Salutations, friend! Marketing to corporations is drastically different from marketing to consumers. That doesn’t mean it has to be difficult. It just takes a different strategy and new insight. That’s where I come in to help. When you know who you’re speaking to and what is important to them, you can tailor your content and your marketing for success. This episode will help you easily identify and market to the different roles influencing the corporate decision-making process and enable you to align your marketing strategies and efforts with your target clients. So, turn up the volume and settle in, friend. Let’s get started.
🎯 Top Takeaway from Today's Episode
Your marketing strategy should be in alignment with your target clients.
đź“Ś Key Points from the Episode
Corporate Buyer’s Ecosystem
This is a framework to help you identify the key roles involved in the decision-making process, as well as the type of information that is most relevant to each role at each stage. Â
The 3 Key Roles Influencing the Decision-Making Process in Hiring Outside Experts
đź“Š Statistics You Need to Know
Research shows that close to 70% of the B2B buyer's journey (Eira, 2022) is completed before a prospect reaches out to you.Â
đź’ˇ Take Action
Create one piece of marketing material tailored to one of the three roles that we discussed earlier today.
đź”— Links
✍🏾 Sign up for the Corporate Coins Training: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients training
💼 Work with us: Systems That Scale™ Program
đź’Ś Be a part of our growing email list: Co(i)nversations and Community
👋🏽 Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram!
🌟 Leave us a review and a 5-star rating: The Profit Scale Podcast
0:00:07 Salutations, friend! Welcome to The Profit Scale podcast, where we help independent Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs earn at their highest levels by learning how to secure corporate contracts.
I’m your host, Ruth-Joy Connell, your Corporate Consultant, and Sales Enablement Expert. I’m on a mission to equip you with the systems and strategies you’ll need to build a business of generational impact and income.
Around here, we bring culture and coins together — providing all the learning, community, and support you’ll need as you scale your business. If you’re ready to step into your next level of income and impact, then you, my friend, are in the right place!Â
Turn up the volume and lean in, 'cause we’re about to get started!
0:01:00 Well, hello, friend! Salutations and welcome back. If you're joining me here for the first time, then welcome to what I dare say will be the best investment of your time that you could ever give to a podcast, if I do say so myself.Â
Just before I started putting together this episode, I got an email from the facilitator of an organization that myself and our team recently worked with. I had facilitated my Pillars of Pricing workshop for their cohort of entrepreneurs, and she had sent me feedback from their attendees on how valuable the workshop was for them.Â
The attendees were from all different stages in their business, and yet it was so encouraging to read how impactful the training was for them. It made me think about how many times I've delivered that particular training and how the entrepreneurs on the other side of it were always so vastly different.Â
I've worked with educators, leather makers, coaches, consultants, chefs, restaurant owners, non-profit owners, and so much more. While I'm exceptionally proud of the work that I've done, I'm not sharing this to brag. I'm sharing it because the reason that each of them are able to walk away with valuable insight to help them price their services is because the frameworks that I teach from are based in principles, or in other words, a fundamental truth.
I've seen that whether one of those attendees was selling a $50-product or a $15,000-service, the principles for pricing are the same, but how they're applied to each unique business, now, that's what's different.Â
0:02:34 Now, today's conversation isn't about pricing. We're going to talk about marketing today, but I will be taking the same approach that I do with all of my training and frameworks, and that's laying out the fundamental truths about marketing while also guiding you on how to apply them to your target clients, which are corporate clients.Â
0:02:53 Let's ground today's conversation in three fundamental truths.
As the expert and authority in your field, I want to present you with a different way to market, one that is guided by your unique ideal client, one that is grounded in their behaviors, and that's aligned with their journey.Â
When I was working in my corporate job as a Sales Trainer, I was tasked with finding different vendors and experts for the services that we sometimes wanted to hire out for. Through my experience hiring vendors, just like you, I was able to break down that process to identify three key roles that are involved in a corporate decision-making process, and I've coined this concept, the Corporate Buyer's Ecosystem.Â
0:04:49 In today's conversation. I'm going to take you through what each role is and some of the best practices to help you tailor your marketing and your content to speak to each one of those roles.
My goal for today's episode is to provide you with a foundation on which you can apply that third fundamental truth, so you can shift your strategy and align your marketing efforts with your target clients and the way that they make decisions.Â
Let's get started.Â
0:05:19 This ecosystem is a way to help you understand the process that a B2B corporate sale goes through in order to arrive at a decision. This is a framework to help you identify the strategies, the people, and the type of information that is most relevant to each person at each stage. This concept uses your marketing to position you for success at each stage of the process. Quite honestly, it simplifies your marketing.Â
When you have a deep understanding of your target clients, you'll learn how to tailor your strategies to them and not to the marketing strategies that are most popular, but possibly ineffective for you. That's what we're focusing on today. This concept identifies three key roles that influence the decision-making process when companies are hiring outside experts.Â
Let's get into the roles.
