Welcome to the segment, What is B2B Marketing, Part 2. In an earlier segment I compared B2B marketing to team sports. And so marketing has to be a team activity, so this is why I call this total marketing. And even though individual play does matter, team play matters as well. So this is obviously a reference to basketball. So you have an opposing team that has five players. So you too need to have five players. You too need maybe a center-like person, you also need forwards, and guards. And so we can think of total marketing as being a total departmental or cross functional kind of effort. And not everyone will be in the limelight. So using, again, a sports analogy, it's about winning. And who scores matters less than whether or not you win. So sometimes, I think, as a player, you have to be in much more of a supporting role, as opposed to let's say a goal scoring role, so to speak. But at the top level, the CEO and their executives have to realize the contributions being made. So it has to be reflected in the reward system. It has to be reflected in how they are ultimately evaluated. Because if not, they will not be motivated and if anything, they will be de-motivated to help other department when they get all perhaps the credit. Okay so, another part of total marketing is this concept of rotational execution. And in marketing you have various stages, which we'll talk about later, but let's keep it simple. Let's think of B2B marketing as occurring in three major stages. The first stage wemight call pre-marketing or even pre-engineering, which is very tech heavy, which is very specialized. But then, of course, you get into the bidding stages, where you have requests for proposals and a request for quotations. And then after the contracts are made, then, after delivery, you might have a prolonged after sales period. So you have these different stages. And as to who acts in the lead role, that should vary depending on the stage, and who has the influence, who has the expertise. And so you can think of this as almost being like soccer or football, as many countries call it. And I'm a big, actually, Real Madrid fan [LAUGH] because I do have ties to Spain, especially that area, but I admire the other team, so to speak, the Barça, the FC Barcelona team. That play this so called Tiki Taka style of football where, again, you have this rotation in terms of positions and so there's no set sort of formula in terms of who has to be the mid-fielder, who has to be the center forward who scores the goal. It's much more based on circumstances, and I think as companies we have to adopt that kind of mindset. In B2B, marketing relationships do matter, much more so than in a B2C context. Because you have fewer customers and therefore the ones that you have, it behooves you to make sure that you keep a good relationships with them. This can be fostered depending on the kind of idiosyncratic investments that are made, so it's based on these so-called locked in relationships. But I think it should be much more positive. It could also be based on people, such as between so-called in-suppliers which refer to the existent network of suppliers, and some gatekeepers, such as the procurement officer. And even there, I think the misperception is that that's bad. But I think from a transactional standpoint, relationships actually help to bring costs down. And these personal kind of ties that can be based on, especially here in Asia, school or region. But in other regions as well, it can be based on the fact that you have similar functional backgrounds. So again, even though the misperception might be that relationships are bad, from a long term transactional standpoint, they can actually lead to lowered cost. Let's take the case of airplanes, for example. Of course, upfront price matters. But you also have additional costs such as the cost of training, the cost of maintenance, the cost of supplies. And that's where dealing with a vendor, that have supplied you before, may help you to reduce those kinds of other costs. Okay, B2B takes place in a very sort of formalized way, you might think of this as being an SOP, a standard operating procedure, so I won't go into the nitty gritty details of each step here identified. But the point is, is that each step kind of differs in terms of how much leeway the buyer has. So I call this the window of opportunity, and as you will note here in this inverted triangle, the further down you go, the less room to maneuver, room, does the buyer have. And so you may actually be closed out. For example, if the specifications for rewarding a contract, a bid, may be incompatible to what you're willing to offer, or can offer. So what this implies is that if you are proactive enough, you should enter early, hence this concept of early vendor involvement, also known as EVI. So this implies that the best stage to get in, is stage number one, if you can do it. So this is an example of a company, or companies that do it. Steel companies here in Asia, whether it's POSCO and Tata. And I'm sure other steel companies elsewhere do the same or strive to do the same, which is to get in early, where they try to collaborate. So the keyword here is collaborate with the buyers in terms of formulating their problem. So in a way, I think the business definition for these companies has evolved to one where they are no longer selling just steel, but rather selling or solving a problem. In the case of POSCO, how to make cars lighter, because it enhances the speed of cars. And in the case of Tata, how to optimize and reduce processing cost for their lifting and excavation product buyers. So it pays for you to get in early. Okay, so the segment takeaways for both parts one and two is that B2B marketing is very complex, but we can sort of simplify it to the extent that we can identify who are in the buying center. But it behooves you by knowing that, to also form an appropriate counterpart, which I call the selling center. We also learned that B2B processes can be very, very systematic, so your marketing too has to be systematically aligned with what the buyer does. And the last point was that, again, you have to be proactive in B2B marketing, and hence, getting in earlier serves you well.
