Here is a classic B2B Sales scenario.
An account leader sees a major opportunity to position a new set of solutions with a significant customer. She rallies the sales, pre-sales, and marketing teams to strategize and build an account plan. Everyone is excited at the prospective sale – the right to play, and to win is in plain sight.
The company has done lots of business with the company before and expects white glove, concierge service given the size of the potential deal.
There are several C-Suite leaders involved in the evaluation and purchase decision from the customers organization. Each leader will likely evaluate the offerings in their own way.
The account leader knows that in order to win the account, she must build a differentiating proposition using content created by subject matter experts across the ecosystem. These include all aspects of the value stack – industry specific thought leadership, financial business case, solution differentiation, product demos, technical architecture, customer references and the commercial offers.
Furthermore, given the competitive challenges, she knows the engagement must deeply personalized to clearly match the distinctive needs of the multiple decision makers involved.
This is where things usually begin to break down.
Content has always king in B2B customer engagement. But finding the right content, at the right time and personalizing it for the right context in synch with a B2B customers unique journey is hard.
The reason is that a majority of B2B companies still adopt a classical content supply chain approach to which assume a linear, customer journey.
The classical thinking poses three big problems.
First, content is developed at different levels of granularity.
Marketing produces 1: many content (one with appeal to broad audiences), Pre-sales focuses 1: Few (which appeals to a few select segments or use cases), but sales need 1:1 content (which is unique to a particular customer opportunity at any given time.
Second, Content is delivered to serve different needs
While Marketing is accustomed to working to service major websites, campaigns and events, or product release cycles, Sales needs content to respond to customer demand immediately - within minutes, or at best a few days.
Third, Content is optimized within functional silos
Classical linear thinking results in each function creates, stores and updates content within their silo without feeling responsibility for the overall content flow to the service an end-to-end customer journey. Even though performance metrics between sales and marketing measure pipeline development to deal closure, but rarely content effectiveness and efficiency along the way.
These problems are further exacerbated by the lack of an end-to-end strategy, imbalanced resources, and process governance. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 63% of businesses do not have a documented content strategy. A HubSpot survey found that 65% of marketers feel they don’t have enough time, budget, or resources to create effective content. 70% of marketers report that their processes and tools are not integrated, leading to inefficiencies.
As a result, the B2B Content Supply Chain becomes misaligned with the modern B2B Customer Journey, in which over 50% of buyers prefer self-guided experiences as a significant part of the process.
Consequently, the a B2B customers experience is fragmented, incomplete, and costly
In our previous roles, our analysis of customer facing content in a large B2B company we found a content landfill akin to a wasteland of single use plastics composed of the following
7 different strategies across sales and marketing, 16+ siloed content creation teams, 44+ tools within a single functional unit to manage content flow, 8 different repositories and over 50,000 and growing sales generated assets.
We found that just searching for one “right” piece of content (such as solution positioning and messaging) is a huge undertaking. The Content you need might be hiding as assets like PowerPoint slides, Videos, or Documents in your smartest colleagues’ laptop, in a remote corner of your website, embedded in a sizzling demo for an event or experience center, or worse in a retired content repository.
In the B2B example above, we found that it takes an experienced pre-sales representative over 15 minutes – an entire hour of lost productivity for a simple use case that involves just 4 pieces of content.
Curating, assembling, and personalizing content to service the unique needs of the customer take weeks more.
Add this up over a year over thousands of such use cases a day in B2B sales, and the costs of inefficiency add up dramatically.
Significantly, with all of the behind the scenes, we found that 90% of front-line sales representatives did not feel like content experiences met their experiences in terms of quality, timeliness or delivery.
Worse, without clear governance, or a single champion or owner for the B2B customer journey, content, they felt like the organizations full value proposition isn’t clearly articulated seamlessly across the journey
Given the high pressure on sales teams, the reflex is to ask experts to produce new content, which keeps adding to the clutter and confusion. As an alternative, the solution to the problem is to bring expensive subject matter experts to into meetings and discussions with customers.
Sales are painstakingly made, but with deep discounting that reduces net profit, growing cost of sales that hurts the bottom line, loss of customer satisfaction and confidence that impacts renewals and upsell opportunities, leaving millions of dollars in revenue for the business on the table.
When the next customer opportunity comes along, the cycle rinses and repeats. Content multiplies like single-use plastics, inefficiencies expand, and the problems continue to be swept under the carpet.
The result is often fragmented, disjointed, bloated customer engagement without context from prior engagements, or a clear line of sight into future opportunities.
Vast numbers of internal resources are consumed but ultimately just a few customers (less than 10%) are actually served. The process is neither repeatable or scalable to the remaining 90%.
The modern B2B Customer Experience doesn’t just need a tweak. It needs a complete rethink.
We believe that organizations should consider rethinking their customer engagement approach from “selling to groups of buyers” to “supporting each individual’s personalized journeys”.
A successful approach becomes less of an organizational challenge, and more of an information challenge – how to best deliver the right information, through the right channel, at the right time in a personalized way – at scale.
