Marketing a B2B Service
Products v Services
Many of our clients are B2B services businesses and in this article I wanted to explore the differences between marketing a service and marketing a product. At the same time I want to bring in some of our customer experiences, to show you what can be done to improve the way you market your business.
The main difference between marketing a product and marketing a service is of course that a product has dimensions, features, specifications, functions and properties that can be defined and inspected by customers, prior to purchase. Products are often (though not always) differentiated from each other along these criteria. Services however are a promise to deliver, there is little that’s tangible about a service and it’s difficult to differentiate one service from another.
Trust
Some of the mistakes we see being made is that given that it’s about trust companies fall back to the ‘we have the best people’ argument. But if everyone makes that argument (which they do) then there is no differentiation. Customers expect that you have good people, why else would they hire you?
So what do customers buying a service need? First and foremost it’s trust. Trust that you are going to deliver what you promise. Customers cannot know what they are going to get until after it’s been delivered. Remember that we’re talking about marketing B2B services and not consumer services, there are major differences in the buyers motivation, between the two.
We worked with a client in the UK and spent some time with a US partner. The US partner claimed they had the best people. The difference was that the US company could back it up with published papers, awards and most impressively a manual on Microsoft Sharepoint, which was widely regarded as the ‘bible’ on Sharepoint.
So how do you engender this trust and how would we recommend you market your service?
The 4 dimensions of service marketing
Our experience shows us that there are 4 dimensions of service marketing, which you can use. It’s great if you can use all four, but you must use at least three. The four dimensions are:
Customers
The first of these is your customers – they are the pieces of evidence that prove you can deliver what you say you can, so use your customers as credentials. Along with this you need to demonstrate results. Customers only buy for two reasons – To make money or to save money. You therefore need to explicitly state the benefits customers receive from your products, either in terms of sales or cost savings. The emphasis from customers is on Return on Investment. It’s surprising how few companies think down this dimension.
Process
The second element is process. If you can define key processes that you use, and have developed, in order to achieve the results and outcomes you claim, then you are in a position to engender trust. Processes give customers comfort that you know what you are doing and how you are going to achieve the results.
Productise
We recommend you start to productise your services – if you have processes then you have the start of the productising process. A good step is to name the service first then start to build the key elements of the service into a whole. Diagrams are useful, specific processes help. Standard processes say for Project Management are well known and should be mentioned, but specific home grown processes work as well.
Knowledge
Inside your organisation you have a mass of knowledge. Our firm recommendation is that you should give as much of this knowledge away as you can. Somewhere on your web-site there should be an area where customers can get tips and hints – practical ones that work. This is like giving away free samples of what you do.
It is also part of your marketing – instead of emailing customers about your latest sale, why don’t you give them a piece of pure information about their industry or an insight into market conditions.
We see too many companies who spend their marketing money talking about themselves – their latest win, their new staff member, their latest announcement. Hard as it may be to accept, your prospective customers are not interested in you, they are interested in themselves and their own problems. You can help them by providing useful information that helps them to do their job better.
Case Study
One of our customers is a web design company. There must now be thousands of web design companies and they would all appear to compete along three main lines of thought. These three lines are: People, Design and Services. A cursory glance at these companies makes it extremely difficult to choose one from the other – they all have the ‘best’ team, they all do great design and they do everything for everybody, no matter who you are or what business you’re in.
Our client took a different view - they looked at who they had done work for, and the measurable results they had achieved. At the same time they looked at the processes they had developed over the years for understanding clients’ needs, turning needs into a specification, agreeing the spec and building the solution.
The result of this work was that they knew they had three main markets where they had clear skills, experience and knowledge – they understood those markets and could add significant value to their customers in those markets. They were also able to define processes that help them get to the end goal of their customers more quickly than many of their competitors.
Now our client’s marketing is aimed at three vertical markets where they have case studies and measurable results, they talk about customer problems and how they can be solved and they are writing knowledge-base articles to help companies in their markets solve other problems.
The results of this change have been extraordinary. Our client has increased turnover and profitability by 40% year on year, the result of changing the thinking on how you market B2B services and in the teeth of a terrible recession.