0:06:09 The Information Gathering role is the person or people who are tasked with finding viable solutions to bring to the rest of the team. They are responsible for researching potential vendors, vetting the vendors to ensure that they meet at least the basic requirements, and understanding their expertise. In some cases, the Information Gatherer will also do the initial discovery call and gather a pricing or a proposal.Â
Ultimately, it is their job to distill down the options from a list of several to a list of maybe one to three viable solutions that they can bring back to their team. This may seem like a less important role, but in fact, it is the most influential role of them all as it relates to you, the vendor.Â
The person in this role can become your ally among the decision-makers on the team because the Information Gatherer role decides who makes the preliminary cut to even be considered for their business. If you don't impress them at this stage, then you don't make the cut, and you've lost the sale before you've even had a chance to begin.Â
Research shows that close to 70% of the B2B buyer's journey (Eira, 2022) is completed before a prospect reaches out to you. That means that winning their attention at this stage is all about how you're providing value to them, which is also known as your marketing.
The good news is that successfully marketing to the Information Gatherer at this stage doesn't require much. It only requires you to do the basics, but it does require you to do them well. This means making yourself and your business easy to find, communicating the problem you solve with depth and with clarity, making it clear who you serve and how you serve them, and having content and resources available for them to see your expertise at work and multiple ways for people to get in contact with you.Â
Of that list, which do you think is the most important?Â
If you guessed, communicating the problem you solve with depth and clarity, then, you, my friend, are correct. You want to repeat that time and time and time again in different ways throughout your marketing platforms and your resources and throughout all of your content.Â
Remember that successfully marketing to the Information Gatherer at this stage is about doing the basics well. This means your content and your marketing should be doing the work of educating your prospects on their problem and providing insights into the problem that they can use.Â
One of the best and fastest ways to stand out to your prospect is to provide them with insights into their problems, challenges or goals that they don't have. This is a really effective way to build trust in your expertise with Information Gatherers who may be looking for you, and an even better way to stand out from your competitors.
When you're able to do the basics well through your marketing, you position yourself for a corporate contract that you may not even know is looking for you. Once you've been able to successfully secure a spot on the Information Gatherer's list, then that's when you encounter the second role in the ecosystem, and that's the role of the Authorizer.
0:09:22 Hey, friend! Since you're listening to this episode, chances are, the wheels in your head have been spinning in terms of how you can serve corporate clients, which makes this the perfect time for me to share a little story with you.Â
When I was working as a Sales Trainer in my corporate job, I was training our sales team to close five- and six-figure plus contracts on a regular basis. That gave me an awareness and exposure to know that those types of opportunities existed. What it didn't give me was the confidence to go after those opportunities for myself.
Even though I was helping my employer close five- and six-figure contracts on a regular basis, signing a contract with my own name on it — me, Ruth-Joy, a young Black female solo entrepreneur, I struggled to believe that I could see the same results for my own business.Â
Maybe you're feeling the same way, but the truth is, it is possible. The opportunities are waiting for you and with the right framework and support, there's no reason why you can't enter corporate boardrooms with confidence and leave with coins. That's where our program Systems at Scale™ comes into play.
Now, I know when it comes to securing corporate clients, most programs always have an emphasis on sales, and while it's an undeniably important part of the process, it's only one part of the process. Since our motto around here is "No coins left behind," the goal can't just be to help you make one sale.Â
My goal is to set you up with the systems to keep the corporate clients and the coins flowing, so that your business can have a generational impact.Â
Friend, I want to invite you to apply for our group coaching program, Systems at Scale™, where we take a holistic approach to teach you how to attract, sell to,2 and serve corporate clients, so you can be positioned for success at every stage of the journey.Â
This program is designed to equip Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and People of Color entrepreneurs, just like you, with the confidence and tools to secure and serve corporate clients.Â
Click the link in our show notes to learn more about the program and to submit your application to Systems at Scale™ today. You know you want to.Â
All right, friend. Back to the episode.
