Mind your client’s business. The return of jolt selling to B2B marketing

As a consumer research and later an advertising professional I mostly think B2C market but I do B2B marketing.

I have worked at two large and successful agencies with diametrically different approach to selling their services (in the business of advertising you just don’t sell your services to potential clients but every major campaign or activity that you create and execute for a client is an act that succeeds a multi-step sales process).

One agency sells a final creative product. The starting point for it is the client brief. They rather scrupulously stay away from even probing the client’s business and marketing strategy.

Over the last decade or so, as the economy has boomed, this agency climbed the charts quickly and become by all reckoning the agency that represented the face of an advertising business that also boomed.

The agency’s creative product is constantly top class. And they did it by investing in resources and systems that were geared to converting a client-given advertising objective into breathtaking disruptive advertising that at the same time delivered on the objective fair and square.

I would call this approach to B2B selling as an approach that focused on the richness of the product-feature. It is akin to say an IT hardware selling on the efficacy of the machines in perhaps innovatively meeting clearly understood client needs expressed in terms of specifications.

The other agency made the client’s business its primary business. The top resources in the company were people who could and would sit at the table with the client company’s senior management and not just discuss the company’s business and marketing strategy but debate it.

The agency made its business to know everything they could know about the client’s business and market. Its middle and junior level would spend time and resources interacting with not just the marketing people in the client company but the sales people.

In many cases the agency co-crafted in many cases the marketing strategy with the client and crafted by itself the advertising objective. The agency than got on to creating advertising that met this objective.

The company’s biggest bottom-line contribution came when the agency managed to change the client’s perception of their own business! For example a client actually pulled investment in a new plant to manufacture the next generation of products as the agency proved to them that the market for the current generation still very large and profitable. Of course, this required a greater marketing and advertising thrust now instead of when the new plant would have opened two years later.

Such game-changing contributions allowed the agency to sit at the highest table with the client and enabled to make top dollar on that business.

Very many times the beginning of this game-changing contribution could be pinned to a seminal meeting where the agency’s top team delivered a ‘jolt’ to the client, a powerful marshalling of arguments that shifted client perceptions about their own business and established a fresh paradigm.

Not surprisingly, given the smaller share of resources and time allocated to the creative process, the agency delivered a middling-quality product (some will immediately argue that the best approach is to combine the approach of agency 1 and agency 2 but that would be, in my mind, asking uncle to be aunt too).

The agency did extremely well in the decade after liberalization that the Indian economy and companies were getting used to the new economic climate and testing opportunities, flexing muscle that had been until then in disuse.

Over the last decade or so, as company after company muscled their way to high growth under managements much more confident, this agency fell back to mediocre growth. It still was successful and but also-ran successful.

I would term this agency’s approach to B2B selling as a mix of solution-selling and consultative. It is what happens when an IT hardware company spends time and resources in developing along with the client the RFP, so to speak and then with the business locked supplies the hardware.

Over the last year the cycle has come full circle. The boom is gone and companies and managements should be searching for new paradigms.

But all indications are that most companies and managements are frozen in the headlights. They have cut out discretionary spending and frozen budgets whose principal strategy is cost-cutting.

Advertising agency budgets are being slashed and agency one- the ‘creative’ agency in the B2B product selling mode, by all reports, is also frozen in the headlights, busy with its own cost-cutting strategy.

Agency two is less talked about and more opaque. Some reports indicate that during the boom years the agency had nurtured self-doubt.

Its business and marketing strategy making and debating skills diminished as it flailed about to strengthen without much success its creative resources and product.

I do not know whether this agency realizes it,but with the “recession” the times are good for this agency to climb the market share chart and perhaps be the growth leader over the coming decade.

However it must go back to not just the old ways but raise the bar further by making the development and administration of the paradigm- changing jolt to its client’s central strategy.

To do so the agency will need not just to go back to the unmatched strategic capabilities it had in its heyday but surpass those by a significant margin by strengthening resources and systems that allow them to:

- Identify a problem that resonates well with management of client and target companies. For example, the need for a car company to escape the vicious cycle of unhappy dealers and falling sales.

- Develop the jolt point-of-view about the issue- one that links with marketing, sales and consequently marketing communication strategy. As a strictly illustrative example (jolt point-of-views do not come easy and certainly not in the process of writing an article) say the refiguring of commercial relationship with dealers with the marketing and sales budgets being entirely concentrated on micro-marketing programs in each clearly identified dealer catchments.

- Figuring out the jolt point-of-view is one thing, administrating the jolt is quite another. It requires B2B communication and presentation skills of the highest order and must therefore be consciously nurtured.

However the agency must be careful with not going for the jolt strategy where it is not applicable. It is quite likely that a majority of sell situations will be amenable to the jolt strategy. However there will be areas where it will be immune.

For example a start-up that is already figured around a disruptive strategy in a market where the established players are frozen. Or say in a “comfort-food” category that actually booms in a downturn.

It will be evident to the thoughtful reader that the jolt strategy will be relevant to a wide variety of B2B categories and marketing situation.

In fact think tanks are already at work on this facet.

My nascent perceptions on the difference between the business strategies of agency 1 and agency 2 were crystallized by an article that I came across in the latest issue of HBR (my immediately previous post was also based on a HBR article. This venerable repository has started humming again as it does in every structural transition).

If you have anything to do with B2B marketing read it.

In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers
by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore
HBR.org March 2009