The biggest antidote to fear: relationships
“Since Covid, a lot more people are involved in the B2B decision-making journey,” says Daisy Mugo, head of B2B marketing at Vivo Energy Africa. “I kid you not, the last tender conversation we were in had 38 participants!”
Zeyad Davids, head of marketing at Visa sub-Saharan Africa, agrees: “The fibres of our relationships have diminished since Covid. Instead of a quick coffee, you set up a Teams call. It’s much more formal. Even getting into someone’s diary now requires a bit of a relationship first. This protracts the relationship-building and purchase cycles.”
The challenge to build trust is mounting. “Pre-Covid our sales teams had more in-person contact with prospects,” explains Mugo. “Those relationships bridged the trust gap between what a company claims it can do for your business, and the belief that they will deliver.”
Gugu-Lisa Zwane-Johnson, head of corporate and investment banking: brand and marketing at Standard Bank, agrees: “Gone are the days when you had a high-touch sales organisation that built the rapport and the trust…. We've moved a lot of that relationship-building online. We've tried to compensate with content, but it’s very different from having a warm body on the other end, pre-sale.”
Fear focuses on cost, but B2B marketers need to shift this narrative to brand proposition
“Our clients are under ever-growing cost pressures,” says Davids. “Procurement is increasingly driven by cost reduction rather than quality improvement. It poses a real challenge for B2B businesses selling a quality service or product that may, over time, prove to be more cost-effective but is not the cheapest in the market at purchase point."
“Looking at a reasonably commoditised industry, the easy way to compare competitors is: Who’s going to give me the best price? But that’s not the sum total of the value proposition, even where the end-service provided seems like a commodity or utility,” continues Davids. “There is a plethora of differences between us and our competitors beyond price, and that’s where brand positioning, product positioning, and a deliberate focus on marketing’s role in the B2B sales cycle come into play.”
Fear has made the purchase cycle longer, top-heavy, and less linear
Thanks to the significance of B2B decisions, increasingly the c-suite is present in even exploratory procurement meetings. “This puts a lot of pressure on leadership in B2B businesses,” says Mugo. “As a B2B marketer, our job is to support our leaders in these conversations to alleviate pressure, but also to equip our sales teams with everything from pitch books and case study videos to engagement plans and sponsorship support so that when they enter conversations with senior decision makers, they can put their best foot forward.”
“In our industry, regulatory and compliance considerations are factors increasingly under the spotlight,” adds Davids from Visa. “The fear of failure, and the possible legal or professional implications for an individual, can be significant. As B2B marketers, we must work much harder to earn a buyer’s trust.”
On top of that, the sales cycle is no longer linear. “We’re navigating this ‘messy middle’, trying to figure out where our buyers are in terms of the sales cycle to meet them at that moment of truth,” explains Zwane-Johnson. “The onus is on us as B2B marketers to be clear about what B2B buyers need to get them through that messy middle. Whether that's content, face-to-face meetings, short-form videos, an event…. We know 95% of B2B buyers will choose the brand that manages to get them at exactly the right moment.”
Fear in B2B buying means account-based marketing needs to be even more human
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to convince a human to put their professional reputation on the line by appointing us,” explains Pnet’s head of brands, Michelle Dobson. “To do this, we need to be highly personal. The message we use needs to answer a specific fear that a decision maker may have, with a clear value proposition of how we’ll solve that. Pnet is a recruitment platform, so for us that means showing the finance person the cost-saving benefit, and showing the recruiter how we’ll save them time. The challenge in B2B marketing, of course, is how highly individualistic this message crafting is, compared to B2C.”
Fear makes brand awareness more critical than ever
“We’ve taken a very intentional position around thought leadership,” continues Dobson. “At Pnet we have access to a vast amount of data about the recruitment industry, which we present to customers through a monthly Job Market Trends Report. It’s about positioning ourselves as an expert, to build brand awareness, credibility and reputation.”
Fear starts at home: We need our own businesses to trust B2B marketing efforts
“There’s often a fear within a business of doing something that doesn’t fall within their [the business’s] understanding of what marketing is. So, when B2B tactics go beyond traditional ideas of marketing (which they need to!), we can be met with resistance internally out of our own fears, too. A fear of ‘Don't go directly to our clients and don't mess up the relationship. Stick in your lane and we’ll stick in ours’,” says Zwane-Johnson. “But we must get beyond this to a value exchange between marketers and the business for the greater good of the organisation. We don’t just need to build trust with our prospects and clients; we need to build trust amongst ourselves and our functions, too.”
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