Do You Speak Buyer Or Seller?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

What language do you use in your B2B marketing and sales communication? Is it buyer or seller?

Too often our marketing and sales messaging is aligned with our selling process rather than the buyer’s journey. When we do this, prospects ignore us or view us negatively which hurts our brand.

This misalignment is most noticeable when we are sending follow-up messages. Regardless of how we received contact information, we often label them with our own vernacular indicating where they are in our sales process, or worse, we treat them all as ready to buy.

We then employ follow-up messaging intended to help us advance our sale. It is often automated with every contact getting the same impersonal message. When our messages are ignored, we move them into a distribution list and they receive a routine message or promotional piece, the same one thousands of others receive. And we’re thrilled by the efficiency of it all!

We’ve all been on the receiving end of these tactics, and we know they don’t work because the messaging speaks seller, not buyer.

The intent of our follow-up messaging should be to help the prospect advance along their buyer’s journey. That may mean helping them better understand an issue, learning more about a topic, or seeing an example of how another company overcame a problem like theirs.

Try this instead!

Rather than aligning a prospect with your sales process, align them with a stage of the buyer’s journey--early, middle, late—even if you initially must make some assumptions.

Develop messaging to help the prospect for the stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in. You can still automate your messaging, but the sequence will look much different as you try to help rather than sell.

Monitor their engagement with your messaging and determine how their journey is going, not whether they are closer to a sale.