Article
Meeting A Rising Bar – Expectation convergence and winning with stories
Let’s start with you. This week you might have binge-watched (most of us do it!) your favourite series on Netflix. You may have booked an Uber somewhere and shared your location with a friend, so they knew your ETA. You most likely would have opened your banking app at some point and made any number of complex transactions totally seamlessly. Maybe you were hungry and ordered something on Deliveroo, but it arrived a bit cold, so they refunded you your entire order. If you had a particularly good week, you might have configured a new car online to pick it up at your local dealership in a few weeks’ time.
These types of experiences are happening every single day. To every single one of your customers, prospects, employees, and partners. Individually these are micro-incidents, hardly worth mentioning. Collectively, they are completely shaping the needs and desires of your audience – and forming the benchmark by which they measure your business.
“Can I track my order like I can my Uber? Does your app come close to Monzo’s ease-of-use? Can I configure my product like I can my Mercedes? Is your complaint handling as good as Deliveroo? Are you communicating with me like Netflix?” These expectations are rising every day and, quite simply, those who keep up will win.
Accelerated expectations
The merging of personal and professional lives isn’t something new but, like many things, it was accelerated during lockdown. People participated in office events from their most private spaces – in some cases their bedrooms. Family members and pets had brief cameos in Teams calls. Meetings got put on hold as the host collected an Amazon package.
But it’s not just our business behaviours that have been influenced by our personal lives. The increasing digitisation of consumer experiences has fuelled the demand for seamless digital interactions in professional settings as well. Consumers are accustomed to easy online shopping, instant access to information, and efficient digital services. They want the ability to engage you with the same ease they do with John Lewis.
In fact, Gartner claims an enormous 80% of B2B buyers already want the same experiences they get in their consumer lives. It’s why as much as 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers are predicted to occur through digital channels by 2025. Time is running out for B2B sales channels to replicate B2C digital experiences, matching the seamless, easy and informative standard of these B2C digital platforms.[1]
From Services to Experiences
The consumerisation of our business lives extends beyond digital services: the bar for our every interaction with B2B brands has been set by the experiences we receive as consumers. More importantly for marketers, B2B consumers want more than just the dry recitation of product features and benefits offered by some B2B advertising. They want the same engaging, storytelling experiences offered by consumer brands like Volvo, Airbnb’s host stories, and Dove’s, ‘Real Beauty campaign’. Nearly every consumer brand now tells a compelling audience-obsessed story. It’s no longer optional for businesses to do otherwise if they want success.
Research conducted by Google with Motista and CEB found that 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy from your if they can connect emotionally with your brand [2]. So, if you are looking to build relationships with new customers – or extend existing relationships – then increasingly, you will need to engage with them on an emotional level.
Personalisation and Customisation
In the age of personalisation, audiences presume that products and services will be tailored to their specific needs and preferences. The proliferation of ABM activity has only heightened the expectation that the materials they are targeted with will be highly focused on their own unique circumstances. And there’s real value to adding value: according to a Harvard Business Review report, 75 percent of B2B buyers will choose the company that was first to do so.
As a result, generic materials, lacking relevance and offering a one-way experience don’t make it past the door. And that’s as true of existing customers as new ones: you rarely get a second chance to make a lasting impression and if your most recent engagement with your customer offers nothing of value then they will simply un-subscribe. Literally – or by mentally switching off to your efforts.
Why Stories
Complex offerings, messages and environments all call for methods that help your audience make sense of information. Stories do just that, and more. Human beings are hard wired for stories – we automatically wake up when we hear or see them and they help us to understand more of what’s being communicated. Stories don’t rationalise in isolation – they provide context and meaning that sparks empathy and drives action.
The way forward
Meeting the enhanced expectations of business decision-makers, and all your audiences for that matter – means adopting many of the attributes that make consumer marketing so successful: a deeper understanding, and delivering more dynamic engagements of value. It also means using storytelling techniques to become part of their narrative and stand out from competition that are simply adding to the noise, rather than cutting through it. Engaging experiences that capture the attention of the prospect and fire their imaginations are some of the surest ways of creating the More Rewarding Connections™ that you and your customers crave.
