Last week we looked at how the retail problem of buyer distraction rears its head in the world of B2B, even in the C-suite. Corporate Overlords find themselves distracted by their friends, their colleagues’ friends, more important things they should be doing and the terrifying stuff that goes on in the world and threatens their business.
Moving down the food chain to where most of the real buying actually happens, let’s look at our friends in the P-Cube. Also known as the Vendor Abuse Department or, in more polite circles, the Procurement or Strategic Sourcing Department, this is where a good many B2B deals are made and broken.
In larger companies, the P-Cube is charged with getting the best price, vetting vendors, taking care of all that paperwork, matching up the quotes, purchase orders, invoices and statements and generally keeping the rest of us out of trouble. For more on the P-Cube see the related links at the bottom of this post.
You would think that people who buy things for a living are immune from the buyer distractions that plague the rest of us, but even procurement professionals can be prevented from actually purchasing by a few key distractors:
P-Cube Buyer Distraction #1: Terrible Documentation
The good people who dedicate their professional lives to helping us spend properly are, for the most part, generalists. They don’t know one light fixture from another; they can’t really tell which IT consultant is smarter than the next and they won’t pretend to judge the creative abilities of your favourite agencies. Their skills are in matching up what the business needs with the available pool of suppliers.
If they have to wade through pages of fluffy garbage about missions and values and visions, that’s going to distract them from understanding what you do, how it adds value to their organization and why you do it so much better than anyone else. The P-Cube needs straight-forward documentation about your products and services that they can read and understand really quickly.
As with consumers, the harder we make our buyers work to understand our products and services, the less likely we are to close a sale. This means making sure a P-Cuber can get to the product pages on your site easily, download collateral that makes sense and find additional information without working very hard.
P-Cube Buyer Distraction #2: Complicated Pricing
Is pricing a battleground in your company? It often is. Sales and marketing go toe-to-toe over pricing more often than just about anything else. Guess who doesn’t care: that’s right, the P-Cube. Their job is to get the best price out of your Sales Squirrels, and this means they need to actually understand how your pricing works to begin with.
We like to imagine a world where the Squirrels sit down over coffee and patiently walk customers through the pricing, explaining the value proposition and gently nudging them into signing on the bottom page.
The reality in larger deals is that your price sheet or proposal is being reviewed by a P-Cuber sitting all alone in his or her fabric box, without any help from your side. Will they pick up the phone and call if they don’t understand something? Perhaps. Or maybe they will set aside your distracting, difficult price sheet in favour of one that makes sense.
In some companies, they have Buying Committees. These are what happens when they let the Procurement Department form its own street gang. If your difficult pricing didn’t make sense to a P-Cuber, imagine how far it’s going to get in room with five or six people all trying to make sense of it.
P-Cube Buyer Distraction #3: Squirrel Infestations
In retail situations, sales people can be a significant distractor, either by vanishing down a long aisle, never to be seen again or burrowing in like a tick, leaving the customer no space to think.
For our P-Cubers, a lack of sales help is seldom an issue, but relentless calls, emails, texts, visits, LinkedIn messages, deliveries, invitations, white papers, balloon-o-grams and other enthusiastic outreach is just a tad distracting.
Good sales people know when to shut up and when to keep talking. Marketers should make sure that whatever is in front of the P-Cube buyer when the sales music stops is going to keep right on communicating and selling.
If you are dropping deals late in the funnel, have a look at the communication frequency between your Squirrels and your buyers. While you’re there, make sure you haven’t played a role in distracting them right out of the funnel.
On a related note, you may want to keep tabs on what your competitors’ sales people are doing to the P-Cube. Obnoxious selling by others can work to your advantage if you’re able to stay the course and be the least distracting thing in the room.
P-Cube Buyer Distraction #4: A Giant Grudge
Good procurement professionals check their egos and baggage at the door and evaluate each purchase on its own merits and each vendor in the light of how they can help the business succeed. Yeah. Right. Good procurement people are, well, people and that means they have feelings and reputations and memories. So many memories.
If you are making it to the P-Cube and no further in your deals, you may well be dealing with Giant Grudges in the procurement departments across the land. There are a lot of reasons a P-Cuber can hold a grudge against a supplier. These include messing up a project in the past, delivering terrible customer service, being generally horrible to deal with, having complicated pricing, obnoxious sales people and lousy products.
Grudges can also be generated by doing an end-run to the Corporate Overlords, flaunting a Buddy-in-the-Business (BITB) connection or generally acting entitled to the business. P-Cubers hate that, and the only weapon they really have is the ability to kill or slow down a deal.
Remembering that procurement people also move about from company to company, anything your brand may have done to make a P-Cuber look bad will surely come back to haunt you. Also, they have friends too, and networks and they talk about you behind your back. I’m sorry if that is news to you.
If you have managed to piss off the P-Cube, you are going to need to do some significant repair work to get invited back to the party. I’d suggest you hire a third party to call up some of these lost accounts and see what really happened. Remember to start with the P-Cube, not with the C-Suite. Most C-Suite people have no idea why suppliers are let go.
Next week, we will look at what’s keeping the F-Word from buying.
Related Posts
Coming Soon to a P-Cube Near You
P-Cube Rising: Procurement is Cool Again
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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