Marketing is full of buzzwords and truisms, and has more than its share of acronyms.
Fear of Missing Out – FOMO – is a well-known one. Advertisers refer to this as ‘scarcity’, and the object of many advertisements is to create a sense that the product will soon become unavailable, so you had better act now!
We see scarcity triggers everywhere – the airlines and hotels are masters at it with their algorithm driven messages ‘only 3 seats left at this price’, or ‘5 people are looking to book this same hotel’.
One of the best – or worst depending on your perspective – examples of scarcity creation is the ‘closing down sale’. We are innately programmed to equate closing down sales with massive bargains, and in our rush to bag one sometimes purchase something we don’t even need or want (that’s a whole other article).
While many of these stores are indeed closing down, I have seen a fair few who have created artificial scarcity by seemingly always being on the verge of closure (I recall a menswear shop in Sydney that was closing down for around 5 years).
But while FOMO may still be a valid concept in the context of B2C marketing, recent research by LinkedIn and Management Consultants Bain suggest that a more relevant acronym in B2B marketing may well be FOMU – Fear of Messing Up.
I watched a very entertaining presentation at the Cannes Festival of Creativity (on Youtube, not in-person!) from the authors of the study and was fascinating by the implications for marketers, and how, in effect, a lot of B2B sales and marketing efforts are misdirected – by targeting the wrong people, and misunderstanding the psychological drivers of B2B buying decisions.
In terms of those psychological drivers, the study found that a lot of B2B buying decisions were essentially being made by groups of stakeholders. A few years ago the average number of people involved in a B2B buying decision was around 7, although experts believe this has ballooned to be more than 10. And what’s important about that is that group decision making is often about compromise.
Imagine a group of 5 friends want to go to dinner and are trying to select a venue. After allowing for various allergies, budgetary constraints, and general preferences, chances are they end up at compromise venue – one that doesn’t particularly thrill anyone, but which conversely doesn’t offend anyone. Sure, they get to eat but the whole thing is sub-optimal.
A variation on this behaviour is seen in B2B buying, with an additional overlay of risk management. Not risk in a compliance sense, but risk in a career sense, in a reputational sense. Very few people want to put their career on the line by making a ‘courageous’ purchasing decision on behalf of a company. Rather than recommend the innovative new solution, they are more likely to recommend the least risky one, even it is more expensive and an inferior performer.
Technology buying decisions have always been fraught, given their price tag and complexity. Over the last few years, countless big companies have been eviscerated in the media for IT boondoggles that cost shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars.
But this is nothing new. The expression ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’ has been lore for decades.
Hence – fear of mucking up trumps fear of missing out.
So what does this mean if you are trying to influence B2B buying groups?
Research by Gartner led to the creation of a Buyer ‘Job list’ – a series of jobs that customers must complete to their satisfaction in order to successfully finalise a purchase:
- Problem identification. “We need to do something.”
- Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
- Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
- Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?”
- “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
They also found that B2B buying does not play out in any kind of predictable, linear order, and instead customers bounce around and revisit each of those six buying jobs at least once. Furthermore, ‘buying jobs’ do not happen sequentially, but more or less simultaneously.
Because of all this bouncing around makes buying complex, buyers value suppliers that make it easier for them to navigate the purchase process. In fact, Gartner found that customers who perceived the information they received from suppliers to be helpful in advancing across their buying jobs were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.
But back to Bain and LinkedIn.
The second big point they made was that many of the people in these buying groups were ‘hidden’, the behind-the-scenes influencers of decisions, who seem to escape the attention of salespeople and marketing messaging.
How big are these hidden buying groups?
Well, the Bain researchers estimate B2B marketing is literally missing half of decision-makers and losing trillions of dollars in deals annually as a result. According to their study, these “hidden buyers” influence half of the buying process and have very different requirements from target buyers (as above, they don’t care about features, it’s all about downside risk management).
Who are the ‘influencers’ in advice practices?
All this got me thinking about advice businesses, and how most product providers tend to target advisers as the key decision makers. In the context of very small practices, where the adviser owns the practice, then this makes sense. But what about those practices of 5 advisers or more who actually have support staff, paraplanners and practice managers? In these practices, it is these ‘behind the scenes’ influencers that are providing critical input into decisions around technology and products, and yet very few companies seem to target them. Is that through lack of data? Perhaps. These people don’t appear on the Financial Adviser Register, afterall.
At Ensombl, we have around 9,000 users of our platform, and around 2,000 of those are those ‘behind the scenes’ influencers. They may not be providing advice, but they are active on our platform, asking questions, consuming content, and sharing resources.
They are the hidden buyers who can make or break your campaign.
We know who they are and what they are interested in. And we’d be happy to tell you more.
Just get in touch.
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