B2B in a B2C World
Roll up, roll up! Two tax returns for a pound and you get this melon for a fiver!!
From market traders to large department stores, retailers are invariably the champions of selling. B2C has been going for thousands of years compared to B2B. So what can B2B learn from B2C – lots!!
Let’s look at how a smart retailer does it and keeps it simple. One well known store categorises everything it sells into four buckets – thousands of products into four straightforward categories and a masterpiece of psychology. Here they are:
Footfall – exactly what you would think. What brings you into the store so they can display all the other lovely things you might want to purchase.
Urgent and Necessary – this is an interesting category. In essence, you don’t want to buy it, but you have to. For example, you’ve got a headache and need some tablets or your fridge breaks down and all your food is going to go off. It’s almost seen as a service to the customers – after all who wants to buy what they don’t want to buy!!
Emotional – what does a customer buy that makes them feel good. That could be giftware, seasonal stuff or even birthday cards.
Famous for – what are you really famous for and want to be known for selling. These are often more unique products which generally attract a high margin. Lots of supermarkets offer meal deals now for example which could fit into this category.
There’s also some amazingly clever other thinking going on of course. Those shopping baskets are not that size by coincidence – just look how lonely a couple of products look in your basket and don’t get us started on all those amazing things you find next to the tills before you checkout.
Digital B2C sales is no different – digital real estate is just the same as physical real estate and the same rules can apply.
So if you’re in B2B, how can you translate all this great psychology to your world? Well pretty easily actually but there are some things to bear in mind. We all want to sell the thing that we’re famous for, but often forget that we need to bring people into our hypothetical stores first. So do you have a footfall offering to do that or are you expecting to hit the jackpot first time especially if you’re not known well to your prospective customer. Footfall may not be the most interesting, significant or valuable thing in itself – but boy is it important in the broader scheme of things.
Are you spending your time marketing a service that people don’t want to buy that fits into the urgent and necessary bucket? There’s an argument that the only CEOs who want to read about cyber hacking and fraud are the ones who are being hacked or fiddled!! They just need to know that you’re there if it happens and you do that by building the relationship in the other categories.
You get the idea. The really clever ones will work out how to build bridges between the different categories to make it easier for customers and clients to transition. Try thinking about your own businesses and map your offerings to the four categories – if it’s good enough for the champions of selling it’s good enough for us!!