Is Marketing Different For B-2-B?

“But it’s different for us, Tim. We’re B-2-B.”

In the last few days, two different people made that assertion to me – questioning whether the fundamental marketing principles we teach and use to help our clients’ companies grow also work for businesses whose customers are other businesses.

If you’re pressed for time today, the quick answer is no. No, you don’t fundamentally market any differently for B-2-B companies than you do for B-2-C.

I know first-hand because we’ve seen these principles work for both B-2-B and B-2-C companies whose owners we call our friends and clients.

If you have a bit more time, let me briefly explain why the answer is “no” using a relatively new and, some would say, heretical marketing theory called The Theory Of Common Sense.

Businesses don’t do business with other businesses. People inside those businesses do business with people inside other businesses.

In B-2-C, we know consumers have questions, frustrations, needs, goals, aspirations, limiting factors and fears. Don’t decision makers inside every business have those same things? 

What’s a business anyway, if not a group of people working toward a common goal? And why would acquiring or retaining a business as a customer be different than acquiring or retaining a consumer?

And so, our Theory of Common Sense concludes by saying that if you want to market yourself as a successful B-2-B company, you need to understand:

• The common denominator of all the people inside those businesses you’re trying to attract
• Those people’s questions, frustrations, needs, goals, aspirations, limiting factors and fears
• How you solve that person’s problem and scratch her itch

And those are precisely the same things you need to understand when marketing to consumers… because, to reiterate, business decisions are made by consumers, too.

The good news? We’ve built a model to help you. We call it The First Order Of Business… not simply The First Order Of Business-2-Consumer.