How Thought Leadership Impacts the B2B Buying Cycle

Position your brand to win more deals with higher profit per deal
by Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group

One of the major challenges of every service firm is growth and scalability. I think the single best solution to this challenge is an effective thought leadership initiative. Thought leadership is simply the most effective solution for service firms to grow revenue, acquire new clients and increase profitability.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. This chart shows that 72.3 percent of the 191 service firm leaders we polled in a recent survey rank thought leadership as either “important” or “very important” to their marketing plans.

To understand why this is true, let’s examine how thought leadership actually functions within the six stages of the B2B buying cycle. To learn more about these stages, please review my article on this topic. These stages include:

1. Challenge or opportunity identification.
2. Criteria creation.
3. Search.
4. Evaluation.
5. Test.
6. Procurement.

Thought leadership delivers six primary forms of value to you, a service provider, as it relates to the B2B cycle. It empowers you to:

1.  Leverage valuable sales resources more effectively.

2.  Enter more buying cycles.

3.  Enter buying cycles early.

4.  Control buying cycles.

5.  Establish credibility and expert status, increasing profits.

6.  Shorten buying cycles.

Leverage sales resources effectively

Many service firm leaders are rainmakers who both sell their services and deliver them. This creates scalability challenges. Thought leadership enables these firms to leverage sales resources much more effectively because it introduces prospects to their value proposition and expertise — all without the precious time and energy of firm leaders.

Think of it this way. A service firm leader can have one labor-intensive call with a potential client at a time. But a thought leadership tool can deliver similar messages with thousands of prospects simultaneously. If that tool is in an audio or video format, it can have levels of impact similar to a live, one-on-one conversation.

Enter more buying cycles

As service buyers discover they have a challenge or opportunity they must address, and that inaction is no longer an option, they begin searching for ideas about the best way to achieve their goals. While they may not be formally searching for providers at this point, they are definitely searching for ideas, solutions and approaches.

B2B buyers extensively use search engines, which routinely catalog tools like white papers, articles, e-books, videos and podcasts. When prospects encounter these tools, they are actually being inculcated with your vision of the best way to solve their challenges and exploit their opportunities.

This means you can enter a buying cycle with a prospect you haven’t even met. If thousands of potential service buyers access your thought leadership tools, you’ll enter far more buying cycles than you can possibly close — putting you in the ultimate position of choosing your most desired deals.

N = 354 executives at firms with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

Source = Forbes Insights

The Rise Of The Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate And Filter Business Information.

Enter buying cycles early

It is almost as important to enter buying cycles at the right time as it is to enter more buying cycles. If you enter a buying cycle late, you’ll nearly always have to play the game by a competitor’s rule book. On the other hand, if prospects encounter your thought leadership tool before they begin their formal search for providers, you’ll have an automatic advantage over competitors.

Take control of buying cycles

I’ve heard numerous service buyers over the years say, “We’ll do it this way because that’s what the experts recommend.” Since confidence is such an important factor for service buyers, they often follow “expert advice” very closely.

If your firm achieves expert status, you’ll gain control of the buying cycle and shape it to your ends. But if you don’t take control of the buying cycle, and someone else shapes success criteria, it will be tough to win that deal.

Establish credibility while impacting profits

If your thought leadership tools address service buyers’ goals, they will be very persuasive. There is nothing more powerful than prospects feeling as if you are speaking directly to them – almost intuitively.

You may have had this experience at times. When someone talks to you about a goal that really matters to you, and tells you how to accomplish it effectively, it is highly impactful. You will listen and take notes. If you learn a great deal through that process, you will be grateful.

If prospects then get the opportunity to work with you, as the expert, they’ll perceive higher value from you than from someone who is merely a practitioner in the field. Where there is higher perceived value, there is also a tolerance for higher fees, which means you can charge more for essentially the same services as general practitioners.

Shorten buying cycles

Service providers, especially those at the high end of the market, often have long sales cycles — six, nine, 12 or more months. During this time, the prospect vets you to ensure you’re a good fit and that you’ll deliver against your promises. Thought leadership builds confidence with prospects more effectively than virtually any other form of proof statement.

Prospects know that your marketing team filters all client testimonials, case studies and success stories. But you can’t “spin” a thought leadership piece. Either you understand your prospects’ challenges and opportunities, and how to address these effectively, or you don’t. Either you can articulate best practices, or you can’t. No other proof statement will pull you into a buying cycle faster, more deeply and with greater confidence in your firm than thought leadership.

Randy Shattuck is a senior marketing executive and founder of The Shattuck Group, a full-service marketing firm that specializes in growing professional services organizations. You can reach him at randy@theshattuckgroup.com.