The Top 3 Questions I Get as a B2B Marketing Consultant – and How I Answer Them

Over the years I’ve helped scores of B2B companies improve their marketing and innovation. Although I’ve addressed hundreds of strategic issues along the way, just three questions seem to come up time and time again. I believe I hear these questions more often because they’re all critical to company growth and dominate our day-to-day business consciousness.

Here are the three questions, typically in this order:

1.??????How do we focus our value proposition?

2.??????How do we refresh our brand?

3.??????How do we get more leads?

Of course, every company situation is a little different. But it’s surprising how similar - and simple - the approach can be to improving all of the above. No need to overcomplicate things, right? So here it goes.

1.??????How do we focus our value proposition?

The reason this question comes up is that, over time, new selling points crawl slowly into marketing and sales materials like turtles, then multiply like rabbits. You may have started with a few key benefits, but before you know it, your website mentions 22 different competitive advantages, likely to include the following:?best quality, best value, best service, faster, more reliable, and more durable. Your salespeople have 10 different “elevator pitches”, not one unified message.

The answer to the question is relatively straightforward. We have customers now. That’s a fact. They decided to buy from us and not from somewhere else. Many of them have purchased multiple times, some loyally for many years. These customers know exactly what your value proposition is. We just have to ask them.

Conducting simple voice-of-customer (VOC) research with even a handful of customers can be eye-opening. Patterns will emerge from the answers. It will turn out that 20 of your 22 competitive advantages are “table stakes” and expected by buyers, while just 2 of the 22 are the real differentiators.?Your company might go further than anyone else customizing things. Or, perhaps your products really are the most reliable on earth.?Your own customers can tell you what to focus on.

Whatever it is, the key value proposition will emerge because B2B buyers tend to be rational. Buyers will not make an unfair trade, especially repeatedly. There is value in what you’re selling and that’s what they’re buying. What exactly is that value? Ask them and they’ll tell you.

Now, nothing against sales or field service professionals, but these aren’t the right people to uncover and articulate your focused value proposition. They are far too close to the accounts and not trained to ask the questions required to get to the truth. It’s far more effective to have someone from marketing, R&D or an independent person doing this VOC. While this may sound self-serving since I conduct VOC and train others to conduct it, I’m being brutally honest from experience here. “Leading the witness” will result in confirming what we’re already saying. But open-ended discovery will bring out powerful new insights, distilled down to the very essence of your company’s worth in the marketplace.

2.??????How do we refresh our brand?

Another great question, which comes up all the time, especially with B2B companies. Whether it’s a multi-generational private company or a large public company, brands can become tired and feel outdated. How do we add energize, modernize and bring more power to our brand (or brands)?

Many clients’ first instinct is to update the company logo and website. To many, this is considered a “brand refresh” and, on the surface, improves the basic visual appearance of marketing messages. However, a quick redesign will only scratch the surface for brand impact.

I’d rather start by defining what a brand is. My favorite definition says a brand is a promise of an experience. What total end-to-end experience are you promising your customers now? What should you be promising them?

Looking back at your answer to question #1 is a great next step. What is your simple value proposition? Not 10 benefits or even five, but just two or three.?How can the experience you provide for your customers coincide with that value proposition? “Experience” should include online or digital contact, all human contact, the purchase process, delivery, their use of your product or service, and any ongoing contact and follow-up. It can involve any and all of the senses:?what do customers see and hear from you? What can they touch and feel? Is there a smell or taste – or could there be?

After “curating” your desired brand experience, then you could consider updating the logo, tagline, website, and so forth. The messaging will fall right into place because you now know the simple, impactful message to deliver.

Finally, make sure everyone in the organization understands the updated brand position, has the same elevator pitch to describe it, and is empowered by management to provide the brand experience. If you’re claiming to have the best customer service, then give your customer service reps unlimited time to manage problems and empower them to make decisions to help customers resolve issues immediately. Unless employees can actually live the brand promise, it will be just a brand hope.

3.???????How do we get more leads?

Who doesn’t want more leads? Or at least more qualified leads. Companies have been trying a gazillion approaches over the last few years, throwing all kinds of spaghetti at the walls, seeing what might stick. Inbound, outbound, marketing-driven, sales-driven, ads, you name it. Some of it works. A lot of it doesn’t. Sure, we want leads.?But who wants to be the tacky, overly aggressive LinkedIn automated message spammer? Not me and not my clients.

My go-to answer for this question involves taking a close look at company financials. It involves a number of additional questions, whose answers will guide us in the right direction. I usually want to know how we segment our customers by application, in other words how customers use what we sell. I then dig into which segments have the most revenue, which the most profit, and which customers within those segments are our best ones – and why.

My podcast buddy Steve Miller likes to call these best customers within each segment “the moose.”?What are the big targets we’re hunting? Where do we find them? What do they eat? Here, I also like to look back at questions #1 and #2 above:?what is our focused value proposition for each segment and what is the experience we’re promising? Utilizing these directional guideposts will help us appeal more effectively to our targets and deliver what they value – and what they buy.

Classic lead generation assumes a few personas (the “moose” from each segment) and then a process to gain awareness, interest, inquiry, and sale. But how do we pique their interest? One of the most important things we can do to entice our prospects is to give them valuable content to lure them in. If we have information and insight that would be useful to them, we’re not being manipulative by sharing it with them, we’re being helpful. Play the long game by giving away some of what you know in your quest to apply even more of your expertise after a sale.

Content related to the specific challenges customers face in their application or industry can be a game-changer for many B2B companies.?The more we can show prospects we understand their business and the issues they face, the better we can tee up our products and services as the solution. Some sales techniques help prospects first understand why they might need to make a change, then explain why the timing is best now, and then finally why the best choice is what we sell, not the competitors’ offerings. Why change, why now, why us.

You might be waiting for me to suggest the magic silver bullet for lead generation tactics. If so, I hate to disappoint you because I don’t have that answer. The answer depends on who you’re trying to reach, in what segments, how they consume content, and what kind of content that is. It depends on many factors like the number of potential customers, concentration, geographic dispersion, distribution channels and more.

However, just like your customers know your real value proposition, your sales force knows what works and what doesn’t. Salespeople tend to pursue the paths of least resistance and learn where to go and what to say. They don’t spend their time in places the company is less competitive, or where the sales cycle is too long.?They cut to the chase. So, ask them.?Reach out and do voice-of-the-salesforce (VOS). Instead of operating in sales and marketing silos, partner up as internal collaborators.

Eventually, getting more leads will have to involve some of the old and new tactics familiar to all of us marketers. That’s just reality. But, when better informed, we’ll be able to pick the ones that work and invest in those. We can stop doing what’s not working and redirect those dollars to other experiments and initiatives. I’d rather see 5 tactics implemented flawlessly than 25 implemented inconsistently.

Conclusion

So, those are the three most common questions I get as a B2B marketing consultant, and my short answers.?How do we focus our value proposition? Let your customers tell you. How do we refresh our brand? Promise an experience and come through on that promise. How do we get more leads? Segment, target and then apply your value proposition and brand experience.

While this advice sounds easy, the implementation can be hard. Complexity has taken over everything we do. The trick is to get back to basics. There’s beauty and power in simplicity. In my experience, it’s well worth the effort to get there.