B2B Sales Strategy… Evoke Emotions?

The boss stood up so fast, he knocked his chair over. He slammed both fists on his desktop as he leaned toward me. We were nose to nose. His face was red and his eyes were bulging. He held my gaze as he growled through gritted teeth, “Fix it! Just f***ing fix it!”

The above example is a tad over the top, but I wanted to get your attention. I wanted to show how an emotion can be evoked using only text. I wanted to portray anger, but I also wanted to grab your interest.

“What happened? Why’s the boss so mad? What’s going to happen next?” That’s what keeps people reading. Readers’ emotions are affected by suspense more than any other factor.

A spectrum of emotions can be portrayed with text, and degrees of emotion can be calibrated via word choice. The example above is overblown. If the scene and the emotion serve the story, we can fine tune the language to make it more appropriate:

The boss stood up, slammed his fist on his desktop, and leaned over toward me. He held my gaze as he growled, “Fix it! I don’t care how, just fix it!”

That still conveys the emotion and arouses the reader’s curiosity, but it’s more suitable for the workplace. What doesn’t evoke emotion or curiosity is this version:

“The boss was angry and he told me to fix it.” That’s telling, not showing… and it’s boring.

B2B Buyers are Emotional Creatures

B2B marketing is personal. B2B brands need to connect with buyers on a personal, emotional and human level. Now we have the research to prove it.

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) partnered with Google on this research report: “From Promotion to Emotion.” They surveyed more than 3,000 B2B buyers, 70 marketers and 15 academics, thought leaders and consultants across seven different B2B industries. Here are their findings:

• B2B brands that connect with their buyers on an emotional level earn twice the impact over marketers who are still trying to sell business or functional value.

• Potential B2B buyers who feel a “high brand connection” are 60% more likely to consider, purchase and even pay a premium than “low brand connection” competitors.

• The B2B “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP) is dead: 86% of B2B buyers see “no real difference between suppliers.”

• “Features, functions and business outcome” marketing has a 21% lift in perceived brand benefits.

• “Professional, social and emotional benefits” marketing has a 42% lift.

• Buyers feel a much closer personal connection to their B2B brands than to consumer brands.

Evoke Emotions to Capture New Leads

Marketers are exhausted by the ongoing struggle to get their messages through to their target prospects. The competition for attention is relentless. The noise in the marketplace is deafening. The choices are overwhelming: a vast spectrum of media, platforms, providers, price points, tools and technologies… sales messages that evoke emotions cut through the clutter.

Your prospects will consume those messages because they want to.

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Bob Leonard is the managing consultant at acSellerant, a B2B creative agency that specializes in story development for mid-sized IT vendors. We interview your sales team, your customers and your C-suite to discover the stories that earn trust. Then we formulate those stories into compelling and concise sales tools that prospects read or watch because they want to.