3. Aligning Marketing with the B2B Buying Journey
Now that we have insight into B2B buying decisions and tools to build working hypotheses about those decisions, we can turn to what we can do as B2B digital marketers and salespeople to interact with B2B buyers. Our goal is to position ourselves as helpful advisors for buyers throughout their buying journeys, leading to more buying journeys completed and– where there is a good fit with our solutions– more sales closed. Doing this involves aligning our interactions with customers across our marketing, sales, and service teams: the three teams interacting with buyers throughout their buying journey. That includes using specific team activities and interactions at the right time and integrating our interactions across the three teams as customers move forward.
There are three objectives for the marketing team and marketing activities in an aligned interaction strategy. The first objective is to generate new demand for sales interactions by educating and interacting with prospective customers early in their buying journeys. Then, as sales teams take over, the second objective is to enable sales interaction success by identifying customers who are ready and willing to speak with a salesperson and providing tools and resources to aid the salesperson as an advisor. Finally, where buying journeys stall or fail, the marketing team takes back over, nurturing these prospective customer relationships with educational content and interactions, and freeing up sales resources until they would be again helpful to the buying journey.
Our focus is on what we now call modified rebuy and new task buying situations—situations where one or more people in an organization are dissatisfied enough about something to consider new options. These journeys are our opportunity to create new demand for our organization. We learned in the last module that moving through these two buying journey situations involves building group consensus on the best new solution across two active phases: solution identification and supplier choice. We learned that buying units often don’t make it through a buying journey, and where they tend to fall apart is in the first phase: solution identification. This stage is where the buying center is first coming together to build consensus on the nature and scope of the challenge, deciding which categories of solutions are worth considering, and deciding if the organizational effort to make a change is worth it. Finally, buying center members don’t reach out to organizations– particularly salespeople– in this phase. However, we can use our marketing tools– particularly our digital marketing tools– to connect with and help these buying center members learn about possible solutions and rally together to keep moving forward.
To help buying centers in the solution identification phase, we need to add a new organizing tool to our own toolkit: the business value proposition statement. This statement connects our products and services with the business outcomes that matter to our clients. Its goal is to help educate our buying center about the type and amount of value that the category of solutions we provide can bring to the challenge they are facing. This statement is a cousin to the more familiar positioning statement that you learned about in your introductory marketing course, which is more useful in the supplier choice phase of the buying journey. The positioning statement assumes a customer is already at the point of choosing among options in a solution category and so defines the unique value that our solutions bring to the challenge relative to others in the category.
The resources in this chapter will dig more deeply into the first objective of marketers as part of an aligned B2B go-to-market organization: educating and interacting with customers early in their buying journey. It will then discuss some research on different categories of B2B needs that can be useful to creating strong business value proposition and positioning statements. We will pick up on the other two objectives in the next chapter.
Learning Objectives
| By the end of this chapter you should be able to… | (covered in these activities) |
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| A. Explain the roles and handoffs of the three teams interacting with customers on their buying journeys, and why alignment between them is critical. | 3.1 | ||||||
| B. Define key objectives and fundamental elements of an education-focused “inbound” approach to B2B marketing. | 3.1 | 3.2 | |||||
| C. Define key technical tools used to accomplish activities and maintain alignment across all three teams. | 3.2 | ||||||
| D. Categorize elements of potential B2B customer value in order to effectively draw on them when crafting B2B marketing content and messaging. | 3.3 | 3.4 | |||||
| E. Align the use of value proposition statements and positioning statements with the phases of the buying process. | 3.4 | ||||||
| F. Design effective business value proposition statements from two broad frames of reference. | 3.5 | 3.6 | |||||
Independent Learning Activities
- 3.1 Video Lecture: “Aligning B2B Marketing for Value”
- 3.2 Video: Hubspot (2022) “Inbound Marketing Fundamentals”
- 3.3 Reading: Bain (2018) “The B2B Elements of Value”
- 3.4 Video Lecture: “Aligning Sources of Value with Buying Stages”
- 3.5 Reading: Konrath (2012) Value Propositions (Excerpts)
- 3.6 Video Lecture “Building Value Proposition Statements”