Isn’t buying an airplane, management consulting services, or the MAN Roland 900 XXL printing press similar to purchasing security firewalls, manufacturing applications or custom software development? In each of these cases the buying cycle is long, the purchase cost is high, the purchase requires the approval of a committee, and a successful purchase implies a long term relationship with the seller.
But there are some differences.
It is a combination of these differences that distinguish technology markets from other B2B markets:
- Complexity of the product
- Customer skill sets required to use and integrate the product
- Market dynamics of the technology companies
Complexity of the product
It’s not just that the products are complex. They aren’t fully developed. The technology is still advancing rapidly as engineers learn and add new capabilities. Product releases are frequent and often contain significant differences from the previous release. In many cases the first few releases of a product are unstable and contain only the core of what will become the full product.
Only the engineers really understand how the product works. They often have difficulty articulating its workings to others. As you might expect, a significant knowledge gap exists between engineering and those who are charged with educating the market (marketing, sales, customer support).
Customer skill set
In addition to product complexity, the customer faces another layer of challenges. Customers have to make the product work in their environment. First they have to adapt or customize the product to the organization’s business processes. Or in some cases like ERP applications, adapt the company processes to the software product.
And second, customers have to integrate the product with other technologies that are already in place. When CIO’s and IT organizations are asked to name the top problem they face, system integration is nearly always at the top of the list.
These requirements create risk for the buyer. And, as in the case of the company selling the technology, a knowledge gap exists between the technologists and the business people in the customer organization.
Market dynamics
As technology companies work to finance their development and create a market for their products, a pattern of market dynamics emerges. Buyers partition themselves based on their willingness to adopt a new technology. Confident buyers adopt the product early if they have a lot to gain from the purchase of a new technology. Mainstream and conservative buyers adopt the technology more slowly.
Another factor for buyers of technology is the structure and stability of the technology company. Buyers have to ask themselves many questions. “If the technology company is acquired, will the founders stay and will the parent company continue to invest?” “Does the company have enough customers, enough cash, and a solid management team to continue to extend and support the product?”
Product complexity, customer skill set, market dynamics.
These all combine to create differences in technology markets.
How do these differences change the strategies and tactics of a B2B technology marketing group? Is your approach to finding, winning and keeping customers different from other B2B marketers? The answer is yes, at least in these key areas:
- Focus on the buyer. The temptation at a technology company is to become seduced by the product. It’s new, no one else is solving the problem in the elegant way you are, and everyone at the company has been pouring their energy into making it successful. But the buyers don’t know any of this. The buyers only know about their problems and are only worried about how to solve them. Step away from the product and look at your marketing programs and content from the buyer’s point of view.
- Add value to the buyer at each stage of the sales cycle. Ask yourself when you make information or a program available to a buyer: If buyers spend a resource (time) to examine this material, is it worth the time it costs them?
- Make adoption and integration as easy as possible. You and your company have more experience with customer sites than anyone else. Share that experience! With your website it’s very easy to make lots of information available. Provide this information, not only about the product, but also about how to deploy it, and how to optimize use of the product upstream and downstream in their business process.
- Recognize where the buyers are in the technology adoption cycle and communicate accordingly to their needs. Is it earlier in the cycle? Then talk about the trememdous strategic advantage from being an early adopter. Later in the cycle? Then the conversation is about how everyone is adopting this standard and lots of third parties are creating an ecosystem of products.
- Explain in a way that your ideas will stick. Keep your explanations as simple, concrete and tangible as possible. Use examples, stories, case studies, business cases, scenarios, demonstrations. Anything that will make your ideas understandable and memorable, that will make it easy for the buyer to take the next step.
- Reassure the buyers that they can depend on the seller. Tell the story of your company. The founders, the vision, where you want to take the buyer and the industry. Technology buyers are taking a risk; convince them that they are taking that risk with a company that has the vision and the passion to make everything work.
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