Marketing Series Article Working with the Buying Center; Part 1 Dissect it and understand it before you face it! by Dick Barnes, Principal, The Freeland Group Just about anyone who is in business-to-business sales has at one time run into this scenario: you make a contact, let’s call him “Fred”, who wants to know about one of your products. After some time you and Fred seem to come to an understanding…he’s really excited about the product but he needs to convince his superior to make out a purchase order. As the weeks go by you hear from “Fred” regularly at first, then less and less often. Your follow-up calls go unanswered. Finally you nail “Fred” down and find out his firm has purchased from a competitor. Fred assures you how disgusted he is, as he really wanted your product, and tells you it was the “people upstairs” who made the decision. You’ve just been done in by a complex purchase decision process marketers commonly call the Buying Center. The Buying Center may be formal or informal. It may be planned or unplanned. The company in which it is nested may or may not be aware the Buying Center even exists. But marketers and sales professionals are asking for real disappointment on a regular basis if they don’t recognize it and learn to deal with it. The Buying Center might be defined as the group of people affected by, and having some voice in, the product to be purchased and/or the process of making the purchase. It may even be an organized group within the firm that is assigned the task of making the buying decision. Many companies are now using item specific Buying Centers; formed for the purpose of researching and making the purchase decision on a single product. They might form a committee, for example, to shop for and make a purchase decision on a new forklift. After the purchase is made the committee will close up shop. Other firms use an informal system, generally not thought of as an actual entity, which comes about due to the varied interests of people within the firm. This is more commonly the situation when we refer to the Buying Center. In this scenario, a set of users will initially recognize a need for an item such as the aforementioned forklift. They go to the person designated as the buyer for the firm and make a request for the item. They may, or may not, have already done some research and might supply the buyer with some promotional materials or with their choices of product or sets of specifications. At this point we have the beginning of an informal Buying Center. The buyer probably won't be the final decision maker, or may not want to risk making the wrong decision, so will send the request upstream to a higher-ranking decision maker. Interesting things can happen during this process. First off, the weight of the input from the initiators of the process has already been diminished, if not wiped out. They might have wanted a specific forklift, or at least a specific type. Those requirements may be irrelevant at this point, as the decision makers may have their own needs to fulfill and their own ideas on what the product should be. The people upstairs may even nix the request all together. If the Buying Center works well, the recognized need for the product and the specifications set by the users should still hold sway. Yet there will inevitably be input not only from the future users, but the buyer, the finance department, maintenance, the board, owners, managers…whomever may have some vested interest in the eventual outcome. The obvious problem for your marketing department and your sales crew is simply this; throughout this complex process who the heck are they supposed to be communicating with? Who should they be trying to influence? Who will make the final decision? How do they make certain your product is in the running when that decision is made? There may well be a “Fred” in this process…someone who will be a “champion” for your product. Is he the right champion? Does he actually carry any weight? What do you need to know to decide where you go from this initial contact point? You obviously are not likely to make sales by dealing only with Fred, but who should you ask him to introduce you to? Who are the people you will eventually need to communicate with and how do you identify them? How do you get into the entire process so you can influence every member of the Buying Center? These questions are just the beginning, because the process you are trying to get involved with can be a very complex one. The persons who will directly use the product are normally the easiest the “sell” to, but they probably won’t make the actual purchase and the amount of weight they carry in the decision can vary greatly. The situation can be a fragile one, where one individual can put you out of the running despite the parties who view you favorably. The first person who shows an interest in your product might seem a logical point person to pursue, and you must absolutely make them a part of a marketing strategy or sales plan. But they’re rarely the final word. If the forklift wanted by the users turns out to be a maintenance hog or costs too much, that point person will end up taking the heat from management…not the users. That person may not be the best place to begin building your marketing and sales assault on a formidable Buying Center. So where is the place to start? A different answer may surface with every prospect firm. It may be a committee, relatively easy to address and make a sales pitch to, or it may be an informal group of advisors and decision makers leading all the way up to the CEO’s office. That’s tough to address…you can easily step on toes as you blunder about or focus on the wrong parties. The Buying Center scenario is a very dynamic one. The players may change as the process moves along, some dropping out as others enter the picture. The need for the product may become refocused or other solutions might be found. Financial or environmental factors may pop up and take precedence over the original needs of the users. To deal with the Buying Center, both marketing personnel and sales people need to be flexible, creative, and fast on their feet. They have to look at the whole situation and must do so in a strategic fashion. They cannot just try to solve the current puzzle as it exists. They need to forecast how the Buying Center will evolve as the process of making the purchase decision moves forward. In our next few columns we will address these issues. We will dissect what makes a Buying Center and how it functions; then explore how we can use that knowledge to be more effective when faced with one. (next article in series) |
