The takeaways were as follows :

The B2B buying decision making funnel is all about managing risk. In this case, there are two risks to manage: organizational risks and personal risks.

• Organization risks involve quality, reliability, commitment and execution.
• Personal risk is about management, decision making and good judgment.

Greater risk interns of project size, purchase value, perceived benefits usually involves the buyer having more resources from the business and other functional areas available to aid with the buying decision process.

The big problem with risk however, is that it creates fear and emotion which turns the process into a non-rational process. It’s important to understand how the B2B marketer can mitigate this. Some risk mitigation thinking for a B2B buyer involves working with an established B2B brand.

Brand building suddenly become a key factor in the decision making process as  some firms might be inclined to work with a certain supplier but require the pedigree and successes to rationalize it.

B2B buying criteria also varies because the core product tends to be very different from a mass marketed product:

• Price fluctuations are few. Unless pricing for raw materials changes drastically, most B2B pricing stays the same.
• It goes without saying that most B2B products are “technical” products that are either used as part of the manufacturing process or used to help another organization build its capabilities.
  
• Need less to say, B2B products have shorter distribution channels.
• In this channel, services are more important than the actual product even though product spec is key in the initial supplier vetting process.
  
• B2B products are very very utility based. The possibility of obsolescence arises if the utility is diminished in certain ways. Style has little to do with a B2B product.
  

Another big piece was having better integration between online and offline marketing. In many organizations, traditional marketing functions are yet to collaborate effectively with digital marketing to determine a unified campaign strategy to engage the customer.

Both channels work with each other to deliver a unified message to drive sales. Also, it’s critical that any marketing campaign have complete lead attribution so that it’s possible to identify actual leads from specific sources. this helps to close the loop on all marketing efforts. Things like a unique url on print to calculate how much traffic was generated as a result of print, a unique 1-800 phone number to know how many people called you as a result of your direct marketing, a google utm tracking code on urls to power your google analytics to give you metrics at a ‘campaign’ level.

Tips that stand out include :

- Ensuring that you have a strategy in mind. Are you in China for the long-haul or is this a tread-softly approach where you want to understand the viability of setting up business in China or are you just in this for the short-term? Each objective requires a different approach.- Ensuring that your product has a strong fit with the demographic you’re targeting in China. It’s quite simple. Developing economies like China and India which are on strong growth trajectories are appealing, but remember that about 80% of the populations in both countries are at or below the poverty level. That means that your market size suddenly shrank (though 200 million middle class consumers are nothing to be sneezed at). It’s also means that the market’s very price-sensitive, so businesses in turn are price-sensitive.

- Relationship building is key. I would like to posit that this is a global aspect of all B2B selling, but even more so in Asian countries where trust is an integral part of the business relationship. Trust, of course, is developed by being patient and by plugging on.

In any case, without further ado, here the article :

10 Tips on B2B Selling in China

So, it’s essential to qualify the nature of the lead to a point where you know the urgency of the business need, the budgets involved, the participants in the buying process and finally, the time of decision-making.

Here  are 6 parameters that are required to be predefined in order to completely qualify a lead and take it into the next step of your prospecting process.

Need Identification:

As simple as this sounds, it’s essential to understand the extent of the prospect’s need. Ask yourself if your product is adding value to this customer because he has a genuine need or are you just wasting your time with someone who’s a nice guy, chats with you on the phone, but is not worth your lead prospecting time. If he really wants to chat, well, have drinks during happy hour.

The point here is to identify the obvious needs and the vague needs. Rank these needs in order from the need that is critical for the sale to occur to the need that is the least critical.

Scale : Use a scale from 1 to 5 with one being the least critical and 5 being the most critical.

Product Fit:

The B2B sales world is famous for its customizations. The ability to provide a customization benefit does give you an edge in the selling process, but will strain your product design, manufacturing and installation processes. For this parameter, ask yourself whether your products or services meet or exceed their technical, performance and reliability requirements? If you need to do some minor reconfigurations to get this order, then it’s still a good fit. But, if you’re going to have to retool half your plant, walk away.

Scale: If they want what you make or may need you to change a few specs, give ‘em an ‘A’. Anything more than a few extra specs gets a ‘C’ unless it’s a multi-million dollar project and/or your CEO wants to do business with them.

