Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  March 13, 2009 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Yesterday a client sent me a great article from the Harvard Business Review called In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers. I urge you to read it.

The premise of the article – which is written by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore – is that you can motivate executives to fund the purchase of your product or service even (or maybe especially) in a downturn by persuading them that your solution is not just nice – it’s essential.

This is not a startling new concept. We’ve been advising our clients for the past nine months to move beyond being “nice to have” and position themselves as a “must have. But the authors of this article provide a process for doing so.

Unlike popular consultative (or solution) selling models, which start with figuring out what prospective customers are worrying about, the authors suggest that it is our jobs as sellers and marketers to tell potential clients what they should be worrying about. They call this “provocative selling”.

Basically the steps are these:

1. Find a critical issue that is not being addressed well by most organizations.
2. Develop a provocative, original point of view about that issue. Come up with a new way people should be looking at the problem.
3. Deliver your provocation to an executive who has the ability to do something about it and show how your novel approach can help.

Let’s use marketing as an example.

The critical issue.

At Tatum Marketing, our experience in working with technology and other B2B companies shows that business owners and investors are increasingly agitated about cutting costs AND generating more leads. But the more they cut costs, the fewer leads they generate and the more danger they create for themselves – not only for surviving the down economy but also for protecting their market share and being correctly positioned for a recovery.

Business owners and marketers can run around in this vicious cycle for a long time – getting deeper and deeper into a whole, but it really is unnecessary.

The provocation.

Business leaders are too focused on cutting costs and not open to opportunities that are staring them in the face.  Most marketing programs are so full of leaks and wasteful spending, just plugging the holes can save money – while at the same time increase the amount and quality of leads or traffic being generated.

Put into the hands of professionals who know a) what works and what doesn’t work, b) how to get the greatest results for the lowest cost, and c) where to find and plug the holes, marketing efforts can deliver more leads even with a reduced budget.

And it can do so without endangering the future of the business.

The delivery.

If you’re a business owner or an executive who can do something about this critical problem, I have an offer for you. If you qualify, we’ll take a look at your marketing program – perform a diagnostic study. We’ll show you exactly how you can fund a more efficient marketing program, exactly what results you can expect from it and in exactly what order you should address it.

Interested? Just send me an email or give me a call.

But whether or not you’re interesting in my offer, everyone in B2B marketing or sales should take a look at the HBR article.