Characteristics of industrial marketing: what companies want
B2B sales present completely different challenges:
The target audience is small, but the lifetime value of each customer is large.
The sales process is long and requires multiple interactions.
The purchasing decision is a very thoughtful and reflective netherlands telegram mobile phone number list one, and it usually involves several levels and different people.
Purchasing motivations are always pragmatic: survival, growth and cost savings. There is no such thing as impulse buying.
Given these characteristics, the main objective of B2B industrial marketing is:
Reduce perceived risk.
Gaining customer trust.
Maintain customer confidence, who are often reluctant to change suppliers due to perceived risks.
Strategies that no longer work
No matter what sector your B2B company works in, chances are that the marketing strategy that was most successful ten years ago simply doesn’t work today. Trade shows, cold calling, advertising in technical and professional magazines… They are all still valid strategies and have their uses today, but digitalisation has completely changed the rules of the game.
Nowadays, most B2B purchasing decisions are made online, and each customer does their own research when they decide they need a product or service: they search online, compare, read reviews… By the time they get to contact the sales department, they have already selected at most two or three suppliers that they think can help them. What's more, companies are increasingly making more purchases directly online, and many professionals prefer not to interact with a salesperson.
With the digital revolution, marketing has gone from supporting the sales team to shouldering the burden of a large part of the sales process itself.
