B2B’s marketing blind spots

Had the chance to sit in on a roundtable of business owners talking about how indecisive customers are nowadays. Your sales team has likely commiserated over the same conclusion we came to, which is that your value is no longer self-evident and the customer’s buying cycle now seems to possess an invisible new gear that fails to mesh with your sales cycle.

These are times that challenge B2B organizations to test the greater meaning of marketing, which is the creation of customers -- creation that can only come from deeper exploration of a customer’s problems, and often in spite of that customer’s own blind spots. Nevertheless, it is this juncture where marketing is being put to the test. Just as kaizen is the practice of discovering and celebrating failures for the purpose of improving quality, marketing must discover customer problems for the purpose of improving value delivery.

But this is generally not the way of most B2B organizations. The tendency is to manage away from problems, rather than to lead people to seek them out. The tendency is to look back in the rear view mirror of product features and benefits, rather than to help focus a customer’s blurred perception of their own problems and costs – kaizen opportunities to be cultivated by your company’s deeper wherewithal.

When a B2B company fails to fail on behalf of its customers, it is because there is an imbalance between management and leadership. A marketing blind spot has formed that prevents the exploration and creation of greater value. Looking at ourselves in the mirror of B2B marketing, some will insist that it is the role of management to minimize failure.

If so, then it is the role of leadership to capitalize on it.

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