In the third of our deep dives into buyer distraction, it’s time to check in with our friends, the F-Words. These are those people inside organizations who actually do stuff with the products and services you are selling. The F is for Functional and these are the folks who make the majority of our medium to large purchase decisions.
F-Words don’t spend a ton of time thinking about how to buy things, worrying about SOWs, NDAs and other bits of paper; they are looking for the thing that solves problem so they can get the other thing done that is being held up by the problem they need to solve. Though, as we shall see, these little process things can slow them down.
Despite their tight focus on the stuff that needs to get done, the F-Word is not immune to distractions throughout the purchase process. They share a few distractions with their friends in the P-Cube, notably Squirrel Infestations, in the form of email and phone bombardment and Giant Grudges left over from some past disappointment on your part. Let’s take a look at some of
this group’s unique distractors.
F-Word Buyer Distraction #1: Complicated Products
In the P-Cube, price complexity can be a deal killer, but here in the F-Word, the product or service itself can over-complicate things and create a distraction.
Most of the stuff we sell in B2B is pretty complicated. There can be hundreds of variations on a given product and tons of add-ons to service offerings. This is all a good and necessary part of serving complicated customers, but when you’re pitching just one customer, presenting the pantheon of your product offering can easily overwhelm your poor buyer.
This is where a really, really good Sales Squirrel will earn their keep. We’ve discussed the perils of Feature Puke in prior posts. Feature Puke is a common sales mistake where the poor customer is presented with every possible form of deliverable and made to choose the one they think would work. If you have ever dealt with a three-year-old confronted with more than a dozen flavours of ice cream, you will recall that our brains are not good at too much choice. When you puke your features all over your customer, you have distracted them.
If you are getting the boot soon after a sales engagement, you may have a puking Squirrel on your hands.
F-Word Buyer Distraction #2: Obnoxious Marketers
Annoying the crap out of customers and prospects is no longer the exclusive purview of our friends in sales. Indeed, in most deals these days, marketing is the first one through the door in a conversation with a buyer.
If we believe that content is good, then it surely follows that more content is better and a tsunami of daily webinar invitations, gated white papers, videos, InMails and other annoyances is the best way of all to get the sale. But it really isn’t and you know that.
If you are seeing your F-Words bailing out of the funnel right in the middle, the chances are pretty good you’ve distracted them to the point of, well, distraction, with your content.
Instead of gently nudging them along Purchase Avenue, you’ve managed to send them to whole new part of town to hang about with a different crowd. Content at each stage of the funnel is a very nuanced thing, and as you get closer to engaging sales, it makes sense to be very strategic about what you’re tossing in there and what you aren’t.
If in doubt, hand over that high-value, deal-driving content to your Sales Squirrels to deliver directly. Yes, I know half of it will never get there, but there could be a great reason for that.
F-Word Buyer Distraction #3: Endless Meeting Requests
At some point in the buying cycle, a meeting needs to happen with a sales person. For obvious reasons, your Squirrels really, really, really want that meeting as soon as possible. They are pretty sure that if they can just get in front of the decision-makers, they’ll vanquish the competition and close the deal weeks ahead of schedule.
The F-Word, on the other hand, is busy and has better things to do than listen to the same sales pitch in person as they’ve had on the phone, online and on paper. They are going to resist a meeting until they are either at the point where their procurement process insists they have one, or where they need some face-to-face information to move things forward.
Plus, meetings are a pain to organize, particularly where there are multiple people who need to weigh in. There are two common techniques Squirrels use to pry open a meeting spot on someone’s calendar: one is to create the suggestion of Subject Matter Expert scarcity, which sounds a lot like:
“Hey, Elizabeth, I know you’ve told me you’re a few months away from a decision but our Global Executive in Charge of Being an Expert is in town this week only and she’s got one tiny window on Wednesday morning that I’m holding just for you. I know you won’t want to miss this opportunity to learn more about our solutions…”
We know this is rubbish. That SME will be back on a plane in ten minutes if it will close the deal. Nevertheless, such things require a response or at least a deletion and that adds to the distraction level . A more pernicious distraction is the presumptive scheduling of meetings. This is where a wily Squirrel will figure out who the buyers are and send a meeting invite to all of them, listing their names in the subject line. This is a sneaky thing indeed, particularly for those of us who should read things more carefully. Imagine how surprising it is for the F-Word, who thinks his boss has scheduled a meeting with a vendor, only to discover the vendor has gone ahead done it for them. Very distracting and the kind of thing that gets you kicked to the curb pretty fast.
F-Word Buyer Distraction #4: Their Buying Process
Sometimes the biggest distraction to actually making a decision and closing a purchase has nothing to do with the decision-maker, the marketing or the sales person. Sometimes, the thing that mucks it all up is the cumbersome, medieval bizarreness that is the corporate buying process.
Purchase requisitions can take weeks or months to get approved and, even then, are only the start of a long, dark journey. Then there are the vendor evaluations, requests for proposals (RFPs), needs analyses, procurement teams, buyer groups, C-Suite BITBs (Buddies in the Business), pitch meetings, contracts, statements of work, vendor set-up and billing cycles.
These are all very well and good if the F-Word had nothing else to do, but since they are functional people with day jobs and deliverables, all of this process and intestinal inspection can slow down and even kill a perfectly reasonable purchase decision, if for no better reason than they simply lacked the will continue.
For the most part we should be staying out of this, but there are a few things we can offer a frustrated F-Word who’s bogged down. A great tool can be content such as buyer guides or checklists that can speed up feature evaluations. If you are feeling brave, you can offer an RFP template to hurry things along there (this can backfire spectacularly, so tread carefully). In the end, however, your best bet is to take the time to create simple, standard contracts, statements of work, billing statements and service level agreements that not only withstand P-Cubers and Handwringers, but save the F-Word a ton of time.
Next week, we’ll end our look at distractions by finding out what’s bothering the G-Spot.
Related Posts
Marketing to the F-Word Part II: Feel the Burn
Why Some of Your Revenue is Having an Out-of-Funnel Experience
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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