In today’s world where digital marketing is ubiquitous and where marketers rely heavily on technology to communicate with customers, maybe it is time to reconsider your B2B strategy and to implement a business-to-human (B2H) sales and marketing approach. Embracing such a philosophy as a strategic model can be a way for companies to increase trust and build confidence in their brands.
For many years CPB UK has been a proponent of such people first, ‘back to basics’ marcomms techniques, advocating recognising and working with each customer as an individual, assessing them for their specific needs, providing solutions tailored to meeting these needs and focusing on these needs to constantly deliver better consumer experience and functionality. Through expert B2H telemarketing we have supported many customers in achieving their business to human goals.
But what exactly is business-to-human marketing?
B2H shifts the focus from targeting a broad customer base to looking at each customer as an individual with distinct wants and needs. At its core is the value proposition that all customers are unique, and every customer wants their specific set of requirements to be recognised, understood, and acted upon.
It is an emotional approach to marketing which can help marketers get under the skin of their prospects and targets, helping them to empathise with what gets their customers excited and discover how their product or service offerings can benefit them. Furthermore, it can help empower employees and give marketers the required insight to better understand their customers.
B2H differs from other forms of marketing such as business to business and brand humanisation. The former is ROI focused and entails promoting and distributing a product or service to another company and the latter refers to how customers perceive a brand.
This was a short precis, to learn more take a look at this article on LinkedIn …
B2B marketers need to see the bigger picture
CPB recently attended a presentation by Tom Savigar, futurist, and business transformation expert at Avansere. He talked about how mindsets need to shift away from B2B and towards B2H. He believes we need to cease thinking of customers or employees as statistics and focus instead on humanising the individual.
As mentioned above, this is a methodology and approach which CPB can get fully behind as we are staunch advocates of a human-to-human approach to sales and marketing. We have always put customers at the centre of our marketing efforts. We believe in getting to know our clients, that conversation is King, that it is good to talk, and that people buy people. To coin a phrase, ‘it’s all in a name’ and CPB stands for causing people to buy. When the company was first set up by Jon Pritchett in 1998, his vision was to create a telemarketing and lead generation agency which focused on understanding clients, creating conversations, and generating demand that would cause people to buy. He was an advocate of a people first, human-to-human approach before it became a trend.
Therefore, it was fascinating to hear Tom Savigard speak about our shared vision of how we imagine the future of lead generation adapting and shifting towards the newly predicted market of B2H engagement.
Tom Savigar passionately believes that the future of business interactions and sales models must change if we are to survive the new, tougher, more challenging sales era. He evokes the consumers’ ‘happy place’ and reveals what we all know, which is that – with the best will in the world – being at work is no-one’s happy place, rather it is a means to an end. Therefore, if, through our business relationships, we can make being at work more palatable, and we can try to enhance our customers’ experience by understanding what we can do to improve their working lives, we can create a better business relationship, which can also impact their personal lives. This enhanced approach will improve business relationships by embracing customers as individuals. Understanding their needs from a human perspective is vital to successful B2H connections and will positively impact lead qualification, particularly if using BANTa qualification which means you are already assessing the human elements of attitude and acquisition alongside the traditional elements of budget, authority, needs, and timeframe.
No-one has come out of the COVID pandemic unscathed but new research, by the Harvard Business Review, suggests that the highest-performing teams have found subtle ways of leveraging social connections during the pandemic to fuel their success. The findings offer important clues on ways any organisation can foster greater connectedness — even within a remote or hybrid work setting — to engineer higher-performing teams and better sales performance. Doing so takes more than simply hiring the right people and arming them with the right tools. It requires creating opportunities for genuine relationships to develop. When it comes to building extraordinary workplaces and high-performing teams, researchers have long appreciated that three psychological needs are essential: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Decades of research demonstrate that when people feel psychologically fulfilled, they tend to be healthier, happier, and more productive.
If we can build similar types of relationships with our customers where they feel psychologically fulfilled, we can predict stronger, longer, and more loyal connections which will bring improved sales opportunities and pipeline generation and enhanced ROI.
By adopting a people first, human focused approach, companies can remain agile in an unpredictable modern world.
Advantages of a business to human approach:
Builds long-lasting customer relationships by connecting with customers on a deeper level
Allows you to have fun with your brand by appealing to human interest and connections
Increases customer and employee satisfaction by seeing the benefits of staff and customers thriving on personal, empathetic communications
How to achieve B2H marketing success:
Prioritise being empathetic
Focus on human-to-human interaction
Use personalised digital marketing technology
For many years CPB has championed putting people first. We offer a customer-centric approach where the customer is always at the centre of our marketing efforts, and we aim for all interactions to be relevant and relatable. It is with this in mind that we continue to embrace B2H, and we look forward to developing deeper and stronger mutually beneficial relationships with our customers.
