I come bearing another headache and brain teaser for you and your Marketing department. The latest trend in B2B sales is the Business to Individual (B2I) sale. The idea is you should customize the experience of purchasing to the individual within a buying group (which is already a customized experience). If you thought the microsites and the group buying idea was granular, you aint seen nothing yet (in my best southern drawl, and most horribly vulgarized English).
B2I in a nutshell
- You have buying groups, and within those groups are individuals
- You are marketing not only to the buying group but to the individuals within the group as well so you get a more granulated marketing and sales experience
- The theory is sales is still sales individuals are still buying from you and building a relationship with these individuals in the group is important for continued success and growth
So now you have two challenges
- Create a privatized buying experience for your group
- Create a privatized buying experience for specific individuals within this group
The information and rules for the dedicated buying experience still apply
- Show relevant content and products
- Track the behaviors of these individuals on your site and create an individual experience for them as well
The theory goes like this
- Individuals within a buying group will have specific buying functions and divergent buying motives hence creating the need for a creating a specific buying experience for each of these individuals
- If you create these differentiated experiences you are creating an environment for a higher probability of purchase, and return
What are you are going to need to pull this off successfully
- A great Marketing person or team that understands the need to track and stratify their customer behaviors
- Infrastructure and personnel to track these behaviors
- A web platform that enables you to build groups and complex user rules
- A web platform that is easily customizable, dynamic, and that is user friendly
- Having a business model where group purchasing is prevalent or common
The long and short of it all is this
- Groups are important but not as important as the individuals within the group
- The individuals within the group need to feel like both part of a team and treated as individuals
- It is easy to accommodate one or the other but it takes real skill to pull off both
When re-platforming you need to keep these variables in mind and make sure your platform can accommodate these needs moving forward.
