Benefits generate interest, Pain generates B2B sales

Despite the best sales and marketing efforts, inertia keeps most prospects from changing vendors or trying new solutions, even when they display initial interest. Speaking to pain-points is often a more effective strategy than emphasizing aspirational benefits for overcoming the inertia that exists at the end of the B2B purchase decision journey.

B2B marketers naturally focus on the aspirational benefits of their solutions. The big interesting ideas behind their solutions provide much of their brand’s identity. The product management team spends its time enhancing solutions and gives Marketing more paradigm-shifting features to talk about.

These aspirational benefits, especially for new solutions, create excitement, generate buzz in trade publications, foot traffic at trade shows, and initial sales calls. But the level of sales generated often falls short of the expectations built on the positive reactions.

The problem with relying solely on aspirational benefits is that it:

  • Assumes that customers are unhappy with where they are at now.
  • Underestimates the market’s tolerance for good-enough
  • Underestimates the hassle and challenges of switching vendors or changing processes.
  • Lacks customer focus – aspirational benefits talks about what the product can do, not what the prospect needs.

Volumes of research into purchase decisions shows that people and organizations typically only invest when they face a pain-point and feel a pressure to act. For decades, sales training organization have made “selling to pain” a pillar of their approach.

Pains=Objectives

Selling to pain is not the same as selling directly to fear, nor is it a negative message. It involves speaking to the areas where prospects are falling short of their goals and objectives and how your solution will help overcome the barriers they face. It focuses on the mundane, nut-and-bolts challenges they face.

Pain surfaces when customers are under pressure to adjust to market changes such as new regulations, loss of market share to competitors, or a general shift in the market’s expectations. It can also come from internal pressures such as slowing growth and top-down directives.

Drivers

Psychology drives the bias towards pain over aspirational fulfillment in B2B markets. Businesses are made up of decision-makers and decision makers are human. Pains and pressures trigger our loss aversion tendencies and are easier to conceptualize for most people.

  • Loss aversion: We feel the loss of something much greater than we do a corresponding gain. Negative feelings about losing $100 are stronger than the positive feelings brought on by winning that same $100. Businesses and B2B decision makers feel pressure when they are afraid of losing something such as market share, profitability, a promotion, or even their job.
  • More concrete: Most decision-makers know the problems they face and can conceptualize how a new solution will address their problems: This supplier has a lower price so my overall costs are lower, this CRM system eliminates the duplicate data and work my staff has to deal with, etc. The aspirational benefits (profitability, efficiency, security, etc.) can be ambiguous, especially to a company that feels they are doing an ok job today and that their solutions are good enough.

Corporate vs. Product Marketing

Aspirational benefits still play a critical role in the sales process – they get prospects into the top of the funnel. They garner attention and can position firms as thought leaders. They are core to a vendor’s brand identity. As such, corporate marketing and branding should focus on the big picture aspirational benefits a vendor and its solutions provide.

As prospects move through the decision journey, product marketing, sales collateral, sales processes should begin to emphasize pain-points and pressures, the question of “What is the prospect struggling with today?”.

Identifying the pain

B2B markers have multiple means of identifying the pains and pressures that motivate purchase decisions in their markets.

  • Sales team – As part of their process, good sales reps will seek out where prospects have pain. They can provide insights into the broad trends they see across prospects.
  • Implementation teams /account managers – Functions that touch customers on a regular basis can provide insights into how customers are using solutions in the real world – what are the using the solution to address.
  • Industry news – The key issues business struggle with will surface in what users (not vendors) talk about in trade journals, conferences, user groups, etc.
  • Primary research – In-depth interviews and surveys can directly explore pain-points and pressures within customer and prospect markets.

In summary

Communicating the big-picture, aspirational benefits of your solution is key to generating interest in B2B markets. However, once you have the prospect’s attention, start speaking to their pain points or they may slip away into the morass of inertia.