0:11:54 The Authorizer is the person who is responsible for ensuring that whomever they hire can produce an outcome that positively impacts the department and the company goals. They are the ones who are responsible for justifying the decision to hire a particular vendor to their superiors. If there isn't a Return on Investment (ROI) from hiring that vendor, then it's the Authorizer who feels the effects of the fall out.Â
The Authorizer often has the final say, but they rarely ever make the decision unilaterally. Now, I'm going to say that again because it is really important and I want to make sure you get it here. The Authorizer often has the final say, but they rarely ever make the decision unilaterally.Â
Remember that the Information Gatherer will be the one who presents the viable options to the Authorizer. From this point, a discussion can begin to compare, contrast and ultimately decide on which vendor is going to be best for their company. In fact, the more senior the Authorizer is in their role in the company, the less likely it is that you will interact with them. It's not unusual for them to only step in at the point at which a decision needs to be made, and they're often going to defer to the suggestions of the Information Gatherer.Â
For example, perhaps you're pitching a company for an executive leadership coaching workshop, and your Point of Contact (POC)Â is the Vice President of People and Culture. The VP reports to the CEO. The CEO is the Authorizer in this particular ecosystem. There are cases where you may not interact with the CEO at all throughout the sales process. They will communicate and deliberate with their VP. The VP will communicate with you. This is why I mentioned earlier that the Information Gatherer is the most influential role in the process because they can serve as the bridge or the blockade between you and the company.
The Authorizer just needs to know the facts. Their decision is dependent on the thoroughness of the Information Gatherer and where they're missing information that's going to help them make a decision, they're probably going to send the Information Gatherer back to you, the vendor, in order to gather that information. They still might not step in.
Knowing this, your approach for marketing to the Authorizer is going to be very different than to the Information Gatherer. The Authorizer's responsibilities and priorities are tied to the department or the company's long-term success. Their priorities are naturally different.Â
Successfully marketing to the Authorizer at this stage requires outcome-focused marketing. This means having one-sheets with the outcomes that you've helped past clients achieve and highlighting how those outcomes have a clear connection between larger company goals and objectives. You also want to use content marketing with a specific focus on industry insights.
When I say industry, I mean their industry, not necessarily yours. All of these should be in easily digestible formats. LinkedIn is one of the best platforms to reach Authorizers since staying up-to-date with industry news and insights is often part of their day-to-day job. However, it is important to know that they are less likely to engage with your content by way of comments, like, shares, etc., but they are going to engage in deeply impactful ways like downloading the reports that you put out, viewing your profile, or looking up your company on Sales Navigator, for example.Â
For them, this is part of their professional development and a way to stay knowledgeable about the resources that are available to them in their industry, and that could be through articles, APIs, or sharing insights from other authorities in your industry.Â
The great thing about marketing to this particular role is that you can leverage the content that already exists in their industry to create content of your own. For example, sharing an article with a write-up, highlighting your takeaways from that article, and asking some thought-provoking questions to open up conversation. That can be enough to get on their radar. While you do want to be consistent and strategic about what and how you publish, it can, in fact, be that simple.Â
0:16:06 This brings us to the third and the final role — the role of the Advocate. This role represents the person who will directly engage with you while you deliver your service. The person who plays this role could be the person who will be your Point of Contact (POC) throughout a contract, or it could be an employee of the department or group that your services will impact.Â
Keeping with our example from earlier, you are trying to secure a contract for an executive leadership coaching workshop. In this case, the Advocate could be the Director of the Sales department or maybe the Vice President of Human Resources. In general, it's probably going to be someone who is directly going to participate in the services that you are offering.Â
They are looking out for or advocating for the best interest of the project, the department or the team. They're usually the person who is asking the difficult questions, which may seem like they're trying to poke holes in your approach.Â
Generally, this person may present as a skeptic. They work alongside the Information Gatherer, and they usually get involved at the point of the discovery call or the proposal, but they're certainly involved in the deliberations with the Authorizer.
It's likely that this person may be working directly alongside you or with you if you secure the contract. They want to hear from people who have been in their position. The Advocate may have been the person tasked with creating the existing solution that's currently not working, so you may be coming in to improve something that they themselves worked on or created.Â
Naturally, they tend to enter into these conversations with a skeptical perspective of, "If it didn't work for me, it's probably not going to work for you." They may also have been burned in the past by other vendors who talked a big talk but didn't deliver on the promise when it came down to it.Â
At times, the Advocate may seem like an advocate for the company but an adversary to you — and that's normal. Whatever you do, never take the role of the Advocate personally. They are doing exactly what they should be. Whether you like them or not, they still have influence over the final decision.
