Your business-to-business campaign clearly explains the advantages of your product. Your sales team has demonstrated the ease of operation, heuristic design and how it fits into your customer’s process. You’ve checked every box the decision maker needs to make an informed, rational, solid business decision.
Still … nothing.
Why does it take so long to make what you know is the obvious choice?
Sometimes as marketers we lose sight of who’s making the purchase decision … and how. Our target customer may be an owner, operations manager, a manufacturing VP, a design engineer or some other business decision-maker. These are professionals who can be counted on to evaluate benefits, lifetime cost and ROI, and they surely use these metrics to explain their choices in the board room.
But your customers are not just rational economic actors: They’re human beings. And people can’t help but make decisions with their emotions first.
In addition to your customers’ business needs, how will going with your offering affect her or him personally? There are some questions that never get asked out loud.
Sure, maybe it does everything you say, but am I going to have to fight with shipping to take advantage of all those features?
Is my family going to forget what I look like while we’re switching over?
Of course, it can be adjusted quickly and easily, but am I going to be taking calls from the production floor all weekend?
All the research in the world is no substitute for understanding your audience as real-live people. There’s a good chance your decision makers are worried about more than their business. They’re worried about their jobs.
And their lives.
If your marketing can answer the questions that never get asked out loud, you can win their hearts.
Their minds will follow.