Ask your favorite marketer or sales person to name their toughest prospect … almost invariably they will shudder and say, “Engineers!”

My meandering career path started with a twenty-year stint in the nuclear engineering departments of America’s nuclear submarines. I have to agree that persuading a pragmatic engineer to buy your product can be hard… if you don’t know the facts I am sharing in this article.

First, if you don’t already know it, engineers don’t have much love or respect for marketers and their advertising. They call it “artsy-fartsy” or “eye candy”… stuff that emphasizes cool looks over useful information. It’s a “waste of their time.”

The smart business-to-business marketing tactic?

This is an easy one… give them what they want. Whether you are creating content for your website or a brochure, make it professional and informative. You may have noticed that white papers and well-written advertorials bring a better response. Engineers want to be educated, not sold. Their analytical brains feast on reams of technical data that would leave most folks climbing the walls.

Ask your favorite engineer if marketing copy helps them make a decision to buy. Invariably, they’ll tell you, “I always base my decision on hard data.”  Let them believe it – as long as they respond to your ads and buy your products. You can persuade with facts and a story, right?

Second, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “Engineers are human beings first and engineers second. They will respond to creativity and cleverness just like everyone else.” Believe that and you may as well pour your money down a rat hole.

Time and again, testing has proven that a letter with a straightforward, low key, professional approach in will outpull a fancy creative package. It doesn’t have to be dull as dishwater, just refrain from being a drama queen when you describe your latest, new and improved product. Forget the hard sell approach.

If you’ve tried to hard sell an engineer, you know they can turn on an incredibly stubborn, mule-headed sales resistance… unless you back up your claims with facts.

Engineers respond best when you address them as knowledgeable technical professionals in search of solutions to engineering problems.

Third, contrary to “normal” consumers, engineers base their buying decisions far more on logic than emotions. I’m sure that every course, book, or article you have read on copywriting emphasized the importance benefits rather than features and leading off with a strong emotional appeal.

Believe it or not, when an engineer is buying a new piece of equipment… even a HDTV, DVD player, or other electronic device for the home… he likes to gather a big pile of facts and spend some time puzzling over which is the best option (it drives my wife nuts). They prefer to make a well-informed buying decision rather than a quick impulse purchase on a whim.

Don’t get me wrong. Emotional aspects do come into play when an engineer is evaluation a purchase. Sometimes a gut feeling closes the gap when the facts are fuzzy… sometimes that gut feeling will override the apparent facts.

Your marketing and sales messages to engineers must be clear and to the point.

Simply lead out with your offer and tell the reader how it will solve his problems. How hard is that?

Fourth, as copywriters, we have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that features are boring and we must present dazzling benefits. Not in this market. Here’s why…

Your engineer prospect is working for a production company like an OEM (original equipment manufacturer), VAR (value added reseller), or systems integrator. He plans on using your product as part of his final assembly. He needs to know your product’s features – performance characteristics, efficiency ratings, power requirements and technical specifications.

Whether you are marketing pumps, electric motors, or micro chips, the engineer knows their benefits. He needs to know their features before he can make a buying decision.

Best approach: figure out how your widget can make his gizmo better and tell him how it does.

Fifth, learn the language and don’t talk down to your reader. By that I mean don’t assume just because you had to look up the meaning of “refrigerant ton” or “EEPROM”, you need to explain them to an audience of refrigeration engineers or computer designers.

Good writers of any sort “know” that you avoid jargon if you want to write clearly, but…

Engineers and techies like jargon… it helps them communicate clearly in their specialty.

In reality, all groups of people have their own jargon and love to use it. It says, “I’m hip. I’m an insider.” Engineers are no different. So learn the language. You just might convince them that you’re “one of them”.

Sixth, a word about graphics. Engineers communicate with them extensively. Not the usual slick beauties or cute clip-art that comes out of your graphics art department, but graphs, diagrams, engineering drawings, charts, blueprints, tables, mathematical symbols and expressions. The average Joe or Jane might not get the point but your engineer prospects will say, “This is solid technical information, not a pile of promotional fluff.”

