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What I Learned about B2B Marketing from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (with a nod to Gustav Flaubert)

For sure, you’ve heard the old saying, “the devil is in the details”. It has certainly been my experience that the smallest, most hidden detail that you overlook can come back and bite you in the ass.

“God is in the details”, mostly attributed to the architect Mies van der Rohe, is the flip side, and the side of the coin I bet on. Which to me means that proactively uncovering the detail can make all the difference in the world.

What are you missing – and will there be the devil to pay?

Great learning comes from the detail of why you won a new client. Even greater, more useful detail comes from finding out the entangled reasons why you lost or untying the gordian knot of stalls.

However, the fine details of the wins, the losses and the stalls are often clouded. History is written by the victorious and thus many details may not make it to your CRM system, lest they conflict with the broadcasted story or tarnish a reputation.

It’s more than likely your current efforts are falling short. Closure rate, sales and profitability hang in the balance.

  • According to CEB (a subsidiary of Gartner), fully 60% of B2B opportunities end in no sale. Learning how to avoid or prevent draws can be very rewarding.
  • A small increase in your win percentage will have a huge impact on your top and bottom lines.

Uncovering the details requires a sharp eye, a practiced ear, and a proven methodology.

That would be B2P’s Decision Drivers (DD) process.

DecisionDrivers improves marketing performance by unveiling…

  • when internal triggers activate search behavior
  • what content each persona seeks at each stage of the process
  • how your prospects differentiate between you and competitors
  • why qualified prospects leave your funnel at each stage.

Here’s a peak behind the curtain: DecisionDrivers.

But does it work?

  • One company believed they had to appeal to multiple personas at once. DecisionDrivers uncovered that they could win by concentrating their messaging and sales efforts on just one.
  • One company was worried that they were not price competitive. Champions refocused us on TOC, where the company has everyone beat, hands down.
  • One company found that their IT department was getting into face-offs with prospects’ IT, and were usually wrong.

So, God and the devil are there, each sitting on one of your shoulders. It’s up to you.

If your B2B marketing is content to gloss over the surface, to sidestep the complexity of the decision process, then your view and your accomplishments are short-term, and are not building the long-term relationships we need to survive.

Some say Flaubert said it first: Le bon Dieu est dans le détail.

Bon chance!