To B user growth dilemma!

Operational means cannot essentially change the value of the product; they can only change the efficiency of delivery, allowing customers to more fully recognize the value of the product.

01 Introduction

The conversion rate for ToB leads is really low! Faced with a large number of leads, sales can only try calling them one by one. Those who are willing to try the product are customers who have short-term needs. According to my personal experience, less than 5% of customers have the intention to try the product after the first communication. So, how to nurture the remaining 95% of leads?

First, let’s analyze the reasons why 95% of customers refuse:

• Customers feel that the product has “no value” to them;
• There is no awareness cultivation process to help customers understand the value of the product. Customers are asked to decide whether to try and buy before they have a chance to understand the value of the product.

Below, we will look at the specific situations and solutions for these two problems.

02 Product value sorting and delivery

If customers do not buy into the value of the products introduced by sales, even if a large number of customers are contacted, it will be impossible to promote the conversion of leads into business opportunities.

In addition to the problem of matching the product itself with customer needs, there are many other reasons for this phenomenon, including the lack of in-depth exploration of customer needs, effective analysis of product value, and preparation of corresponding language to match the two .

A deep understanding of customer needs is a prerequisite. If we don’t understand what difficulties customers will encounter, we won’t know what problems we are solving for them and what value we are providing to them.

To improve conversion rates, it is necessary to re-examine the product value points, fully summarize the problems encountered by customers, and collect the improvements that the product brings to the customer's business.

Customer issues can be evaluated using two dimensions: impact and prevalence:

• Impact: The greater the impact of a customer's problem on the business, the more willing the user is to find a solution;
• Universality: How many people in the market encounter the same problem? The larger the population, the more people with needs there are, and the larger the market size.

If you want to find the most universal and influential problems, you need to answer three questions:

1. Who are the target customers of the product services?
2. What are the business goals to be achieved for this position?
3. If I were in this position, how would I use the product to achieve this goal?

The way to help customers solve problems can be software products or software + service models. The value brought by ultimately solving the problem is the product value.

03 Cultivate customer awareness

Another important reason why leads cannot be converted into business opportunities is that when customers do not yet understand the value of the product, we force them to introduce the product, and the probability of them rejecting us is very high.

The customer's cognitive process is as follows:

The stage when customers are really willing to communicate with salespeople is after they become interested. These customers account for about 20% of the total customers. The remaining 80% of potential customers are in the unconscious and conscious stages. In other words, 80% of our traffic is not being utilized.

If we can carry out precise and stage-by-stage cultivation for each potential customer, so that each customer can fully understand the value of our products, we can effectively convert the remaining 80% of traffic into the interested stage.

Lead cultivation needs to solve two problems:

• How to make users fully understand the value of the product and turn them into mature customers;
• How to efficiently serve every customer.

3.1 How to make users fully understand the value of the product and turn them into mature customers

Customers’ understanding of the value of a product needs to go through the process of “unconscious-conscious-interest-selection”. This process requires a lot of information preparation, and it is a process in which users continuously absorb information and discover their own business problems.

At different stages, the information that users need to know becomes increasingly in-depth and specific:

(1) “Transition from unconscious to conscious”

Judging from cognition, customers in the unconscious stage do not yet understand what your product is or what value it can bring; judging from behavior, they have not yet left any information to understand your product or solution (such as purchasing a phone list). In the early and immature market, this type of customer accounts for the highest proportion. Therefore, we need to educate the market and change user perceptions so that more customers can understand the products/solutions and retain their investment.

The educational process requires two types of content:

1. Compare our solution to the customer's existing solution, highlighting the differences. The emergence of new products must be because the old solutions are not good enough. For example, Didi’s changes to the efficiency of hailing taxis. To find the points of difference, we need to develop a practical methodology for dissemination.
2. Industry benchmark customer cases. Companies seek profit and avoid risk, and are often unwilling to be the first to try something new. Use industry benchmark customer cases to prove that learning from others’ experience can help you improve yourself, and ultimately stimulate potential customers to stay.

(2) “Conscious transition to interest”

Some customers in the awareness stage will leave their information on our website, but when we call them, they are unwilling to communicate; another part does not leave their information, but when we talk later, they say they have heard of our company and know what we do. This group of customers is also the most troublesome for the sales and marketing teams. They are unwilling to communicate by phone or meet in person to listen to us introduce our products.

There are two types of content that these customers need to know and are interested in:

• How do we solve the problems of the leading companies in the same industry? Everyone is concerned about what their competitors are doing.
• How we help solve common problems in different industries and the same positions.

The following picture is a content map for customers in the "unconscious and conscious" stage:

Once we have content to help customers understand the value we provide, we need to have a process that allows every user to fully receive the information and understand the value of our product.

3.2 Efficiently operate each customer

When the number of customers is too large, we cannot rely on manual methods to cultivate customers. We need a combination of automation and manual methods to reach customers.

In the “unconscious-conscious-interested” stage, users do not want to be disturbed and are unwilling to have any contact with our sales. This requires us to provide content touchpoints so that users can accept the touchpoints themselves and find content that interests them.

The contact methods include: EDM, WeChat communities, online open classes, online activities, and websites.

Among them, EDM and WeChat communities include customers in the "unconscious and conscious" stages. We can divert a large number of external online indexes to these two platforms as a traffic pool for cultivation. When users reach the conscious stage, we can introduce them to online public courses for conversion. The public courses need to be high-frequency and concise in content. Through the above cultivation, aware and enthusiastic customers will be invited to offline activities for conversion.

The value and cognitive difficulty of different products are different, so the process can be designed according to the product characteristics. For products whose product value is easy to understand, the conversion cycle is relatively fast and the process can be designed to be simpler. For some products, the cognition is relatively complex, so cultivation actions are required at every stage of cognition.

Let me show you a process I designed before, for reference:

at last

Operational means cannot essentially change the value of the product; they can only change the efficiency of delivery, allowing customers to more fully recognize the value of the product. In 2015, there was a popular saying in the operation circle: "Even if the product is a piece of shit, you have to let customers eat it." This statement is of course wrong, especially in a long and cautious decision-making chain like ToB.

As a marketing operator, you cannot just think about how to get customers to eat the food. You must always reflect on whether the food is really delicious and then give feedback to the chef. Value is the core of ToB business. Whether we are in good times or bad times, we need to always focus on customer value to achieve growth.

Author: Yuan Lin

Source: Yuan Lin