Learn the visual language of your engineering prospects and use these symbols and artwork throughout your website, email, or offline advertising

The best visuals are those specific to the engineer’s specialty.  Electrical engineers like circuit diagrams.  Mechanical engineers understand pump curves. Computer programmers feel comfortable looking at flow charts.

Engineers, programmers, and other techno-geeks are the same as everyone else… except when it comes to sales and marketing. Logic and analysis trump emotions and “hype” every time.

Here are ten proven ways to make your B2B marketing messages hit the mark more consistently.

I. Be technically accurate. When an engineer of a technical expert is thinking of buying your product, they want facts. Lots of them. Cold, hard, accurate details about your product.

The emphasis here is on accuracy.

These folks are experts in their fields. They can spot a faker in an instant. Take the time to really get to know the subject you are writing about, get your facts straight, and get your company’s engineers to check it over for you.

Give your engineering and technical prospects accurate facts and you’ll be well on the way to persuading them.

Part of technical accuracy is the use of precise words. For instance, when you are talking about air compressors, “high pressure” can mean 125 psig in some applications and 4,500 psig in other applications. How much pressure does your high pressure air compressor provide? Don’t try to weasel out with generalities. Don’t write “huge storage capacity” when you mean “500 Gb” or “high torque motor” when you mean “686 ft.-lbs of torque.”

II. Be concise… and clear. As Strunk and White teach us in The Elements of Style, conciseness “requires not that the writer … avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Engineers, managers, and others on the purchasing committee are busy. They aren’t going to give your marketing a lot of their time… especially if your message rambles.

Go ahead and pack your B2B marketing message with accurate product facts and strong sales arguments, but keep it tight, logical, and concise. Save your flowery phrases and purple prose for that novel you are going to write one day.

III. Simplify, simplify. So said Henry David Thoreau. It’s great advice… even if it is redundant.

When marketing technical products, the ability to explain complex concept and principles with concise clarity is essential to your success… even if members of your target audience are authorities on the subject. Instead of trying to dazzle the reader with your vocabulary, explain your topic so a seventh grade reader could understand it.

Your readers will stick with you a lot longer when the reading is easy… as long as your facts are technically accurate.

Years ago, Bob Bly shared this example of how to clarify gobbledygook:

“In the first draft of catalog copy for a line of pollution control equipment, the product manager wrote:

Here is how he made this technical gobbledygook more readable:

“The interior wall must be continually wetted to avoid solids buildup”.

Jargon is a problem for many marketing writers. Engineers, analysts, and other technical people like how it eases communications. A little well-placed jargon will help you establish rapport with the tech crowd, but a little goes a long way.

Remember your goal is simple, accurate, clarity.

IV. Know your audience and explain your product with the level of technical information they prefer.

If you are telling top management about your new embedded software chip, you might keep it short and simple, telling them that it is a:

“Field Programmable Gate Array designed to handle high-speed, broadband video streams similar to those used by the U.S. Air Force reconnaissance drones as they beam real-time information from Afghanistan to the Pentagon.”

When you write the promotion to design engineers, you can include:

One thing to keep in mind: in many high-tech companies, the CEO and the senior design engineer is the same person. It pays to know your prospect and market accordingly.

• “FPGA core capable of being synthesized in Altera, Lattice and Xilinx FPGAs.
• Supports H.264 variable and fixed bit-rate encoding of video streams.
• Encodes video data at 3 clocks/pixel.
• Typical clock rate in an Lattice ECP-2 FPGA is 100Mhz.
• Multiple cores can be used for processing larger size or higher bandwidth images.
• Built in DDR2 memory controller (FPGA vendor independent).
• Built in Decoder that can decode A2e H.264 encoded streams.
• Can be bolted on to A2e Image Signal Processing Pipeline for complete streaming video solution. Custom versions available.”

