The Three C's of Closing in Enterprise B2B

In many ways B2C marketing is easier than B2B, despite fierce competition. As a graduate student I interned at a marketing research company in Tokyo taking notes for focus groups held by Fortune 500 companies. Despite my struggle with the Japanese language it was pretty easy to see what worked and what didn’t when it comes to getting people to buy your products. 

In B2B however you’re selling to a business.  Yes, people are ultimately making the decision and you need to understand their needs and motivations, but no company will part with large sums of money without a clear and compelling reason to do so. There are also very real differences in how you sell to mid- and enterprise-sized organizations.

Mid-size organizations tend to be growth-oriented but conservative by necessity. They may have highly complex systems needs but typically lack the internal resources of the Enterprise business, like cross-functional decision committees, event budgets and analyst relationships. When they look for IT solutions there’s a good chance they’ll start their search with Google, so having a high SEO ranking is a must for companies trying to gain traction in this market segment. Once they find you, the decision to buy is based primarily on product quality, service, cost and time to value so it goes without saying you also need to compete based on these criteria.

Enterprise deals are a bit different because they are larger in scale and involve more stakeholders, complexity and competing initiatives. At every company I’ve worked with the most successful competitor was ‘do nothing’, usually because the sales rep either failed to reach the decision makers with a compelling proposition or because there wasn't a real project to begin with. It’s an easy trap to fall into because business users may initiate a sales cycle but don’t make the final decision. Successful sales reps work with their internal champion or a business partner to connect with the C-suite while unsuccessful ones put on a long-running feature function show to an enthusiastic audience but ultimately lose the deal because there was never a deal in the first place.

I'm glossing over quite a bit of variation but this scenario gets played out time and again in Enterprise sales cycles. Meanwhile marketing teams continue to focus on creating leads – often confusing SMB and Enterprise marketing tactics – without a clear connection to the front line where deals are closed. As a result, as sales targets grow year over year lead targets become impossibly high because a high fail rate is assumed in the target setting. To avoid this trap, marketing teams should include the three C’s of closing Enterprise business as part of their strategy. 

• Catalyst: Unless there is an executive-sponsored corporate-level initiative that requires an expensive new solution such as operational excellence, cloud strategy, organizational restructuring, harmonization of systems, business transformation, etc., there is unlikely to be an actual deal in the offing. That doesn't mean you can't create a catalyst with a compelling business case and exciting narrative but your proposal will be competing with other projects that already have executive attention. 
• C-Suite: Whatever solution you are selling, the end users who love your solution may influence but are unlikely to control the final decision.  To win the business you also have to convince the decision makers that your solution will help them achieve their objectives and make them more successful. You can’t do this with a generic pitch, either – you have to do your homework about the person and the long-term strategy of the business . At the very least you should carefully read the annual report and you might also invest in executive profiling, for example with a company like Boardroom Insiders. You have to speak their language and demonstrate how your solution will address what they care about today and also help future proof their organization for the uncertainty of tomorrow. 
• Customers: Marketing content strategies often make the mistake of talking about their solutions from a first person perspective, which is immediately suspect because everyone knows marketers are paid to talk up their own brand. The best marketing is customer-led, just as happy customers are the best sales reps. You can try to dazzle your prospect with numbers but unless you can back it up with customer evidence it’s just you talking about you. Happy customers are also more likely to be loyal and/or repeat customers so at the end of the day there's nothing more important than looking after your customers.

How do you join up your marketing and sales enablement strategies with the three Cs? Simple. You spend time getting to know your customers and understand their challenges, business goals and how your solutions help them be more successful. These insights should be the foundation of your marketing and content strategy. At the same time, by helping your customers be more successful and celebrating their success with them you are creating loyal advocates who will help you win new customers. 

It really is that simple yet so easy to lose sight of in the daily grind of meetings, metrics and marketing trends. The only successful business strategy is to stay focused on what makes your customers successful and build/market/sell more of that.