Opportunity Size/Budgets:

The best things in life are free, sang the Beatles, unfortunately, your value-adding product comes with a price tag. The size-of-opportunity is a key question that you need to ask in order to qualify this lead as you’ll have an idea of the revenue potential of this prospect. Naturally, you’ll never get an actual number, but a ball-park estimate will tell you how serious they are about purchasing your product. If your prospect is price sensitive, then you’ll get various indications early in the game about ‘reduced budgets’, ‘bad economy’, ‘cost cutting’ etc. If quality, reliability and other service-related factors are very important factors in the decision-making process, that’s a good serious prospect to have.

Scale: Rate your prospects as A, B or C depending on their fit. If you’re aware that their budget’s within range, then assign an ‘A’ rating. If the prospect’s price sensitive but will consider other factors like time of implementation, delivery options and other factors while making his purchase decision, assign a ‘B’ rating. If the prospect is very very price sensitive, assign a ‘C’ rating and walk away.

Authority:

This is another important factor. What is your contact’s role in the purchase decision process? Is he a  recommender, influencer or decision maker? Understanding how many people are involved in the decision making process qualifies the lead further. If your product costs $10K or so and if your prospect is a mid-sized manufacturing organization, then it’s quite possible that one single person has the authority to approve a sale. However, if your product is in the $100K plus category, then there has to be a chain of command or a buying/purchasing committee that approves such big-ticket sales.

If your big-ticket product lead states (with exaggerated bravado) that he is the final authority, then he’s not being candid. It’s better not to waste too much time with such prospects.

Scale: No scale here. Simply assign the R (Recommender),  I (Influencer) or D (Decision maker) tag based on the contact’s position in the firm.

Timing:

When will they make a final decision on buying your product? When do they plan to implement it? At what stage of the buying process is this organization at presently? For some products like office supplies, the time line for purchase is short, but for big-ticket items, it may take 6, 12 to 24 months. This information is useful in mapping and quantifying the potential of your sales pipeline. But, more importantly, this information allows you to plan your selling strategy for every member of the decision chain.

Scale : Rank it on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 assigned to a prospect who is in the early stages of the buying process. The firms that are in the middle or towards the end of the buying process get a 3. The tire kickers get a 1.

Typically, 10% of all your prospects will be kicking tires. About 40% or so will be in the early stages of the buying process, 20% will be in the middle stages and 10% will be towards the end of the buying process. Note that these numbers vary for the different B2B sectors. I’ve based these estimates on my experiences in the construction products industry and software sales sector.

Competition:

This is very good information to have handy. Understanding the size and reputation of your competition should be an integral part of your planning process, thus allowing you to calibrate your strategy accordingly.

Scale: All competition gets an ‘A’ because it’s so good to know who else is playing this game.

Having worked on salesforce.com, Dynamics CRM and even Zoho CRM for a while, I found that qualifying these leads with the sales team using the above criteria, enabled me to categorize them efficiently and plan the appropriate marketing communication towards them.

Brian Carroll recently ran the above poll on LinkedIn with telling results. B2B selling is a prolonged process and there tends to be a bit of downtime in between your communication with your prospects. Use that time to qualify them better by understanding their businesses, researching your competitor’s offerings/marketing programs and identifying other players within the organization (a good internal coach is always a valuable asset) you’re trying to sell to.

One aspect of marketing that B2C firms have been using effectively has been social media. In contrast, B2B businesses are struggling with the question of social media in their marketing plans. rightly so, it is a different but challenging medium.  Well, here are some tips on how B2Bs can use social media today.

Social media is a powerful communications tool and being part of the new digital marketing toolbox, it cannot be utilized with traditional marketing messages and positioning. The easy part about a B2B firm using social media is which social media to use. The usual suspects stand out : Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, Ning, Twitter, YouTube – if you have video content, slideshare. The hard part is planning and executing your social media strategy.

Step 1 – Set specific goals :

Always ask yourself : What is the purpose of this social media exercise and what do I hope to achieve from this? Only when you have a complete answer should you begin. Typically for a B2B, you could use the following :

- Increase  sales leads by X% for 2010 using social media.

- Increase email enrollments by Y% for 2010.

- Increase telephone leads by Z% for 2010. (Use a 1-800 telephone number specifically for this exercise so that you know the exact numbers of leads from this exercise.)

Step 2 – Who’s going to do this?

Who’s the best fit to communicate via social media? Whoever takes the lead in your social networking role must be open, informative, objective, available and most of all – truthful. They have to be prepared to take feedback from users regardless of its content, to respond openly and fairly, and to tell the truth no matter how much it hurts. Openness and honestly is essential for your social media marketing to succeed. Zappos and Whole Foods have their CEOs use social media to communicate directly with their customers – but they are B2C organizations. B2Bs already have their CEO participating in the sales process so perhaps the CMO or the head of Internet marketing can lead this by communicating either via Twitter, Linkedin or a Blog.

