In my last post, I wrote that leading marketers are creating content that teaches customers something new about their business that motivates action, progressively disrupting customers’ thinking about their business.
Now, I want to lay out what these disruptive content paths actually look like and how they work.
To properly dissect disruptive content paths, we first need to take a step back. Based on years of CEB sales and marketing research, we’ve observed leading commercial teams orienting their sales activity to what we have come to call “commercial insight.” A commercial insight is an insight about the customer’s business that re-frames the way customers assign value to the areas where the supplier outperforms competitors.
My colleagues here at CEB, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, have written extensively about commercial insight in a book that has taken the B2B sales and marketing community by storm: The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.
For purpose of illustration, let’s take a hypothetical example of a commercial insight.
(By hypothetical example, I really do mean that this is made up strictly for purposes of illustration. I don’t actually know if there is an ultrasound tech absenteeism problem. So, don't quote me on that. )
Let’s say you supply ultrasound medical equipment to obstetricians. You have a unique design and manufacturing capability that enables you to develop especially lightweight, ergonomic ultrasound equipment.
Your commercial insight involves absenteeism rates for ultrasound technicians. Using their hands and wrists all day causes techs to get carpal tunnel syndrome, which leads them to call in sick fairly frequently. Most obstetricians view this absenteeism problem as just a cost of doing business. They believe it happens because any human being using their hands and wrists like that all day long is going to suffer from carpal tunnel.
But, being a savvy marketer, you dig in further. Through research, you discover that this carpal tunnel is actually caused more by the ultrasound equipment than by the hand and wrist motions. You determine that with lighter, ergonomically designed equipment, you can dramatically reduce the incidence of carpal tunnel. That’s your commercial insight. You can leverage this insight to teach the customer something new about their business that they didn’t appreciate before. You have re-framed the way the customer thinks about her business in a way that favors your competitive differentiator.
Notice how commercial insight goes well beyond thought leadership. In the ultrasound equipment category, most thought leadership would focus on development of new technologies, such as portability in ultrasound devices. While this might inform the customer about something new, it would fall short on actually changing the customer’s view of their own business and motivating them to act.
Commercial insight is about changing the way the customer thinks of their world (i.e., it “breaks their frame”) and in a way that leads back to you uniquely as a supplier.
Unfortunately, in today’s information environment, delivering insight is still not enough. Timing, as they say, is everything. Our research indicates that the average customer contacts a supplier once they’re 57 percent through their purchase decision process, meaning that most of your customers have long since landed on their key buying criteria by the time they’re talking to your sales reps. Influencing them away from those criteria is like trying to re-shape already dried cement. It ain’t gonna happen.
This is where we’ve found leading marketers using content marketing in a very specific way. They engineer a “disruptive content path,” which accomplishes three things with the customer:
- Sparks the customer to explore her existing mental model about how something works in her business
- Introduces a disruptive idea that upsets the customer’s existing mental model
- Confronts the customer with the disruptive idea in the customer’s terms
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Here’s what a disruptive content path might look like using the same ultrasound equipment example:
Spark:
- Infographics, blog posts and the like on the average yearly cost of absenteeism in a typical practice
- Content that teases the link between absenteeism, carpal tunnel and ultrasound equipment
With this content, you’re just trying to get that obstetrician to reconsider the cost of absenteeism in managing her practice, and to provoke her into exploring a little more.
Introduce:
- A short white paper with evidence about the hidden impact of absenteeism on patient satisfaction
- A video testimonial of an obstetrician talking about the tech absenteeism problem in her business, and how there were some hidden costs she didn’t fully appreciate
- Third party medical studies on the link between ergonomic design of tools and severity of carpal tunnel syndrome
The content here dials up the pain of the problem. It also introduces the disruptive idea, which is that ultrasound equipment is actually the main culprit behind tech absenteeism, not the nature of the tech’s job. This content suggests that a really painful problem in her business is actually much more controllable than she appreciated. You just taught the customer something new about her business.
Confront:
- An online benchmarking tool that invites the obstetrician to share a little about her practice and in return receive comparative information on how absenteeism affects other practices like hers. Or,
- A pain calculator, where the obstetrician can plug in a few parameters about the size of her practice, how many techs she has, how many patients she has, and then get an estimate of how much absenteeism is costing her, including hidden costs.
This is information the customer can’t easily get herself. You’ve just enabled the customer to size her own underappreciated problem in her own terms. Now you’ve given the customer motivation to act.
Spark. Introduce. Confront. That’s what your content needs to do. If you’re creating content that doesn’t clearly lie on a disruptive path, we’d argue you are wasting your and your customer’s time. Period.
