The old tried-and-true push marketing campaigns just aren't going to work anymore. Customers now expect providers to understand their business, the issues they face, and the markets that they play in. They no longer have the time to educate you on what their problems are.

In fact, they expect you to educate them. They want to know what you can do to help them attain and retain leadership in their chosen markets. In our view, understanding customers’ businesses and markets is no longer an option—a mere tactic for standing apart from the competition; it is a requirement. We have to move beyond being merely politely curious about customers’ business issues and start to immerse ourselves in those issues.

But we’re not just talking about educating customers here. Marketing also has to give salespeople the ability to have high-level business conversations with executives in their customer bases.

Consider this the second of two important steps in enabling salespeople:

1. Get salespeople to stop pitching and start conversing with customers—going from monologue to dialogue.
2. Make those dialogues more meaningful.

For example, CIOs used to think it was refreshing if a salesperson took a breath in the middle of the pitch to ask them something about their business. But today, CIOs are getting tired of those kinds of uninformed methods of engaging them. One CIO told us, “The next salesperson that asks me what my point of pain is, I am going to throw that person out the door.” The challenge for marketing is to equip the salesperson with the knowledge necessary to begin the conversation with those pain points.

Get More Personal

All of this means that marketing needs greater understanding of customers as individuals. Because merely knowing the challenges of the business as a whole isn’t enough. It's people, not organizations, who buy. The question to ask yourself is, what can I do as the solution provider to help these individuals address the problems their companies are facing while also helping them achieve their goals for their specific roles in the business?

This means that your marketing research must go beyond business issues and take a role-based approach. If you want to get really personal with customers, you need to know more than their children’s birthdays; you need to understand at an aggregate level the kinds of things that people in various roles inside your customers’ companies find useful. You also need to understand the internal buying processes that they need to follow and the internal barriers that they need to overcome as they move through the buying process.

Of course, it is also important to match the right conversation to the right stage of the buying process. The goal of marketing’s efforts is to help move the customer from awareness to interest and get them ready to hand over to sales. That’s the basic script for the series of conversations that you will have with them:

1. Acknowledge their point of pain.
2. Present a possible solution.
3. Present the value of your solution.
4. Offer proof that you can deliver the solution.

Of course, these conversations are going to take place over an extended period of time—ITSMA research shows that the current B2B buying cycle is anywhere from 12–18 months (and likely to increase as the economy continues to go south). Therefore, it’s important to remember where you leave off each conversation. You don't want to keep reinvesting effort where you’ve already been; not only is it expensive, it will be boring and perhaps even offensive to the customer.

When you do all this well, you leave the customer hanging at each stage of the conversation—they’re always hungry to learn a little more. You begin to hear things such as, “Well I didn't know that about your company—tell me a little bit more.” This is how you know that you’ve moved beyond campaigns to conversations.

Additional Information:
To learn more about account penetration, please contact Jeff Sands.

Jeff Sands is Vice President of the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA). Ajit Maira is Senior Vice President of ITSMA.