Creating Awareness that Generates Demand and Drives Sales in B2B
Many SaaS, Tech and B2B Companies fall into the trap of trying to create awareness without understanding the relationship between creating awareness, generating demand, and producing sales. Companies that efficiently scale their growth are those that create awareness while differentiating their solutions for today and their approach for the long term. The most effective way to create this differentiation while building awareness is through understanding the Buying Triggers of Ideal Customers and using your Buying Vision to drive compelling Competitive Positioning. These insights amplify different elements of the classic Awareness > Interest > Desire > Action funnel and result in significantly more sales.
What Triggers Your Ideal Customers To Buy?
Understanding the triggers that send your Ideal Customers to market is key to crafting messaging that will capture their attention and generate interest. Awareness is really salience. You create salience with your audience by talking about what they need, when they need it. The best time to offer someone a drink is when they’re thirsty. When you understand the triggers that send your customers to market, you can create messaging that highlights your relevance for them in the moment, fanning the flames of urgency, and cementing top-of-mind awareness at a fraction of the cost of more generalized messaging. The following key questions will reveal what triggered your customers to buy and the context they are in when evaluating solution. Interview your Tier 1 Ideal Customers to build a solid understanding.
“What context sent them looking for a solution?” What was it that caused them in their business environment to go looking for a solution like yours? For example, did they notice declining sales and went looking for a cause, or are they chasing better margins? This will shape the types of solutions they look for.
“How clear was the organization on the problem that they were looking to solve?” Did everyone in the organization agree this is the real problem? For example, was everyone in the organization certain that the negative outcome had a central cause, or was there uncertainty or debate? This will change how they seek out and evaluate solutions.
“How much consensus existed across the decision or buying committee on likely solutions?” In other words, were different members of the decision committee thinking in different ways about the solution that they wanted to solve for, or were they all thinking in the same ways when they went to market? This is key to understanding how to guide them through to a sale.
Understanding this context provides real insight into the mindset and context that has historically worked to attract your best customers. Through this understanding you can find creative strategies that will put you where your customers are when they enter this context and create more top-of-mind awareness.
Crafting Your Buying Vision
According to Forrester, if you can shape your customers’ buying vision, you will win the deal 74 percent of the time. The reason is that your Buying Vision accelerates prospects from Awareness into Interest and Desire. A clear Buying Vision magnetically attracts the right prospects to you, making your advertising dollars much more effective at generating demand for your product. A clear Buying Vision helps guide your messaging, and when your buying vision aligns with your clients’ that’s when the sales process becomes easy, accelerating deals through the pipeline. Your customers become long-term partners, cocreating the future version of the product with you. A buying vision is used to further enunciate what evaluation criteria you believe matter when a customer is buying a product like yours.
Additionally, a buying vision helps focus the long-term value that customers hope to get from picking your solution over other options in the marketplace. This is particularly important in a B2B environment where B2B buyers are hoping to have long-term engagements. The RFP process is painful, so they don’t want to have to go through it again. They want to buy a solution that will adapt and evolve over time, becoming more valuable, not obsolete. The buyer has a certain belief about where the world is headed, and they’re looking for providers, partners, and vendors who share that belief and that are developing innovations to keep up with those changes in the marketplace on an ongoing basis. Their belief about where the world is headed shapes the criteria they use to evaluate and select a solution. When a customer’s buying vision aligns with your product vision, that’s when they’re going to want to work with you. The process becomes easy, and they become happy long-term customers.
Armed with a buying vision that clearly outlines the problem you solve, the customers you serve, and how your approach is uniquely suited to the future and different than the status quo will help you align on messaging that not only creates awareness, but also creates a compelling reason for customers to work with you specifically.
Competitive Analysis
The next step is to amplify your differentiation through Competitive Strategy. Understanding how you are different from competitors deepens your prospects Desire to work with you and stimulates Action. You must start with an understanding of the basics for your key competitors. For your top competitors, review their marketing materials to understand the following:
- Target Customers: Who are your competitors targeting? Both in terms of Firmographics and Customer Personas.
- Basis of Competition: Are your competitors pushing Ideas, Products, or Company characteristics? Does this align with the current maturity of your marketplace?
- Buying Vision: Can you tell if your competitors have a clear Product and or Buying Vision (beliefs about where the category is headed and why they are positioned for future success)? Can you create hypothetical product or buying visions for your key competitors?
- Points of Parity: Is there a consistent theme among your competitors (and from your customer interviews) that tells you the main aspects that are believed to be table-stakes that everyone must offer to be competitive in this marketplace? For example, maybe it’s assumed that all competitors have software that works on mobile phones.
- Points of Differentiation: Are there key aspects your competitors are leaning in on for how they are different than each other? For example, does one talk about more sophisticated technology? Does another emphasize consulting and support services?
- Reasons to Believe: What proof points are your competitors using to give customers a reason to believe that they can reliably deliver what they promise? How persuasive are these reasons to believe? Try to be objective. As an industry insider, you may know that a review from a certain magazine is merely a paid endorsement, but if your target market sees it as objective confirmation of a superior product, you must take that into account.
