B2B Lead Generation For Complex Sales

Do you want to scale up results and increase conversions for your sales team?

Empathy marketing is more relevant now than ever in B2B lead generation. Even though we have an ever-increasing array of channels to reach our customers, it’s actually becoming increasingly harder to connect with business prospects and customers, as the constant barrage of marketing messages drowns out your business. People are constantly distracted by social media, phones, tablets, more content, more data, more emails, and many businesses find it hard to get their messages heard at all. 

One of the key reasons for not getting heard is that a lot of B2B customers are far too focused on converting new customers as opposed to building a connection with potential leads and adding value. Another reason is the presence of a confidence gap, also known as a trust gap. Our customers don’t seem to have confidence in us. 

So, how do you close the gap?

You can improve connection by starting with empathy. Even if you’re into B2B marketing and dealing with complex sales, you have to think about how your customers feel, because that’s actually what’s driving decision making. In this post, we’ll discuss empathy marketing, an effective strategy for connecting with leads and improving their confidence in your brand. 

What is Empathy?

Empathy is being able to understand the perspective and emotions of another.

So how your customers feel and what you need to do begins with your empathy. We need to focus on building emotional connection before conversion; this is true even in personal relationships, dating, and friendships. We actually need to connect with people before we ask something, which is why empathy marketing is essential.

How to Know Your Customers’ Core Emotional Motivators

You’ll do well to know what your customers care about. We’re going to need to learn how we can be ‘the customer’. Further in the article, we’re going to share some tools to do that. 

There are various emotions people feel in decision-making. This is true in B2B lead generation. It’s very complicated because we feel more anger than joy.  

Actually, there are 27 unique emotions. 

How do you increase conversion? 

In an article by the Harvard Business Review titled “The New Science of Customer Emotions“, we see that through these emotions that they discovered across multiple categories, we have the nine most important emotions that influence buying behaviour. 

Now, the point is what you sell and what your clients sell are going to connect to more than one of these emotions. What you need to understand though, is that these are not the emotions that drive buying decisions, but that your customers experience myriad emotions throughout their journey. 

How can I discover the emotional motivators of my clients and prospects? 

Empathy Mapping

Well, the first thing you can do in empathy marketing is something called empathy mapping. What you see the customer say and do externally tells us how they’re thinking and feeling. You actually need to spend time with your customers, and you need to get data. 

So, this is an example of an empathy map created using mind mapping tools. 

Based on what they’re saying and doing, it helps you build an understanding of what is not happening externally, but you need to understand the interior world of how customers are thinking and feeling. 

If you have insights, you can help them navigate the internal challenges they’re going to face. 

How can you do that? 

Journey Mapping

The customer experience is a process; it is not a linear journey. As you can see, someone may be learning and then they’re thinking, and then they’re feeling. 

But how can they go through this process?

Be their shepherd and guide them through the entire journey. Journey mapping allows you to step into the shoes of your customer.

How to Know Your Customer Motivators in Empathy Marketing

Are you finding it difficult to make complex sales?

You need to know your customer motivators using these steps:

Go out on sales calls

You can’t build an empathy map unless you know something about a customer. You actually need to spend time with them; if you aren’t face-to-face with customers, go out on sales calls.

Listen to call recordings with customers

If you have a sales development team inside a sales team, record the conversation. At Munro Agency, we have a tool for this. You need to actually listen to conversations because emotions can be heard. We can hear a person smiling or hesitating. It’s amazing what you can learn when you hear both sides of the conversation.

Get out in the field with your customer

You can go to events or trade shows but go to places where your customers are or even spend time and see if you can work on-site with them. 

Empathetic listening

To better understand customer motivators, use empathetic listening; you’re not just listening to reply, you’re listening to understand. That’s also sometimes called third ear listening. “What’s the feeling or emotion behind that?” “What’s the main motivator?” 

You have this greater insight when you’re listening at a deeper level.

Customer story interviews

Conducting customer story interviews is where you learn about customers’ journeys and experiences. This way, you can probe further and listen to the entire story.

Review customer questions

Reviewing customer questions online is also an excellent way to know your customers’ emotional motivators. You can find these questions on customer support boards, red boards, or they may be putting feedback up on social media. The point here is, you can see the questions and get insights. 

How to Design Messages that Connect to Emotional Motivators

An emotional connection has to come ahead of lead conversion. Instead of trying to get someone to care, you really need to get insight to know what they already care about. Once you do that, you have that connection that you could then build on. 

This takes us to the next step – Designing messages that connect to emotional motivators.

The Empathy Indexing Tool

Empathy indexing is a method to help you be your customer.

How can you be your customer? 

You need to have a method or a tool to overcome your bias so you can focus on the customer. So here are the four most important things for empathy indexing:

• Emotional resonance
• Customer focus
• Relevancy
• Clarity

You can use this as a guide for all your marketing messages, including ad emails and call guides. It’s a way for you to enter the world of your customer.

Examples of How to Use Empathy Index in Empathy Marketing

Emotional resonance 

Example 1: A typical sales email:

This is how emotional resonance works. 

Customer focus

Customer focus is the next dimension in the empathy index. So the way to improve customer focus is by looking at the words that your customers use the most. 

So how does customer focus affect conversion? 

Example 2: A Facebook ad promoting a webinar. 

That’s a dramatic improvement, just focusing on being more customer-focused. And so, when you combine emotional resonance with customer focus, you can see a dramatic impact. 

Example 3: Optimizing your messaging

When you improve your messaging, you need to think about the whole experience your customer has.

The result is increased emotional resonance, customer focus, and improved customer experience.

So these are examples of empathy indexing as a tool that you can use right now on your empathy marketing messages, especially for complex sales. 

How to Transfer Insights and Scale-Up Results

How do you transfer insights and scale up your results? 

Just by taking one insight to scale up results and learning something about your customer, you can create an offer that truly connects to what they care about. You can take this same approach and scale up an entire company or your clients’ marketing process as a whole.

Marketing automation nurturing is more than sending out emails month after month consistently; it’s more than just improving scores of people who emotionally unsubscribe before they physically unsubscribe. 

This is why you need to have these insights to know what your customers care about, understand their motivators, and then design messages that matter. This then influences their nurturing machine so that they can prepare and create better content through the process. So they were actually connecting more.

Case marketing is leading the way because you will have this amazing insight about your customers, so you can help your sales team know how to leverage all the work that they did to take the lead conversations further.

So how can you help your team scale up results?

• Train your team on building customer empathy
• Empathy index your marketing messages
• Collect and share customer insights across your team

What’s the Takeaway?

It’s important to know your customers’ core emotional motivators. Based on this, you can then design messages that connect to those motivators so you can begin scaling. It’s not difficult; it just takes time.

As a growing B2B company, you’re most likely dealing with a lot of complex sales. Let Munro Agency, a company dedicated to digital marketing and lead generation, help you get the most out of empathy marketing. We aim to help you increase your conversions and boost your revenue. If you want to find out more about other marketing techniques, do follow our blog for more digital marketing-related articles, such as our comprehensive guide on pay-per-click advertising.