introducing challenger marketing
Post on 17-Oct-2014
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Without Commercial Insight, Your Thought Leadership is Doomed to Fail. B2B buyers are learning on their own and delaying their contact with suppliers until late in the purchase. Most B2B marketers are fighting back with thought leadership—but this simply won't work. Don't Teach; Unteach Most thought leadership tries to teach customers something they don’t already know or believe about their business—often grounded in future trends or technology shifts. It’s about their future business. What their business could be. But thought leadership rarely changes the customer’s direction in the buying process. And that means the same old purchase criteria and the same old price-driven competition. The Challenger Marketing approach unteaches customers something they already know or believe about the way their business currently operates. Today. Only this kind of mental disruption—or Challenge—can reliably reset the customer’s choice of purchase criteria decisively in your favor. As a result, Challenger Marketing organizations employ 4 essential elements. Visit http://www.thechallengersale.com/marketing to learn more.TRANSCRIPT
1Competing in Todays B2B Battleground
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Introducing Challenger Marketing
2B2B buying will never be the same.
Customers are cutting suppliers out of their learning...
and theyre getting more and more of their information from outside sources.
Define NeedsLearn
Assess Options
Make Decisions
Todays customers are typically 57% of the way through their purchase process before they contact suppliers. Marketing needs to be present where customers are doing the bulk of their learning.
Suppliers today account for less than one-half of all information that buyers use to aid in their purchase decisions. This means that depending on how many alternative suppliers are being considered, any given supplier likely will receive no more than 10%15% share of mind.
Information from Suppliers
Historical Historical
Information from Non-Supplier Sources
Today Today
Customer Engages Supplier
3The Challenger Sale has disrupted the world of sales by upending conventional wisdom about what matters most for high performance in selling. The book showed that the best sales reps are no longer the relationship builders but rather the Challengers. Challenger Reps push customers thinking and disrupt
purchase cycles. Three things that Challengers do with their customers:
Teach them new insights about their business. Tailor messages for resonance across
prospective buyers.
Take control of the sale using the credibility gained with their insight.
The Challenger Sale revealed that the winning sales reps lead with insight...
so, how can marketers take the same approach?
Percentage of high-performing sales reps in complex sales environments
The Challenger
The Lone Wolf
The Hard Worker
The Problem Solver
The Relationship Builder
25%
19%
7%4%
54%
4Marketers often run to content marketing, but its not fixing lead generation.
of B2B marketers
are anchoring their lead generation strategies around content marketing.
But sales leaders rank lead generation efforts dead last in terms of effectiveness in helping them do their job.
Marketers are trying to position themselves as thought leaders, but it isnt leading to commercial results.
Source: CEB Commercial Insight Diagnostic, CEB Research
Effectiveness of Marketing Efforts (Scale of 15)
Commercial Strategy 3.13
Brand Development 3.04
Sales Support 2.94
Customer Segmentation 2.92
Analytics and CRM 2.75
Lead Generation 2.53
90%
5Most content fails to generate leads because its based on thought leadership, not insight.
Insight
Thought Leadership
Accepted Information
General Information
Commercial Insight A compelling, defensible perspective
from a supplier that materially impacts a customers performance and directly leads back to their unique capabilities
Commercial Insight:
The Content Marketing Hierarchy Marketers create many flavors of content in their aspiration to achieve thought leadership, but only one type of content will produce the desired commercial impact.
6Dont Teach. Unteach.
Thought leadership teaches customers something about what they could be doing in their business.
Content Focus: Benefits of alternate action
Commercial insight unteaches customers something they are currently doing in their business.
Content Focus: Costs of current behavior
The key difference between thought leadership and commercial insight:
Marketers create too much mediocre content in the name of looking smart or being helpful. It doesnt move the commercial needle and only adds to the noise. Marketers creating content that lacks the ability to disrupt customer priorities should stop it. Kill it. Never create it in the first place. Period.
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77
Commercial Insight Content challenging customers current thinkingthis will more reliably reset the customers purchase criteria decisively in the suppliers favor.
!
Create content paths that lead to commercial insight and disrupt customer purchase processes.
Personalize the PainPresent the problem as it relates to the customers specific business using benchmarking tools, pain calculators, and diagnostics
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1 Spark ConcernBuild interest in an underappreciated business problem with provocative infographics, data, and factoids.
2 Scope the ProblemPresent evidence, testimonials, and frameworks illustrating the hidden dynamics of the problem.
How to cut through the noise
8Meet the Challenger marketer.
Challenger marketers disrupt purchase processes by generating commercial insight, amplifying that insight in the market and through the sales force. These marketers develop a deep understanding of customers, take an investigative approach to their jobs, and possess savviness beyond marketing.
Possesses experience beyond Marketing
Background in Consulting or Strategy Planning
Focused on business objectives ahead of marketing metrics.
Understands customer purchase motivators and decisions
Synthesizes action plans from customer interactions, observations, and data
Tailors and contextualizes information
Business Savvy Investigative
Customer Native
Thrives in an ambiguous environment
Analyzes outliers Decisive, but not overly
confident.
Hallmarks of a Challenger Marketer
Marketing and sales roles: from handoff to collaboration
Build Content to Engage Prospects
Position Supplier as Thought Leader
Generate and Nurture Leads
Prove Superiority of Supplier Value Proposition
Navigate and Align Buying Center Stakeholders
Close Deals
Marketing Sales
Traditional Sales Funnels
Partner with Sales to develop commercial insight.
Create the conditions and content that enable Sales to build prospect relationships in the pre-funnel.
Co-design demand generation and content strategy that disrupts how customers think of their own business.
Collaborate with Sales to equip reps with Challenger collateral.
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Sales Funnels for Challenger Marketers
Marketing
Sales
9
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The Challenger Sale from CEB
@CEB_Challenger
Take the Next Steps
CEB Marketing Leadership Council
Challenger Marketing Series
Getting Paid for Content MarketingDisrupting Customer Buying Criteria
This study may not be reproduced or redistributed withoutthe expressed permission of The Corporate Executive BoardCompany.
Assess Your Challenger Readiness CEB Report: Getting Paid for Content Marketing
Roadmap to Building a Challenger Commercial Organization
Challenger Marketing Series
www.thechallengersale.com/marketing