- Personality/Tone: Do competitors have a well-defined personality for their brand? If so, where does it sit within dimensions like “Stability vs. Innovation” or “Independence vs. Belonging.”
Positioning Your Solution
Armed with this analysis you can look for white-space in the market or craft a strategy that takes your competitors head-on.
In their excellent book, Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout talk through many different approaches for positioning, but many of them stem from the #1 Rule for Positioning. Paraphrased, the number one rule for positioning is “Be #1.”
Humans build mental models of the world, and they only have space for a few category labels. Within the labels, they like to rank order the options. Seth Godin’s book The Dip further quantifies the business impact and the importance of being a top-ranked option. The problem with the platitude to “Be #1” is that there can only be one #1 (just like The Highlander), and unless you’re very lucky, you’re probably not #1 today. So what to do?
There are a few strategies that build off this insight and may guide your thinking:
1. Create a new category you can be Number 1 in. My favorite example of this is Avis vs. Hertz in the Car Rental space. Hertz dominated the market for years. To compete, Avis created the new category of being #2 – and “we try harder” – showing they were the best at being “not number 1.” Maybe you aren’t the best software for every office, but maybe you’re number one for small-town governmental agencies with less than ten employees, half of which are part-time? That might seem like a small niche, but it’s this type of specificity that delivers insights for product innovation and marketing and sales that will generate sustainable competitive advantage. The category should make sense in a few meaningful ways (similar challenges, similar ways of working, etc.), and it’s best when the decision-makers in the category are aware of each other (professional networks, similar conference, etc.) because then your success within the niche is visible and builds your reputation with other decision-makers. You can create this category through geographic features (We’re number one in Atlanta) or solution features (We’re the number one native app in Salesforce), or some other criteria that makes sense and defines a meaningful niche you can win with. You could also change the basis of competition. Rather than being the best software for a particular problem, you could be the best-managed service/software-supported consulting. Or you could expand the marketplace to include all-in-one features where you excel. Alternatively, you might pivot to focus on a particular point solution if your competitors are all in on a different one. Vertical integration or horizontal expansion might be other ways to redefine the market in a way you can claim (and maintain) dominance.
2. Head-to-Head Strategies: If you aren’t number one and can’t create a new category to be number one in, you’re generally left with Head-to-Head Strategies. These are some of the most successful approaches.
Unique Features: Do you have unique features or capabilities your competitors can’t replicate easily? The more defensible, the better, but even just a perceived uniqueness can be successfully exploited.
Missing Shortfall: Is there a well-known drawback to solutions in your market that you have successfully overcome? The opposite of a unique feature, this absence of a negative can be powerful and help win deals that might normally be lost to “no decision” that your competitors would lose.
Add-Ons and Partnerships: Can you partner with a complementary product or service that creates a network effect for your solution and powerfully differentiates it from competitors? Working well with other industry leaders can be a great way to differentiate.
Better Value: Competing on price is a slippery slope, but if you can build efficiencies in your processes and technology that allow you to deliver better quality, or faster, at the same price, then you deliver better value. Quantifiable attributes, like quality and speed, can be tough to defend. Pricing is always a meaningful criterion in a B2B decision-making process, but it’s generally best to avoid leaning in on this aspect of your solution, even if you are the lowest-priced option.
Be Better: I list this one last because it’s so hard to win in the eyes of customers. The common belief is that market dynamics win out, and if you were really better, you’d be bigger. Of course we all know this isn’t true, but it’s a hard belief to overcome in the market. You can emphasize better service or more accuracy, but it’s often difficult to prove except to the most technical, and many buyers do not have the interest in developing the expertise necessary to understand just how you’re better.
Crystalizing your Unique Value to Your Customer
With this view of the landscape, it’s time for some deep and honest introspection. Remembering your customer and prospect interviews, go through and make a list of the meaningful attributes of your company and your solution. These should be reflective of your long-term product vision and buying vision, not just sales spin.
Be honest about what is a real benefit to the customer, not just a feature. After removing any of the attributes that don’t align with a meaningful benefit for the customer, rank them in order of importance.
Which of these are Points of Parity, AKA tablestakes, that are required of any serious competitor in the category? Which of these are Points of Differentiation, where you are different than your competitors?
Think through what proof points you have that these benefits are true and uniquely yours. Do you have an exclusive invention or software license? Are you certified in some unique way?
It’s important to remember that you will generally win based on your differentiation. If you only have parity with everyone else, then there is no reason to choose you, unless you’re the lowest priced, and that’s a bad position to be in. Instead, you want to differentiate your product with authentic, defensibly unique benefits that matter to your customer.
Awareness that Generates Demand and Sales
Understanding the context that triggers your customers to buy and their business context reveals opportunities to reach your customers when they are most receptive to your messaging. Awareness is a function of salience, and you can achieve more salience and awareness at a lower cost by talking to your customers when they are receptive.
A clear view of your Buying Vision provides guidance on messaging that will deepen your customers interest and desire to work with you because it shows your alignment to their beliefs about what matters for solutions like yours and why your approach is the best suited for the future.
Finally, competitive strategy that differentiates further amplifies desire and stimulates action, bringing more customers to your door that are primed to buy.
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