For our fourth sales play (see Storyboard Sales Play #1 – “Sphere of Influence,” Storyboard Sales Play #2 – “Stack Ranking” & Storyboard Sales Play #3 – “Market Intelligence”), this play is one of my favourites. I’d like you to remember the movie The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy and her motley crew of friends (Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion) are trying to get to the land of Oz and visit the wizard inside the Emerald City. Along their journey, they encounter some pretty hairy situations, like fighting trees and flying attack monkeys… and they get pretty discouraged. What I believe would have motivated and better guided this team would have been a clear picture of what the Emerald City looks like, smells like, and benefits from – in advance! Dorothy would have been more determined to march to the Land of Oz.
Using my silly analogy, I want you to picture this sales play’s engagement strategy. Your prospective customers are more willing to shift priorities and change if they can gain a clear roadmap of what “better” looks like. They also need to be able to figuratively touch it, smell it, and taste it. This is what makes experiential marketing so effective. Since you’re a B2B seller, and a customer can’t “touch” your solution, here are ideas from our customers:
- Take a page out of the real estate industry. When you buy a house, you do virtual walk-throughs of the property. From the comfort of your living room, you can Google Earth the neighbourhood and visually walk room by room around the property. You can literally imagine yourself living in that home, cooking, having friends over, etc. This same process is possible in B2B. Customers of ours have designed virtual CX experiences for their world. A prospective customer can see a day in a life, interviews from customers/employees, and the visualized world that they can literally begin daydreaming about.
- Take the digital world into the experiential/live world. Customers of ours recognize that producing a visual representation of best-in-class is too cost/time prohibitive, and having people meet is more effective. Customers of ours like Rockwell Automation, Teleperformance, and Hu-Friedy will use rich media and digital sales to bring customers to events for collaboration. They realize that if they invite the right people, and perhaps even have a customer at the event, their own customers can present the Emerald City for them.
What does the Emerald City look like in your world? How can your prospective customers gain an experiential sneak-peak behind the curtains to meet the wizard?
