The four flaming hoops of B2B marketing
In my experience working in a B2B environment, there are four fiery hoops that you need to jump through in order to convince someone to buy from you. These hoops take the form of four questions that you need a potential buyer to answer in your favour.
The four questions are:
1) Does our business have a problem?
This could be almost anything. Manual data entry that needs to be automated, an organizational structure that hasn’t kept pace with a growing company, or even wooden doorstops that scuff the tile floor. Whatever the problem is, your buyer will often need help realizing that there’s a problem to begin with. As Aldous Huxley wrote in the Doors of Perception, more of our brain activity is spent filtering stuff out than is spent letting stuff in. We become numb to things; it’s part of life. Sometimes people need you to point out a problem that’s been draining their life force without them even noticing.
2) Is the problem worth addressing?
This is sometimes a harder sell than simply identifying a problem. The problem needs to cause real hassle or lost productivity (I fondly recall an old scene from 30 Rock where the character Tracey Jordan launches an infomercial for a breadless panini-maker by having a test subject sprain their hand while trying to pick up a piece of Wonderbread).
You need to believe that the problem your product or service sells is worth addressing. Otherwise, no one will. Next, you need to focus on instances where the pain of this problem is most acutely felt, and then to tap into the frustrations your buyer feels in their workplace (there’s never a shortage of this emotion out there).
3) Can we handle the problem internally?
In my experience, this is the fieriest hoop of all. Organizations will always try to address a problem internally, even if that means just deciding on principle that it’s something they should address themselves, and then not doing it.
Think of new product design sprints, small marketing campaigns, even UX design! Beware the things that people think they can or should do themselves, then seek to break through this false belief (or simply show them how much time and money they’ll save by having someone external take care of it).
4) Is this external firm/product able to address the problem?
So many people start at this stage when trying to sell B2B. They jump directly into discussing the features of their offering — or the benefits, if they think they’re really ahead of the curve. But no benefits or features are worth anything if they’re not solving a problem.
In other words, you can’t skip hoops 1–3 when marketing, especially in a B2B environment. This is a huge part of the enduring pull that some infomercials can have (especially late at night) when they lead with something like “Has this ever happened to you?” Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes the scenes that follow are comically exaggerated, but you do get some images that are truly enduring. How many paper towel commercials have you seen that show how one brand stacks up against “The Other Guys” by showing the rival brand anemically pushing around spilled grape juice before shamefully disintegrating?
At the end of the day, you probably know how to pitch the features and benefits of your offering. If not, there’s lots of great material out there on how to do so. But in my experience, it’s the work that comes before this point that matters most for your product story, whether you’re building a landing page, running a commercial, or even making a cold call. If you can get a person to agree that 1) they have a problem, 2) the problem is worth addressing, and 3) it’s not worth trying to do it within their organization, then part 4) should come rather naturally.
