There's a new truth in B2B marketing: if you want to move products, you need to move minds. Most companies suffer from a delusion, and it's this: that buyers always make decisions in a rational, logical, and economic way. The result is a slew of features-driven B2B marketing that few people really care about. In recent years B2B customers have evolved. The don't just want to buy from businesses anymore, they want to buy into them. The problem is too few B2B companies realize this. They continue with the same product-centric marketing that increases revenue by a percentage point here and there. It seems safe but it's dangerously short-sighted, because it doesn't deliver the transformational and long-term growth that makes businesses category leaders. It's even more important to address this issue at such a critical and delicate moment in the world economy. Marketing leaders require strategies that have an exponential, rather than an incremental, effect on brand, marketing and sales, and to implement them they need the new super-skills this book teaches. This involves establishing a core purpose, shifting the focus from products to people, from features to feelings and from messaging to storytelling, acknowledging that neuro science has proved that people buy on emotion and justify with fact. In other words, it requires a completely different mindset to the one that's prevalent right now, one that we call 'Humanizing B2B'.
