The pressure to achieve top line revenue growth and profitable growth strategies remain as the key challenges B2B CEO’s face today. Compounding these challenges is the rapid transformation underway in the buyer-seller relationship brought on by the advent of digital marketing and social media technology. For many B2B CEO’s, they are witnessing the conventional strategies associated with sales and marketing being dismissed and tossed aside by buyers at an alarming rate. The seller centric world of yesteryears has literally been turned upside down as buyers are seemingly in more control than ever and traditional strategies no longer are effective.

1. Buyer Experience Innovation
Why CEO’s Must Make This Their Top Priority
By Tony Zambito, President & CEO , Goal Centric
www.goalcentric.com
www.thebuyerexperience.om
Copyright 2010 Goal Centric Management, Inc.

2. Introduction
The pressure to achieve top line revenue growth and
profitable growth strategies remain as the key challenges B2B
CEO’s face today. Compounding these challenges is the rapid
transformation underway in the buyer-seller relationship
brought on by the advent of digital marketing and social
media technology. For many B2B CEO’s, they are witnessing
the conventional strategies associated with sales and
marketing being dismissed and tossed aside by buyers at an
alarming rate. The seller centric world of yesteryears has
literally been turned upside down as buyers are seemingly in
more control than ever and traditional strategies no longer
are effective.

3. A Mandate for Innovation

4. Challenges
These challenges are creating a mandate for CEO’s to
innovate towards new means of attracting new buyers,
retaining existing customers, and maximizing value through
customer loyalty. A CEO today must think in a much broader
context than the myriad of different approaches that have
arisen over the past few years to respond as well as adapt to
the transformative events taking place in B2B markets. This
broader context is essential to viewing in totality the buyer
experience one has with their organization. Today’s CEO’s
must make Buyer Experience Innovation a top priority to
succeed in the rapidly changing B2B marketplace.

5. A Definition

6. Definition
Let’s define Buyer Experience Innovation:
“Creating in totality an ideal buying experience and
innovative interactions that engages as well as enables buyers
to enter into a transactional and loyal relationship with the
organization”
Over the past decade, customer experience has become part
of the landscape of business thinking. In particular, customer
experience has found its way more prominently in the B2C
market space as the emphasis on creating brick and mortar as
well as online experiences has become an essential means of
winning over customers. New technologies associated with
mobile, digital, and social media is causing resurgence in
customer experience thinking today. In the B2B context, it is
important to delineate this context whereas customer
experience can be viewed as essential to back office
operations while buyer experience is essential to the front
office – primarily sales and marketing.

7. The Why Reasons

8. Why
Why must B2B CEO’s make Buyer Experience Innovation a top
priority? There are several reasons, of many, that can be
noted:
Growth Strategies: The lifeblood of B2B organizations is
creating sustainable top line revenue as well as market share
growth year after year. The path to sustaining growth
strategies is through creating innovative and rewarding buyer
experiences that help buyers to meet their goals.
Alignment: The issue of sales and marketing alignment has
been written about extensively over the past few
years. Many organizations continue to struggle with this
issue. When this alignment is problematic, it directly affects
the buyer’s experience and not for the better.

9. Cohesion: In conversations with several B2B CEO’s, a recent
issue is that while there have been new approaches related to
areas such as demand generation, content marketing, and
social media, there is a lack of cohesion in these efforts that
contributes to the overall buyer experience.
Static View of Buying Cycle: For many years, we have
conditioned ourselves to look at the buying cycle one
dimensionally and through the prism of the seller only. Many
sales and marketing approaches have been designed around
these static views, whether they be defined as 4, 5, or 6
stages makes little difference, and in today’s digital age
creates a severe disconnect with buyers.

10. Lack of Insight: While B2C has made strides in customer
insights, B2B has lagged behind in attaining critical buyer
insight that contributes towards making informed
decision. Some of the B2B CEO’s I’ve talked to basically say
this “not knowing” truly keeps them up at night and that
decision-making can be an art form of crap shooting.
Sales Cycle Modeling: The sales cycle and the numerous
selling models that exist have been reinvented over and over
throughout the years. Evident to many B2B CEO’s today is
that buyers today no longer make themselves accessible to
this means of one-way communication and have become
resourceful in resisting such efforts.

11. Design Thinking: Forward thinking CEO’s today are leading
their organizations through sound design thinking in products,
services, and experiences. Buyer Experience Design and the
sub-component of Buyer Journey Design will become critical
pieces of the puzzle in developing buyer experiences that
enables and engages buyers.
Brand Experience: While the concept of the holistic brand
experience has gained prominence in B2C circles, the sales-
driven cultures that exists in B2B organizations have not
considered brand experience in the same holistic
manner. Today's leading B2B CEO's are beginning to make
brand experience a considerable component of strategy.

12. Bold New Thinking

13. Bold
We are undoubtedly in a transitional period in B2B strategies
related to sales, marketing, and services. This requires of us
and B2B CEO’s today bold new thinking around Buyer
Experience Innovation as a means of achieving acquisition and
growth strategies. Recent work with thought leaders and
challenging issues faced by our work (Goal Centric) with such
clients as HP and FedEx has pushed through some revealing
thinking around Buyer Experience Innovation and to see the
problem of various compartmentalized approaches. In future
eBooks, I will explore and share further thinking related to key
principles for Buyer Experience Innovation. I also look forward
to sharing innovative strategies and tools that have proven to
be effective in shaping the buyer experience.

14. Produced By:
Tony Zambito
Buyer Experience
President & CEO
Goal Centric
Innovation:
www.goalcentric.com
www.thebuyerexperience.com
Why CEO’s Must
Copyright 2010 Make This Their
Goal Centric Management, Inc.
Top Priority