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7 Min
Prioritization isn’t a topic that gets enough attention in B2B marketing.
You can have an amazing product. You can solve a real tangible problem for your market. You can get in front of your target buyers with quality content and messaging.
And you can still fail.
Because none of that matters unless the problem you solve is an urgent priority for your target personas.
This isn’t new. Getting a market to prioritize the problems you solve has been a marketing challenge since forever.
What has changed is the number of problem solving options available to prospects.
In 2023 there were over 11,000 software solutions available across 50 categories… just in marketing technology.
Prediction, by the end of 2025 there will be over 25,000 platforms on this chart. AI is going to make it so much easier to build tablestakes software, pair that with all of the tech layoffs in 2022 + 2023 and an increased demand for niche versions of existing technology. We’re going to see a flood of lower cost, higher specificity products over the next years.
All of these solutions are built to “solve” a problem.
So as a marketer, you have to not only market your brand, you also have to market your category.
Further complicating matters is the recent macroeconomic climate in B2B tech.
Pre-2022 was an era of tech-bloat. Now we are seeing shoestring budgets, smaller teams and a need for a direct tie to ROI. Under these conditions, 91% of sales teams missed their quotas in 2023.
If your product is perceived as a nice-to-have, it will remain so.
So how do you go about making your product a priority in your customers mind? One that solves an urgent problem?
That’s where creating demand comes into play.
Prioritization is the goal of Demand Creation.
Arguments are out there claiming that you can’t “create demand” in your target market.
IMO that’s very short-sighted.
Creating demand is possible, but it’s like inception.
You have to plant the right seed in your target market’s mind. Then you have to nurture it until one day, your customer realizes they have an urgent problem that they need to solve and they know just who can help them solve it.
Prioritization comes down to a few core factors you need to align and focus on throughout your marketing.
You should be solving a specific painful problem that a specific persona cares a lot about.
As marketers, we have it hammered into us that we should talk about benefits instead of features (both are important, just at different parts of the buying journey).
But we should have equally ingrained into us the importance of emphasizing the pain of our prospects current situation.
We’re motivated more by pain than by potential benefits.
If the pain isn’t great enough, then a prospect won’t feel the need to make a change.
This is why the problem you’re solving has to be something a specific persona cares a lot about.
If your product doesn’t solve a painful problem for a customer, then you need to do more customer research and work on the product before you can expect to find success.
Category and positioning play a massive role in prioritization and greatly impacts your strategy.
Brands need to be deliberate in positioning, otherwise you run the risk of your customers and market positioning your product for you.
Positioning maven April Dunford explains why that can be a problem and what needs to be true about your positioning for you to succeed:
As you determine your positioning and category you’ll want to answer specific category questions. Is your category mature, growing or new? What does the competitive landscape look like? The answers to these questions are important because it will greatly influence your strategy.
Based on this information, you should understand how much you should focus on marketing your category versus how much you should focus on marketing your key differentiators.
Organizations in mature, competitive categories should focus on their key differentiators and what makes them the clear and obvious choice amongst a field of competitors.
Those in new categories or categories without strong competition should focus their efforts on marketing their category and emphasizing the pain of the problem they solve in order to drive category prioritization.
When it comes to prioritization you need to understand Problem Awareness, Solution Awareness and Brand Awareness.
Both the problem you solve and the category you are positioned in are part of understanding levels of awareness.
If you’re in a mature, competitive category, you don’t have to focus on the problem at the category level. That’s already taken care of. You’re more likely to come up against a named competitor. In this situation, you want to focus your problem awareness efforts on the problems and pains your unique differentiator solves.
If you’re in a new category without a lot of competition, you want to focus on the problem at the category level. Emphasizing a substantial pain that has been untreated up until this point and how damaging it can be. Encouraging them to change their response to that pain.
Your job with solution awareness is the same regardless of problem or category. It is about how this pain can be solved.
The logic of the solution should be vendor agnostic, but all roads should be leading to your solution as the no-doubt choice.
Brand awareness is very important, but the goal is not general brand awareness. It is specific.
You want your target market to think of your brand the moment they have a specific, important problem that you solve.
Only a small percentage of your market is actively in a buying motion. Which means your goal for the vast majority of your target market is to make it onto your target customers shortlist when they do encounter that problem. Making it onto that shortlist is imperative because 90% of buyers will choose a vendor that is on the initial list.
Target Market > Target Accounts > Target Personas
Customer research and insights are foundational for effective marketing.
Out of customer research come target personas. The people who are going to be making buying decisions when it comes to solutions like yours.
Personas get a bad rap in marketing because historically they’ve been done poorly. Particularly those based purely on demographic data.
For personas to be effective they need to focus on motivations, problems and challenges they face, specific sources of influence, what gets them promoted and other information that can help you become one of those sources of influence.
But convincing one person is just the start.
One of the biggest hurdles facing go-to-market teams is the role of expanding buying groups.
The average number of decision makers involved in a software purchase in a typical B2B sale is 6-10. With each additional person involved in the decision decreasing the likelihood of a prospective sale.
Adding additional complexity, the group at each organization is different depending on the product, implementation, cost, impact, problem being solved etc.
The Challenger Customer discusses how these groups are dysfunctional. They don’t work in sync and can have folks with competing priorities within these buying committees that can be particularly tough to win over.
Counterintuitively, your goal isn’t to win over each individual in these buying groups through a direct appeal specifically to issues you believe they care about. You are better served helping your target buyer align them to prioritize a common core problem that you solve. Arming these champions with the materials they need to build the internal consensus.
When building out your personas, you need to delineate between your target buyer persona, the one most directly associated with the problem you solve and the personas of the larger buying group. While no two groups will be the same, oftentimes there will be specific roles that are involved in most deals which you can tailor personas around.
Your point of view and the insights you provide should be framed as a secret weapon that can help solve the problem at hand.
To break through the noise, your POV has to challenge the existing status quo in a way that makes your prospects rethink how they approach the problem that you solve.
If you’re in an existing category, it means highlighting your unique differentiator. For new categories it’s about highlighting your category as the solution to the urgent problem.
According to the Challenger Customer, a compelling point-of-view is centered around a “commercial insight”. A commercial insight is grounded in real data that you can point to which emphasizes the pain and negative impact of sticking with the status quo.
This is similar to the “burning platform” strategy which has been in change management for decades.
The idea of the burning platform is that you're standing on the platform of a deep sea oil rig (representing the status quo). That platform is on fire. Your choice is to either stick with the status quo and be engulfed in the flames, or you take action and jump (ideally into a lifeboat with your branding on the side).
Both of the strategies focus first on changing the way your prospect thinks about the existing status quo. Changing thought patterns is essential to changing behaviors.
Whether you call it a commercial insight or a burning platform, it needs to be at the heart of your content strategy, with all roads leading back to the necessity of changing the status quo.
Prioritization is essential for success in B2B, but it is rarely discussed as the core of a marketing strategy.
Prioritization requires many functionally disparate activities to be aligned across go-to-market teams. Your strategy for prioritization should be explicit, with each function understanding how their role plays into the overarching strategy.
Positioning, product, content, messaging, growth strategy, brand, sales all need to work in concert to make your target market prioritize the problems you solve and solution you offer.
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