Pull back the curtain – Analysts are expected to know what’s going on in their industry, and that includes publicly available information and the confidential stuff too.  Don’t be shy about opening the door and giving the analysts a sneak peek at your company’s next big thing. They’ll remember your hospitality when you’re ready to launch.

Put words in their mouth – In new markets and segments, the names and criteria of product categories may not yet exist.  By helping analysts define your market, you not only give them a starting point for the work they’re responsible for, but you also get to influence how your category is referred to, defined and measured. 

Show them you’re listening – In briefings and message testing sessions, analysts can give you a lot of information.  While it’s often impossible to roll everything thy say into your story, try to extract a few important nuggets of information that help you create a better value proposition. When you modify a presentation, press release or other tool based on an analyst’s recommendations, send it to him, let him know how helpful his guidance was, and thank him.  Analysts are experts, so treating them as such  establishes respect.

Buy their research – While analyst firms are often targeting the same markets you are, they have a secondary set of customers- vendor companies like yours.  Even if an analyst will accept briefings with you for free to keep abreast of your company’s activities, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to make a client out of you.  If an influential firm publishes a report on your market, buy it and reference it in your conversations with their analysts.  Chances are you’ll show up in the next one.

Market conditioning is more important in some markets than others.  If the problem your company solves is well known and extremely painful, there is less conditioning to do.  However, when a problem is lurking beneath the surface or not well understood, this marketing technique is critical.  Imagine a new enterprise software company that can gauge the efficiency of server, storage or network infrastructure utilization.  Nine out of ten IT professionals might say "So what, efficiency isn’t a big deal for me these days."  Instead, let’s say the company first commissions and publicizes a study that finds that inefficient infrastructure utilization causes 40 hours of application downtime for the average enterprise each year.  With this tap on the shoulder, the same audience might be compelled to listen to the same story or even seek out this company’s solution.   

Market conditioning is equally important when there are significant pre-existing objections to a certain technology or architecture.  For example, a telecommunications equipment vendor touting a new short range optical switch might encounter an audience bias against DWDM switching in the access network.  If this objection is prevalent, launching directly into this market could doom a marketing effort before it even begins.  However, by having a well known independent lab validate and publicize the benefits of this approach before the launch, the market is more likely to be receptive to it.

You may have a killer value proposition, but if your audience has its back to you, it’s not yet time to tell them all about it.  Before you start talking, try giving them a little tap on the shoulder.  It’s one way to be sure that they’re ready to listen to what you have to say.  Do I have your attention?

Most marketers are no longer swinging for the fences with marketing communications – they are thinking through their marketing goals and mapping out phased communications strategies that get them there over time.  They are walking before they run, dating before they marry, and establishing a dialogue  before they sell.  Here are a few examples of progressive thinking in the area of marketing phases:

Marketing Experiments Blog: Writing Headlines that Don’t Sell — But Get Much Higher Conversions

Startup Hustle: Acquiring, Engaging, Retaining and Monetizing Your Customers

Marketing Interactions: B2B Websites Need to Focus on the Long Term

Drew’s Marketing Minute: Are You Expecting too Much From your Marketing?

I’m a big believer in marketing programs that don’t sell or try to do too much, but instead happen in phases and focus on long-term success.  I’m glad to see that others agree.  What do you think?

With that, Our Ten Most Popular Posts: 

1. Internal Communications: Own It
2. The Blogosphere: You Don’t Have to Blog to Belong
3. Mission Statement: Make it Possible
4. Slogans: Say What You Do
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6. High Tech Blogging: Why?
7. Lead Generation: The Bell Curve
8. Communications Part II: To the Right People
9. Age of Conversation 2: The Deadline
10. The SEO Triple Play: Message, Mechanics, Maintenance

Simply put, the buying cycle defines the steps that specific customer stakeholders must pass through in order to make a purchase. The buying cycle for high tech solutions often spans many months and multiple stages, calling on numerous customer stakeholders who have the power to recommend, authorize or reject a purchase at any time. In order to better understand the buying cycle, step into your customer’s shoes and try answering the following questions.

• Once I identify a problem, what are the steps I need to take to purchase and implement a solution?
• Each step of the way, who is the person I need most as an ally if I am going to be successful?
• What are my chief concerns at each step, and what are those of my allies?
• What information do I most need at each step to make it easy for me to purchase and implement the solution I want?

Once the buying cycle is well understood, it is helpful to diagram the steps, stakeholders and required information to visualize the big picture and decide on your primary goal each step of the way. This buying cycle diagram can take many forms, such as the following example based on the steps to purchase a high-speed backplane connector.

By defining the phases of the buying cycle and identifying the customer stakeholders and their concerns for each phase, a seller can truly begin to think like a buyer. Walking around in the buyer’s shoes enables a keen understanding of the intricacies and barriers to a sale, helping sellers establish goals, craft messages and develop programs that can methodically improve sales success.

For big ticket items, especially in the business to business realm, a microsite must transcend cute and sticky, finding a place in the buying cycle where it can advance a prospect down the path to purchase. For example, instead of pasting my face on a dancing elf’s body, perhaps I could engage an online configurator to discover how a new data center appliance might speed up my company’s order processing system. Of course, in order to find the microsite I still need to recognize I have a problem, understand that an appliance is a viable solution and know who the company is: so market conditioning, solution positioning, category creation and awareness generation better be checked off the marketer’s list. And call me Scrooge, but I’m probably not going to pull the trigger on a product after playing with an online configurator…I’m going to check out the competition, meet with the company, ask for a demo and negotiate pricing: which makes differentiation, sales and marketing collateral and a defensible price list a must. Can microsites catch on for big ticket items in the B2B world as they have for low end consumer products? I think so…but they better have a well defined role in a long, multi-touch buying cycle if they are going to have a chance. What do you think?