In most, if not all B2B sales, there is more than one person involved in the buying decision. It could be any number of people that serve any number of roles within the organization. Getting everyone on the same page can be challenging.

Each member is involved for different reasons therefore they need to be marketed to differently. Your message to each of them should be tailored to respond to their specific pain. For example, an executive involved may care about how this new product is going to increase efficiencies while the actual end user may care more about ease of use and if it integrates well with other solutions already being used.

Here’s a direct mail campaign I did that delivered an 80% (marketing to sales) conversion rate.

BACKGROUND:
At the time I worked for a content management platform company. We were looking to partner with about a dozen strategic partners and needed a high impact program to get their attention. The goal was to get a meeting with the CEO, the CTO and the VP of Strategic Alliances, one meeting with all 3 people in attendance. These companies didn’t know us so I needed to do something to stand out among all other marketing attempts.

ACTION PLAN:
Mission Impossible 2 was about to come out on DVD and advertising had kicked up for the upcoming release date. I decided to leverage this hype and build a campaign around the movie.

I wanted to get the attention of the key executives and get them to accept a meeting with our executives. My copies of the MI2 DVD arrived on the release date, I then turned around and sent them to the potential partner executives in a metal briefcase with a message attached. The message read - “This package has also been sent to Jason Morio, CTO and Suaad Sait, CEO. Whichever one of you logs into this site (PURL), accepts a meeting with us and ensures all 3 of you are in attendance will get a portable DVD player. (I’m about to date myself here but oh well, portable DVD players had just come out and were running anywhere from $600 - $1200 each.) If I were doing something like this today I might offer the cool new iPhone.

Of the 12 companies that we targeted with this first piece, 6 companies took the meeting. We were very excited with the results. (DISCLAIMER: I feel like I need to say this before we go on any further. I’m sure most of them took the meeting just for the DVD player, but even so, we got our shot at the table with the decision making unit for a partnership.) My job as a Marketer was done. I opened the door and set up a meeting with the right decision makers.

There were still 6 more companies we wanted to talk to that didn’t respond. For those that didn’t respond to the DVD, we sent a follow up piece. This time, a rocket with sunglasses and message inside. (If you remember the movie, it begins with Tom Cruise climbing a mountain and a rocket is fired into the mountain with a message.) I mailed the rocket with a piece of rock attached to it with different messaging this time. Still trying to spark an internal competition but this time with different solution messaging. We thought maybe with a little tweaking of the value proposition we could land a few more meetings. It worked! Three more potential partners took meetings.

So of the 12 originally targeted prospects, we got the attention of 9 and were able to present our value proposition as well as a joint value proposition.

Tips to remember when building a program for the entire decision making unit:

• Leverage what is already happening around you
• Make the most of your first impression
• Tailor messages to the each member of the decision making unit
• Don’t depend on someone else to champion you, create awareness with the entire decision making unit
• Everyone loves a competition and especially one where there is a high percentage chance of winning
• If it doesn’t work for everyone, continue testing and tweaking