The good news is that not every person who plays the role of the Advocate is going to be an adversary. There are cases where they will support and advocate for you as well, and champion getting their team on board, both before and after signing the contract. That's the ideal situation. What's most likely going to happen is a hybrid of the two approaches. They might start off skeptical about you, but our hope is that they become your ally in the process.Â
How do you tailor your marketing to this particular role?Â
Successfully marketing to the Advocate requires proactively addressing their objections. This means using case studies with clients that are similar to their company or that have similar use cases. This means having a similar context for why they're hiring you and/or for the outcome that they're looking to achieve. It also means using client testimonials that speak to the process and not just the outcomes.
Lastly, educate them on the steps in your process and the purpose behind each step. Essentially, you want to show them what steps they are going to take and how each one of those steps are going to tie to the end goal that they're looking to achieve.
In situations where you do come up against the Advocate role, and they're more of an adversary than an ally:
If they are still considering other vendors for the contract, how well you address their concerns can be the difference between winning and losing the contract at that stage. Listen for the why behind the what and be direct but compassionate in your responses.
At the end of the day, regardless of their role or their disposition, we are all people talking to other people. This may be the most difficult role to get on your side but when you do, you will have created, not one but two advocates for your business. If that's not a recipe for success, then I don't know what is.
All right. Now that we've discussed all three roles, let's bring it all together. Regardless of the industry you're in and the service you provide, the roles within the Corporate Buyer's Ecosystem are consistent across industries.Â
I want you to think about your own profession. If you've ever been a decision-maker in your corporate career, you've probably played at least one of the roles in the ecosystem, if not all of them, at one point or another.Â
As we bring it all together, there are three important distinctions to make.Â
0:22:09 This is why we first grounded our conversation in the fundamental truth that your marketing must be in alignment with your target client. The framework that we just went through allows you to align your marketing to what's important to each role at each stage. It remains true across industries, companies and job titles.Â
We've covered a lot to this point. If you're like me, you may be struggling to remember what we first started our discussion with. No worries. That's what the recap is for.Â
Let's recap our conversation today. Then, we'll talk about how we can convert this conversation to coins.Â
0:22:47 We first started off discussing the concept of principles, which are fundamental truths that apply across a variety of contexts. We then grounded our conversation in three fundamental truths about marketing.
From there, we built on the third fundamental truth by identifying the different roles that are within your Corporate Buyer's Ecosystem, and understanding how to tailor your marketing approach to each role.
The three roles that we discussed are:
While each role is unique and serves a different purpose, they all work together to arrive at a final decision about which vendors they're going to work with. This creates an opportunity for you to use your marketing as a tool to strategically position your business for success.Â
Understanding each of these roles and what's important to them creates an opportunity for you to use your marketing as a strategic tool to position your business for success well before the conversations even begin.
As you know, our conversation is never complete without talking about how we can take action and turn these conversations into coins. Today is no different.
That being said, your action item for today is to create one piece of marketing material tailored to one of the three roles that we discussed earlier today. If you need a reminder about how to tailor your marketing to each one of those roles, go ahead and listen to this episode again and remember to take notes.Â
As a reminder, one-sheets work really well for the role of Information Gatherers and Authorizers while case studies and testimonials appeal really well to the role of the Advocate.
0:24:44 If serving corporate clients is the next step for you in your business, and you want more strategies like the ones we discussed today, and most importantly, you want tailored support to learn how to apply these strategies to your unique business then I want to invite you to apply to work with me inside our signature program, Systems That Scale™.
This group coaching program is designed to pair strategy with tailored support. It is so much more than just sales. We take you through a holistic approach, teaching you how to attract, sell to, and serve corporate clients, so that you're set up for success even after the ink dries on that contract.Â
I hold a free monthly training called Corporate Coins: How to Attract, Sell and Serve Corporate Clients. This free training is an opportunity to dive even deeper into the mindset and mechanics that will set you up for success on your Corporate Coin journey. Plus, it will also give you an idea of what it would be like to work together with no commitment needed.
Whether you're just getting started on your journey or you're looking to level up, you're going to leave this training with tips and strategies to help you earn and serve at your highest level, much like in today's episode. You can find the link to register for our training in the show notes.
Friend, if you're not subscribed already, go ahead and do that now because in the next episode, we're going to be talking all about how you can use systems within your business to serve your corporate clients with excellence.
To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to the podcast, so you'll be notified in two weeks when the new episode is released.Â
As always, friend, I'm so grateful that you chose to spend this time with me. My hope is that each episode plays a small part in moving you one step closer to building a business that will have a generational impact.
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On behalf of myself and the team, thank you so much for supporting us in doing so! Thank you for being here. I'll be here, at the same time and in the same place in two weeks. Until then, I wish you coins, confidence, and all the bags! Talk to you soon, friend.