Step 3 – What are you going to communicate?

The information you communicate should be educational, informative and of interest to your audience. Ease up on the self promotion as something like that will backfire. Social networks are places where people go to socialize and relax. Any product promotion will be dismissed promptly. Be thoughtful.  Educate, inform and speak in the language of your customers to identify needs and provide solutions to them. Provide them with white papers, research statistics, product information and suggestions. You should remember that this medium will complement your other customer-marketing activities like email and direct communication.

Step 4 – Where you will communicate?

I wrote down a list of the usual social media suspects above. However, you just cannot start a blog and think that it’s the  solution to everything. This is the part where you really try understand your customers habits. Where do they spend their time online? What do they read and where they look for their information?

Try to get into the minds of your customer. Do these guys even use social networks? If Facebook is not where they’re at – then are they on a industry specific network on Ning or are they part of a industry group on Linkedin? They may also tweet?

Remember that technical buyers may read the latest product review blogs, but do the economic buyers, in the form of CEOs, read blogs at all? It’s highly possible that they read the more traditional communication media – like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. It is thus critical to match your media and messages to your audience.

Social media allows you the opportunity to humanize your company. In the B2B world, while you are in touch with your customers because they buy from you, social media being a different environment allows a more open social interaction which in turn, can deliver some excellent feedback from your customers about your business. The image alongside based on a survey by Marketing Sherpa is quite revealing about how marketers perceive social media.

If your audience uses Twitter, use it to get closer to your customers and prospects as they will be donating lots of information that’s useful in relationship building. Follow your audience’s Twitter streams, and you get a sense of how they think. Linkedin is another great way to learn about your audience. Find out which groups your prospects participate in via Linkedin, and find out what those groups are discussing. It’s very possible that these  prospects communicate about their company as well as have questions related to your products in their discussions in these groups. Use the conversations as an opportunity to find out where your prospects are in the buying process.

Hope this post was useful. Please feel free to comment on the same. Good Luck!

For B2B marketers, it’s important to understand the characteristics of B2B buying behavior (including the purchasing process as well as the influencers involved) in order to create effective marketing programs to reach the buyers.

The different characteristics of B2B buyer behavior are :

1.Market characteristics :

- Demand for B2B products is derived: What this means is that the demand for B2B industrial services and products is derived from or is driven by consumer demand for goods and services.  For e.g. the demand for Computer Associates’ Enterprise security software is dependent on the volume of online consumer purchases. If consumers are not driving increasing sales on online shopping sites by buying more from online sellers(thereby triggering a need for safer online systems), then online retailers will not consider CA’s suite of security products or anyone else’s for that matter. Derived demand is thus based on expectations of future consumer demand.

- Customers are few and purchase orders are large: Clear enough. Typical order size varies from hundreds of thousand dollars to a few million dollars.

2. Product/service characteristics:

- In the B2B purchasing world, products and services are technical in nature and are bought on the basis of their specifications.

- Many of the products in B2B sales tend to be raw or semi-finished. For e.g. Microsoft’s Office suite is not entirely developed by Microsoft  – some of the other pieces are developed by external teams with the expertise and upon completion the piece of coding is sent to Microsoft’s team and integrated within the main suite.

- Key decision factors in B2B purchasing involve reliability of delivery schedules, technical support and post-sales customer support.

3. Buying process characteristics:

- B2B buyers follow established purchasing policies and procedures which are set in place by the company’s purchasing department. RFPs are typically common for high-tech, high spec products.

- Processes exist in place for evaluating sellers and their products and services.

- The buying influencers are many and many parties participate in the purchasing decision.

4. Characteristics of the marketing mix:

- Direct selling to organization buyers is the typical rule. So, many firms send their promotional material to heads of purchasing departments.

- Typically, B2B advertising and other promotional material is technical in nature.

- Pricing is never set in stone. It’s set as part of a protracted negotiation where it’s evaluated as part of a broader situation where the seller and product qualities play a large role in the decision-making process. Bulk discounts are also typically the rule.

- Relationship marketing is the key here, and different levels of the organization  participate in the buying/selling process especially if the sale is a big ticket sale.

It’s important for online marketers to recognize the makeup of B2B buyers as this will help them communicate with them more effectively. While a buyer might be on Facebook, it wont make sense to create a Facebook group but perhaps a LinkedIn group. He might also be willing to follow your tweets. And, if your email newsletter provides him with value, he’ll be sure to browse through it.