Day 13: Business to People

Day 13 of 30. Howdy y’all. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing for a B2B business.

Let’s say you are in the professional services or the professional products, or you are in some way directly targeting /directly marketing to businesses. You need to know your customer. That’s the first rule of sales (and, well, everything really). 

If you’re doing that in the B2B world, you need to hear this. There is a solid argument that there is no such thing as B2B or B2C anymore. Think about QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a fantastic company. Intuit is a fantastic company. Are they marketing to a customer or are they marketing to a business? The lines are fuzzy, right? We’re talking about a bookkeeping software. It should be pretty clear that it is for a business, but in the reality of LinkedIn, social media, this moment in time in which we find ourselves in 2020, and the covid and quarantine culture, there is really no such thing as business to business or business to customer.

We find ourselves in the reality that we are business to people. 

You might be able to find your exact, perfect business or targeted customer specifically inside of LinkedIn sales navigator. You might understand your customer base so well that you know what kind of coffee they drink, and so you need to market directly at that coffee shop. You might know that there is a press conference with this CFO at such-and-such time, and so you need to take out a billboard to make sure he sees it. The reality of business to business versus business to customer has changed, and your marketing strategy should change and adapt to seeing people instead of seeing categories of business or customer. Adapt to see your customer and their needs, their wants, their hopes, and their fears. Those are all very real, very tangible, no matter the size and scale of the enterprise.

So as you’re thinking about this, I encourage you to really try to see your customer where they’re at. Try to understand. Make a list of their purchasing journey, make a list of their hopes and their dreams and speak to that. Be courageous as you’re marketing and talk to those points. Hope this helps.