 What is the best way to get to know your prospect?

V. Talk to the people who are going to use your product… ask them about their most pressing problems. That is really about as elaborate as your marketing research needs to be. By talking with a few knowledgeable engineers, you can quickly grasp what industrial buyers find useful in a technical product.

Visit with your clients’ technical and marketing and you can discover which product features should be hi–lighted in your marketing copy and why they appeal to the buyer. Then, apply your usual persuasive marketing skill to turn these features into sales‐oriented “reason‐why‐they‐should‐buy” copy. The kind of copy that generates leads – goodwill – orders – and money.

VI. Tailor your promotions to the buying process. The business-to-business sales process can require many lengthy steps. When you are creating a sales letter, email, or web page to generate leads, you are simply looking for folks who would like to know more about your product. Focus your efforts persuading them to ask for more information. The sale comes later.

When a prospect responds by requesting more information, don’t send a sales letter and a brochure, send information. This is where “edu-marketing” shines. Edu-marketing means educating your market. When your prospects ask for information, that is what they expect to receive.

Send a special report or white paper that tells all about your product without a noticeable sales message. Case studies are also good edu-marketing tools. They let your customers tell about their problems and how your product was the perfect solution. Interestingly, when the customer in your case study is honestly enthusiastic about your product, it sneaks right past the most skeptical, “hype detector”… especially when the information is tailored to the prospect.

Send lots of details and facts to the engineers… White papers detailing all the technical aspects of your product’s applications, case studies about your solution of challenging engineering problems, and spec sheets for quick reference.

Tone down the details and focus your results on efficiency, cost savings, and return on investment if your prospect is the CFO. Show them enough of the financial details that they can make their analyses and feel like they have made a smart decision. Reports and case studies showing savings, ROI, and an improved bottom line will resonate with them.

When your prospect is the CEO, distill your information down to the the most important points. Keep everything pertinent and pithy. Solutions to problems and financial results are important, but the bottom line is how your product will bring more sales and greater profits to their company.

VII. Let case histories demonstrate proven performance. The biggest concern of business buyers is if your product really does what you claim it does. They want the comfort of knowing that your product has proven its performance in real‐life applications.

Case histories – concise “product success stories” – are a foolproof way to put the buyer’s mind at ease.

They work like a testimonial on steroids. The typical one-line blurb in consumer ads won’t convey the information your business prospect is hungry for. The tight, concise paragraph common in business-to-business brochures and ads works somewhat better. However, your best results will come from two to four page cases studies where your customer shares the details of his problems and how your team and your product provided a profitable solution.

VIII. Emphasize the features. Of course, you will stress the benefits your prospects will receive from your product. But remember technical features are important also. While you may feel features like particular materials of construction, pressure ratings, or design geometry are inconsequential or meaningless, they are important to the technical buyer. In fact, they are often the keys to a buy or no-buy decision.

One effective way to bring out the features is to tie them to the benefits with a “because” statement:

• Because this system uses L‐band frequency and improved MTI (moving target indication), it can detect targets up to 50 times smaller than conventional S‐band radars.
• Because the geometric shape of the seal ring amplifies the force against the disc, the valveʹs sealing performance improves as the pressure grows.
• Because no mechanical systems or moving parts are required, Hydro‐Clean consumes less energy and takes less space than conventional pump driven clarifiers.

IX. Summarize with graphics. Graphs, tables, charts, and diagrams explain and summarize technical
information in a way that engineers and other analytically inclined people understand quickly.

Graphic elements like headlines, subheads, and body copy are good places for your sales message. Many of the “facts and figures” engineers want to see are best presented in tables, side‐bars, charts, and inserts.

Good illustrations help share your message… photographs add believability and drawings help readers visualize complex products and processes.

X. Check the numbers. Last, but certainly not least, double check your numbers. A misplaced decimal can kill of the credibility of your marketing message.

