The Most Important Question in B2B Marketing…and Why AI Can’t Answer It

The most important question in B2B marketing and sales is: Why will prospects buy our product or service? Other questions are important: Who is buying (Personas)? What are they looking for (Features, Attributes, and Benefits)? What Price are they willing to pay? Etc.

But after all of these questions have been addressed through marketing and sales efforts, the firms who can answer Why the prospective customer needs or wants to buy will have a much deeper understanding of what really motivates buyers to choose their product or service over the competition, and they will be more successful at winning business.

Multiple Whys

Getting at the Why is easier said than done. For all but the simplest B2B purchases, there can be multiple Whys and many layers of Why.

Most complex B2B purchases are now made by committee. Each persona on the committee will typically have a different Why. When purchasing enterprise SaaS software, for example, the CEO’s Why is usually different from the CIO’s Why and the CFO’s Why.

Marketing and sales need to work together to uncover the common Whys of each persona and develop tactics to address them.

Ultimately, personas don’t make buying decisions, people do. One CEO’s Whys for making a purchase could be completely different from another CEO’s. Each decision maker can have a hierarchy of Whys, both professional and personal.

As any experienced salesperson will attest, prospective customers often won’t tell you their Whys, particularly the personal ones, for a host of reasons too numerous to go into in this post. That’s why many sales methodologies teach salespeople techniques to uncover undisclosed Whys.

Then there are the Whys that derive from the fundamental human neurobiological motives we all share and often don’t overtly recognize. My colleague Dr. Constantinos Pantidos has done brilliant work on how these influence buyer decisions. Learn more here.

Where H.I. trumps A.I.

This is an area where AI doesn’t do very well, at least not in B2B marketing and selling. AI is very good at crunching numbers and recognizing patterns. With B2C marketing, there is enough purchase and research data on millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of customers for AI to predict the Whys for a majority of consumers in a company’s target market.

But in marketing and selling complex B2B products and services, the Whys are as varied and nuanced as each organization and decision maker. Here, the human intelligence and intuition of marketers and particularly salespeople are still key to determining Why prospects will buy.

To learn more about improving marketing by uncovering and addressing why purchasers of B2B products and services buy, contact us.