The good news is that a modern generation of digital technologies and tools, especially the range of applications now available with Generative AI can rewrite the traditional aspects of both content and processes governing the creation, curation and distribution across the B2B landscapes.
With AI, we can imagine a new world where generic brand websites be replaced by just a simple prompt interface.
What this means is that the need for organizations to spend millions on creating and maintaining websites and other digital content experiences that cater to the traditional notion of serving “groups of customers” such as by Line of Business, Industry, or Function, may ultimately cease to exist.
Instead, organizations would create a simple destination page with a single search prompt or a human-like chatbot powered by an AI agent.
A single prompt would query the customer on their needs with a few basic questions about their interest, context, and needs.
As the customer answers questions, a smart, guided AI engine would create a personalized digital experience based on their responses – it would include context, history, core interests, competitive positioning, demos, references, though leadership, product insights and so forth. As the customer progresses through their specific journey, new layers of content are added, or removed by AI on-the-fly based on their needs and progression through the journey. The experience layer of interaction is unique to them and maintains persistence while continuing to add deeper personalization
Consequently, each query delivers the deepest degree of personalization to the customer. It is executed through a combination of a general purpose and proprietary LLM which consists of the organizations subject matter expertise, and is supported by external LLM’s to enrich the experience with additional context, external research and expert advice. Furthermore, each interaction adds increasing levels of intelligence and context through enrichment of the learning models.
In order to realize this vision, we suggest the following steps.
1. Use AI, Predictive Modeling and Competitive Intelligence tools to build highly personalized customer insights and journeys
By applying AI to the wealth of customer data such as preferences, buying patterns and historical purchases, and combining them with external data sets on industry and business levers, create a sophisticated nuanced picture of each buyer’s unique demand signals, expectations, context and journey.
2. Create the data foundation by convert assets and subject matter expertise into modular, Lego-like digital blocks
Break down the basic hundreds of pieces of Bill of Materials which typically exists in the form of tens of thousands of hard assets like PowerPoint decks, videos, and documents into a few modular, Lego-brick like pieces of baseline content. In our case, we found that baseline content such as key messages in positioning and messaging, product differentiation, references, industry benchmarks, ultimately constituted to 50-75 baseline digital content bricks for each solution offering, making it a far easier problem to manage.
3. Sanitize the data across underpinning tools and infrastructure such as content management systems
Establish a clear model in terms to reduce data redundancy, latency, and usability. Ensure proper governance to do data tagging, vectoring to ensure that AI engines can quickly search for existing content and reuse it. Once digitized, each content block can be made AI-ready by adding the right context, vectors, and attributes to enable search, curation, and assembly. Ensuring clean data, high quality data frees up valuable subject matter expert capacity to focus on creating new content only when needed.
4. Streamline the content process flow across functional silos
In order to move content across different parts of the business, it is important to create the right process flow which enables different functions across the business to synchronize their respective Bill of Materials. Proper cross functional governance ensures that teams do not create redundant content, and that content is refreshed on a regular cadence, and retired when no longer relevant. Create a common exchange or storefront to easily qualify content resource requests and source data from across repositories to serve those requests.
5. Create “in-the-moment, personalized digital experience “briefcases” for each customer
Use AI to source, curate, and assemble digital data blocks to create deeply personalized value propositions on-the-fly. Localized AI models to make suggestions on the best data to use, suggest additional complementary content sets and compose templatized narratives for further refinement. A web interface can be served up as custom digital personalized experiences and relevant “always-on” digital briefcases for their customers. As the customer progresses through their journey, add new pieces of relevant content or modify existing pieces to ensure close synchronization with the customers need.
Summary
The B2B content supply chain is irrevocably broken. Fixing the current state won’t work. It’s time to reimagine the customer experience.
In studying and analyzing multiple aspects of this issue, we believe that AI has the potential to revolutionize B2B engagement as it exists today.
First, we believe that B2B customer engagement will continue to be an authentically human activity – where sales leaders will be required to lead even more with their personal attributes –empathy, situational awareness, commercial savvy, collaboration, connection and communication to create and cement relationships that lead to sales, adoption and renewals.
Second, we believe that when the foundational aspects of the information supply chain – the subject matter expertise that drives impactful action is digitally powered with AI the lifeblood of these interactions between buyers and sellers in B2B will become even more powerful – persistent, personalized, and prescriptive.
Third, we think that the interface of digital and human engagement will become radically simpler. Bloated websites that are aggregated pieces of content, assembled for general purpose use will give way to a single set of prompt capture capability. These prompts will trigger AI agents to extract, assemble, curate and present digital content in the form of fully immersive, personalized value propositions to be built in accordance to each organization’s unique customer journey.
This will necessitate a radical reshuffling on the entire marketing and sales operations technology stack, digital atomization of content at its most granular level, cleansing and making data AI ready, improving the process flow of information and an uplift in skills required for content curation and assembly.