For many years, part of marketing’s focus has been sales enablement — understanding sales funnel dynamics and working to help sales move prospects toward closing. This support is essential, but it’s still internally focused and often driven by what sales shares about the desires, objections and feedback they receive as they work toward conversion.
Gartner has been touting the concept of buyer enablement to make true strides forward on impacting the buying cycle. The term means arming buyers with all the information they need to make the right decision. The buyer funnel moves through six stages: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation and consensus creation. In this model, alignment between sales and marketing is no longer in support of sales activities (as it is in sales enablement), but in support of buyers’ needs.
The complexity of this model can be daunting since most B2B firms target a wide variety of buyers in organizations that have very different profiles. To be successful, marketers must have direct access to customers to understand the buyer’s journey intimately enough to connect similarities and differences, create the right messaging and content, and choose the right communication path.
If your marketing team is not in direct line with your desired customer base, you won’t get it right. Marketing staff needs to hear buyer pain points to understand how the nuances of messaging land with the customer. Marketing should understand how and why people buy from you and connect that to the solution.
Understanding the customer takes (thoughtful) work.
Buyer understanding should leverage information from many different areas. While nothing can replace one-to-one conversations, there are many ways to collect secondary information. Here are some techniques we use to inform our own marketing strategies:
Social Listening
People talk online. Instead of using social listening tools to just track your own brand, try searching topics. Don’t limit yourself to specific social channels — bridge out to boards like Reddit, or read comments people have posted on LinkedIn.
Prospect Annual Reports Or Quarterly Earnings Calls
Often these public documents contain information on the pressures buyers might be facing or the goals they are trying to achieve. They cover major initiatives and a vision of the changes coming. They also provide indicators that specific goals are stalled or industry drivers that can be applied to like buyers.
Conference Topics, Associations, Community Events
Where do your buyers engage with peers? Looking at conference topics helps to show what’s top of mind for your audience. Likewise, spending time at association meetings or meetups gives the opportunity to make new connections, ask probing questions and get multiple viewpoints.
Industry Analyst/Consulting Firms Content
Many analyst firms do more than just cover technology solutions. For example, if you’re selling to CMOs, reviewing topics that a firm is covering for its CMO subscribers could give insight into what is top of mind for this role and the challenges they’re facing. If you learn that CMOs increasingly have to convince CIOs to adopt the latest martech, you could create content and tools that explicitly speak to the CIO on behalf of the CMO — something they can share to help them sell internally.
Apply your knowledge to the funnel.
In the buyer enablement funnel, information and marketing content should clearly map to specific stages. If there is a gap in your understanding of what buyers are facing during a specific stage, focus your research efforts on that area.
Stage 1: Problem Identification
Content should focus on diagnostic strategies for evaluating gaps or covering new techniques for overcoming specific challenges. Storytelling and case studies are good ways for potential buyers to see commonalities in their own situations. Case studies should be about problem identification and approach versus a thinly veiled pitch.
Stage 2: Solution Exploration
There are multiple methods a buyer may have for solving a specific problem. This is where marketing content can explore specific problems and layer on information about how their solution fills that need — but keep in mind this should not be self-serving, salesy or inauthentic.
Analyst reports can come in handy here, as can contributed articles and other third-party verification vehicles to show you are legit. If you have a product, make sure a demo is available (with and without sales intervention). Let the buyer consume as they wish. Be upfront with ROI calculators, and try not to gate all your content; you want to remove obstacles.
Stage 3: Requirements Building
The buyer is going through this process internally, trying to get all the stakeholders to contribute requirements. Maybe at this stage you supply an easy checklist of the questions they can use or a framework that’s helpful in coalescing multiple inputs. Maybe it’s about the key requirements most overlooked and how to ensure those are considered.
Stage 4: Supplier Selection
Have competitive information readily available, but make sure you are fair and accurate. Don’t forget to include the “soft” features — your organizational support, customer success model and/or unique customer care program. This is also where the people aspect of your company needs to stand out. Introduce prospects to more than just the salesperson. It could make or break the sale.
Stage 5: Validation
For some customers, this means a proof of concept (POC) or pilot. Consider providing content on a great test plan or an easy way to measure outcomes (or even a guide on what they should be measuring).
Stage 6: Consensus Creation
Sales often fail because buyers can’t rally their internal stakeholders. Arm your champion with the right messages to present to every stakeholder. Help them with slides, market information and a recap of how thorough the investigation was for a new solution. Pretend you have to sell internally to yourself, and you’ll quickly see where they can use help.
Buyer enablement is a shift in thinking about marketing. Unlike sales enablement, it involves truly understanding the buyer, making their life easier, removing obstacles and enabling them to see that yes is the only answer.
