ready
lead. This could be characterised by company size, revenues, location, industry sector. Having this
conversation is the first step in aligning the activities of the Marketing and Sales units so they both
reinforce each other.
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7. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
• Understand your buyers – Identify the people involved in the buying process, their specific needs,
their role in the decision making process, and the kinds of organisations you are targeting so you can
build a picture of the key players and the buying process in a typical sale.
• Create compelling offers – based on your knowledge of your buyers and what interests them, create
‘content’ that will attract them to your online presence. In B2B complex sales this content typically
includes case studies, white papers, webinars, recorded demos, online videos, analyst reports, buyer
guides and ‘how to’ guides.
• Drive buyers to you online – again based on your knowledge of typical buyer organisations, use the
full range of available digital tools to drive relevant traffic to you online. Use Google pay-per-click ads,
Search Engine Optimization, ‘opt-in’ email campaigns, social networks, online PR and other methods
to build a constantly increasing stream of visitors to your website. In addition, continue to use
selected ‘offline’ promotional methods such as direct mail shots and high impact trade shows to
reinforce the online program.
• Capture contact details – in return for offering buyers high quality content such as an analyst report,
request some basic contact details from them such as their name and email address. You can then
use this information to do a first-pass assessment of the visitor e.g. which company they come from,
which geographic location, whether they have a profile on LinkedIn etc. If they have visited your site
before, you can begin tracking their history of interactions with you.
• Filter your contacts, sell to the hottest, nurture the others – based on the profile of the contacts and
your agreed lead definition, you can identify those that are of greatest interest. Qualify those leads
that seem to have potential (e.g. by having a telemarketer ring to ask what their interest in the
solution is). Any leads not yet ready-to-buy but who fit the target profile should be placed in a
program of regular follow-up communications to ensure you stay front-of-mind.
By adopting this process-centric, online marketing-based approach, you are now much more likely to catch the
broad range of participants involved in a B2B purchase. You are also making more effective use of your time –
rather than calling one hundred people in the hope that three will answer as in the old approach, you are now
pursuing contacts who have already indicated an active interest in what you have to sell. Instead of having
sales staff pursue low-grade ‘red-herrings’, you are qualifying all contacts using agreed criteria and only
handing sales-ready leads to your team. You can see what you get for your money too – with online lead
generation you can match up every dollar spent with the results, often within minutes or hours, letting you
decide which tools are most effective at generating high quality leads. Finally, this approach is easy to scale-up
without having to increase headcount. You can automate email follow-up campaigns, run multiple Google
pay-per-click ads and your web-site can capture visitor details 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all without
intensive manual input.
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BUILDING A DEMAND GENERATION MACHINE
Many B2B companies suffer from an unpredictable flow of leads and from leads of varying quality. As sales
slow down or stall, these companies tend to focus on the bottom end of the sales-funnel to find solutions.
Should we change our sales pitch? Should we change our product demo? Should we retrain our sales people
in strategic selling? Should we change our sales team?
These problems should be addressed by developing a set of processes within sales and marketing that
generate a constant and predictable flow of leads. Creating and nurturing leads through automated demand
generation processes using digital techniques will ultimately result in more deals and a higher conversion rate.
Demand Generation should be treated as a key operational process, in the same way companies have defined
processes for product development or financial management. The objective is to build a ‘machine’ that
produces a predictable and repeatable flow of leads of standard quality each quarter.
The first step in building this machine is to ensure both sales and marketing understand their respective
responsibilities. While Marketing covers a broad range of activities, in complex B2B sales a key responsibility is
to generate leads. Likewise, the function of the Sales department is changing, with more focus on selling to
key opportunities and less time spent on prospecting and chasing cold contacts. The Sales team should look at
Marketing as the people who fill the top end of the sales funnel. In future the division of responsibilities
between Sales and Marketing will become blurred and the two will share a more clearly defined collective
focus.
With Sales and Marketing aligned, the next step is to implement processes and tools to generate and then
manage leads. This means setting up online lead capture, coordinating email marketing campaigns, managing
pay-per-click advertising programs and integrating all of these so that all leads are captured and scored in a
consistent way. A new category of software, Marketing Automation systems, is being used to support the
creation and management of these kinds of processes.
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9. Generating Demand for High Tech B2B Sales
Importantly these processes should focus not only on generating new contacts and inquiries, but also on
‘nurturing’ those leads that aren’t sales ready, which in our experience is about 75% to 80% of all leads
generated. Using digital tools to nurture leads who are either very early stage or just not ready to buy will pay
dividends. According to a report by BPM forum, over 80% of generated leads are never followed up, or are
dropped or mishandled. 7 Given that Forrester Research has estimated that on average it costs $100 to
generate a lead in B2B, this is an expensive waste 8. A Yankee Group report also found that an 11% reduction
in dropped/lost leads combined with a 1% improvement in lead-to-order conversion increased gross annual
profits by 136%9. All of this suggests that it makes financial senses to systematically manage other leads that
are of interest but which haven’t yet moved into the buying phase.
CONCLUSION
Buyer behaviour in B2B has changed dramatically, reflecting the impact of the internet on the way companies
buy goods and services. Buyers are doing more of their research online; they are also more difficult to reach
directly; and traditional marketing and sales techniques are less effective as a result. Your aim is to connect
with as many buyers as possible who are just starting to identify the need for a solution so you can influence
their needs and establish yourself in pole position as a candidate supplier. For companies wishing to achieve
scale internationally, inbound marketing will help you establish contact with, and nurture, more buyers than
would be possible using outbound methods. B2B complex sales organisations should adopt a new approach to
generating demand, one that aligns the sales and marketing teams, reflects a deep understanding of the buyer
and uses digital marketing tools to support lead generation. Apart from improving demand generation in the
short term, the real promise of this new approach is the potential to automate repeatable processes that drive
faster and more predictable revenue growth.
7
BPM Forum, “Gauging the Cost of What’s Lost”, 2004
8
Laura Ramos, Forrester Research, “Lead Generation Costs”, 2007
9
Quoted in Stephens, Craig, “Streamlining Sales”, BtoB Magazine 88, no.4 (2003):7
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CONTACT US AT:
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Letterkenny Institute of Technology
Letterkenny
Donegal
Ireland
Website: www.dohertywhite.com
Phone: 353 7493 81986
Mobile: 353 86 383 8981
Dublin: 50 Sycamore Road
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