Read This!

When C-Suite executives begin looking for solutions they type in their problem in Google. Most companies, Bistritz and Read (Selling to the C-Suite, click bakc to yesterday) found, create their search words according to the solutions they offer. These search words don’t overlap with the problem search words.

Thier experiment shows that searching for customer growth and declining revenue  get a total of 377,000 hits, none of the top names that came up on the search engine is of any help to individuals and companies with those problems.

However, type in the  key words to these “solutions” and you get 23 million hits! (!) 

Their conclusion:  the Internet only connects buyers to sellers during the middle of the buying process when C-Suite executives are no longer invovled in the process. Right at the beginning of the buying process, when options are still open, most companies key words don’t connect to the executive because the vendors are using their own marketing and product speak, ” solution speak”  instead of “problem speak.” 

(The reason being that consumer marketing moved away from problem speak for a variety of reasons pertaining to consumerism, but these reasons don’t apply to B2B marketing!)

So, how would your company’s key search words look from the point of view of problem speak instead of solution speak?

Big lesson from Bistritz and Read, fundamentally rethink you B2B marketing and make sure that you don’t have a pseudo-consumer model masquerading as B2B!