What’s a marketer to do when it’s harder for buyers to buy than sellers to sell?

As a B2B marketer, you’re working harder than ever to share your brand’s value with the right buyers in the right channels at the right times.

You’re targeting digital ads. Optimizing search. Creating highly-relevant content. Tweaking your unique value proposition(s). Refining your event strategy. Nurturing prospects and leads with the right tech.

You’re measuring all the metrics and outcomes the big marketing software-as-a-service providers tell you are important. (With always more to sell, they keep changing their minds: Yet you manage to keep up!)

But is it working?

Increasingly—despite all the frenzied effort—the answer is no.

Today’s enterprise customer seems less willing to pay for your value, even when they fully understand it. And even when they can learn more about you and your solutions at every turn.

Why? What gives? What’s changed?

Greater risk aversion, more complicated and expensive solutions (nearly all involving tech), tighter regulatory requirements, globalizing operations, exploding cybersecurity risks, and tightening data protection protocols have all conspired to bring more customer stakeholders to the decision-making table.

Authors from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a leading member-advisory resource for larger B2B brands, share in their book The Challenger Customer that customers report an average of 5.4 different people are formally involved in making today’s typical B2B purchasing decision. And that number has grown to 6+ in the 2 years since the original research was published.

That’s not just 6+ different people at the table, but 6+ different perspectives now dynamically involved in the decision-making mix.

In modern America we’ve been told again and again (and again) that “diversity is our strength.” It’s become a secular religion of sorts.

But while diversity clearly has its benefits, it never comes without its share of messiness. And that messiness can be paralyzing.

Anyone who’s ever tried to shepherd a group of individuals from very different backgrounds  into a consensus position can vouch that stakeholder diversity in decision making can bring some rather nasty dysfunction. Often groups of deciders can’t agree on the actual problem, let alone choose a collective course of action.

As the researchers at CEB point out: The big story in the breakdown in effectiveness of traditional sales and marketing strategies—even those empowered by the best of digital tools— isn’t supplier struggles to get better at selling. They know how to sell.

The revolution has been in how buyers buy: Your prospective customers are finding it harder than ever to get to “yes”.

Individual vs. Group: Market to each individual or to an entire group?

Most sales and marketing pros today would likely say you should direct focused effort to each of the individual decision makers that make up the decision-making group. By dividing and conquering, the thinking goes—by tracking them down individually and winning them over—you get at everyone’s needs.

But do you really?

Today’s marketers are building more personas. Content creators are crafting more content, personalized to each of those personas. Technologist are digitally targeting more account contacts across more channels.

Indeed, the rise of something called “business-to-people” (or B2P) marketing within B2B reflects a shared realization among marketers that it is real living-and-breathing people who actually do the buying from businesses, not other businesses themselves. So understanding the wants and needs of individuals is essential.

Yet—while all this may be true—it is equally true that it’s not individuals at one business that buy things from another, but groups of them that do.

When CEB measured the impact of:

1. Winning access to all the stakeholders evaluating purchases (or “tracking them down”), and
2. Better positioning the seller with each stakeholder (or “winning them over”)

They found that that while tracking them down had a positive impact on improving the likelihood of making a strong sale, delivering more personalized messaging to each decision maker did not.

Surprised? So were the researchers.

Personalizing an offer to each decider in a complex solution sale actually decreases the likelihood and quality of sale rather than increases it. Turns out, the better we as marketers get at customizing an offer at the individual level, the less likely we are to help close a quality deal.

The researchers’ conclusion? It’s not how a supplier markets & sells to individuals that’s important, but how they can sell more effectively to groups of diverse individuals.

Seems that somehow we’ve forgotten that selling to individuals (that may comprise a group) and selling to groups of individuals is not exactly the same thing. But not because the selling is different.

It’s the buying that’s different.

Diversity vs. Dysfunction: Is the problem decision-maker diversity or the dysfunction it brings?

The challenge to decision making is not the number of voices but the diversity of perspectives and priorities reflected. And while this diversity may ultimately make for a better decision. It also makes any decision harder to reach.

There will always be value in understanding each buyer separately. However, the real value in today’s more complex sales environment is in understanding how groups of buyers work together (or fail to do so) to make a purchase decision.

If we don’t understand how these groups come together—if we sell only to the individual and not simultaneously to the entire group—we’ll miss what is arguably the most critical part of B2B selling today: finding a way to connect a diverse group of decision makers with an overarching vision they would unlikely be able to realize on their own.

What does decision-making dysfunction look like?

It’s when some don’t get their say, while others avoid discussing important issues altogether. It’s when still others outright disagree with one another on one or more core issues.

While neither the buyer nor seller may be able to do anything about the diversity problem. (The players are the players, after all.) There’s likely quite a bit they can do to make the buying process less dysfunctional.

For the seller, that includes getting content that articulates a cross-functional, cross-disciplinary vision for the future into the hands of decision makers.

Solution vs. Provider: Focus on choice of provider or on identifying the problem & solution?

There are three stages any buyer must pass through on their way to a purchase decision:

1. Defining the problem (What’s really gone wrong here?)
2. Identifying a solution (What’s the right, most feasible, course of action?)
3. Selecting a supplier (Who do we choose to deliver?)

Deals can be lost—and collaboration break down—at any point in the process.

Again, research offers insight.

CEB study participants report that it is the “solution identification” stage that is the most difficult for diverse decision makers to master. By a wide margin. So, while customer stakeholders might all agree that there is a problem, there’s likely to be a real debate about its cause and the best way to solve it—irrespective of supplier.

Results like that make it very clear where sellers ought to be investing their time and effort when it comes to educating buyers and facilitating a consensus.

* * *

Today’s complex solution sale isn’t failing because suppliers don’t know how to sell. Their sales acumen is just fine. They know what to do and how.

Rather, suppliers aren’t getting paid for their value because buyers are finding it a challenge to actually buy. It’s not that diverse customer buying groups can’t agree on anything. It’s just that—left to their own devices—they can’t agree on very much.

Supplier marketers best serve their brands when they focus on how to help diverse decision makers come together around a shared vision of what’s possible and a path for getting there.

We’ll explore alternatives for marketers in upcoming posts, including how they can architect content marketing efforts to build consensus among diverse decision makers.

Remember, great marketing content is less about selling than it is about helping buyers buy from you.

Erik Crawford Kridle has a passion for the power of great ideas powered by great content. He spent nearly 20 years in Big 4 consulting—the first half communicating change for clients, the second as a marketing leader for deals, talent and customer/digital consulting businesses. A Pennsylvania boy by birth and upbringing, he now lives in Orange County, CA with his wife Su, their children Olivia, Elizabeth and Jakob, and Sam the family dog (plus morning walking companion!). Erik crafts marketing content for B2B solution providers and blogs at KridleContent.com.