It Takes Patience to Build a Trusted B2B Brand

How many times have your exec­u­tives (or your clients’ exec­u­tives) directed you to focus on the “quick wins,” the quick fixes, or go for the “sil­ver bullets?”

Yet as B2B mar­ket­ing experts know, it takes patience to build a trusted brand. Mar­keto asserts in their blog, Mod­ern B2B Marketing,

It is not uncom­mon for a prospect to read a vendor’s blog for 6 months or even longer before engag­ing that ven­dor, or for a lead to require 7 or 8 mar­ket­ing touches before being sales ready.

And that just starts the process of turn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties into cus­tomers… The more that’s at stake, the longer the sales cycle.

How Patient Brands Behave

Patient brands allow cus­tomers to set their own pace and time­frame to work through their learn­ing and deci­sion mak­ing process.

Patient brands invest in active lis­ten­ing to learn what’s on people’s minds or uncover mis­per­cep­tions that they must address over time. They com­mu­ni­cate authen­ti­cally, inter­act and respond knowl­edge­ably with cus­tomers and prospects who want to engage with the brand. They plant seeds that flower as online com­mu­ni­ties. They fer­til­ize and pro­vide good grow­ing con­di­tions for those communities.

They encour­age con­sis­tency in poli­cies and employee behavior.

They real­ize that mar­ket­places are made up of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions; and rec­og­nize that peo­ple have mem­o­ries and feel­ings. They under­stand that strate­gic moves can have last­ing con­se­quences so they avoid erratic behav­ior or strate­gies “du jour.”

The Flip Side: A Parable

A friend reminded me the other day of what can hap­pen when exec­u­tive teams make major changes to their chan­nel model, such as exit­ing the SMB mar­ket and drop­ping their part­ners. Later, when busi­ness con­di­tions change and they want to re-enter that mar­ket, they don’t under­stand why their field or part­ner orga­ni­za­tion are so chal­lenged in recruit­ing good part­ners. They don’t under­stand why part­ners no longer want to do busi­ness with this brand.

Here’s a story of a Sil­i­con Val­ley brand…

My friend worked for what was once an admired brand in a hand­held device cat­e­gory, a for­mer inno­va­tor. She and her team had spent at least 2 years devel­op­ing the part­ner model, build­ing out the part­ner pro­grams, and recruit­ing solid part­ners with sound busi­nesses and a good cus­tomer base within the SMB sector.

One day the exec­u­tive team at her com­pany decided that the con­sumer mar­ket was more appeal­ing, so they dis­banded the part­ner team and elim­i­nated (or de-invested in) their part­ner pro­grams. Not sur­pris­ingly, sales to SMB cus­tomers declined precipitously.

A year or so later, when con­sumer sales failed to mate­ri­al­ize and cus­tomer acqui­si­tion costs had reduced oper­at­ing mar­gins, the execs decided to resume their focus on SMB cus­tomers and partner-based sales. They looked around, and lo and behold, there was no insti­tu­tional mem­ory, no under­stand­ing of KSFs for lever­aged sales to SMB cus­tomers – their expe­ri­enced tal­ent had left the company.

Unfor­tu­nately, both SMB cus­tomers and the part­ners who focused on that sec­tor of the B2B mar­ket remem­bered all too well this brand’s will­ing­ness to aban­don them. No mat­ter how enthu­si­as­tic the company’s new hires, they could not over­come the marketplace’s mem­ory. The brand had demon­strated its untrustworthiness.

The brand never recov­ered, and it’s in the process of dis­ap­pear­ing from the market.