Many of us became marketers and writers just to get away from having to deal with numbers; all the math whizzes in our class went on to become computer programmers, accountants, and media buyers. But to create an effective business-to-business marketing message, you have to respect numbers.

In technical promotions, a misplaced decimal or other math mistake can be less obvious to the marketer, since the material is so highly technical. How many marketers or writers could say, at a glance, whether the pore size in a reverse osmosis filter should be 0.005 or 0.00005 or 0.0005 microns? (How many of us even know what a micron is?) Yet, to the chemical engineer, the pore size of the filter may be as crucial in the application he has planned for your product. Get it wrong, and you’ve lost a sale.

All numbers in business-to-business promotional literature should be checked and double‐checked by the writer, by the marketing department, and by technical reviewers on the client side.

A successful marketing plan should focus on one thing – your customer – and this article shows you how to do just that. We’re going to find the answer to “Why Should I Buy From You?” Some folks say “What’s in it for me?” It’s the same idea.

Obviously, you have a product or service that you want to share with other people. A lot of other people. And you’re considering the idea of writing a marketing plan so you can reach more people that want to buy your product or service.

You’ve been doing some research reading books and articles like this to find out how to plan your marketing. In your reading, you keep hearing about the importance of a great Unique Selling Proposition or USP.

Now, you want to know how to create that USP for your own product or service.

I understand exactly. Keep reading; you might find the approach presented in this article a bit different than the previous advice you have received.

Maybe you’re confused about exactly what a USP is. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t a little confused at first. I suppose you may have tried to create your own USP already and found that it just didn’t connect with you customers the way you thought it would. Pretty frustrating, isn’t it?

Consider this – maybe you’ve been looking for customer love in all the wrong places. Have you thought of simply asking your customers why they do business with you?

I believe you and your staff could have spent hours burning the midnight oil trying to create a concise statement that explains your product or service and the benefits it delivers. You brainstormed every possible benefit for every feature. It looked so simple when you saw Domino’s and FedEx’s USPs.

Perhaps it would have worked better if you had reviewed the testimonials your customers have given you. Maybe your customers told a staff member why they like your business. Did you ask your staff that question?

After pulling an all-nighter full of brain sweat, caffeine, and pizza, dawn brought you face to face with the cold reality – your USP could work just as well for any of a dozen of your competitors. It wasn’t unique.

Now, you just want a simple common sense way to figure out how to answer your prospect’s question, “Why should I buy from you?”

Try this: Look through your customer correspondence files. You want to find where you let them down or didn’t meet their expectations. You might even find a few complements where they told you what you did right.

Also, ask your staff to share things your customers have said to them during their buying experience – good and bad.

And you, the CEO, Big Kahuna, or Top Dog, take your top ten clients/customers to lunch. Take one person each day for the next two weeks. Ask them straight up, “Are we performing as you expect us to?” and “How can I improve my performance for you?” Take notes! Or use a micro-recorder. It will tell your customer you are serious about his business.

You have your answers. All you have to do now is order more pizza, put on a fresh pot of coffee and call a staff meeting. Go through everything you learned about what your customers want and expect. List everything they wanted that you didn’t provide. Make a list of what they like best.

Stir well and keep the focus of your discussions on the customers’ desires. They just told you why they buy from you. Wrap it up in a concise pithy sentence and tell you prospects why they should buy from you, too.

One last thing: take those lame “Visions” and Mission Statements” off the walls and replace them with your USP. That is the reason you’re in business.

The secrets of growing your business in good times or bad is to focus your efforts on three simple strategies:

1. Find more prospects
2. Convert more prospects to customers
3. Increase the value of each customer

• Increase the average sale
• Increase the number of sales to each client

Pretty simple, right?

Simple concepts and tough, exciting, achievable challenges for any entrepreneur.

In this blog, I’m going to share the best ideas, techniques, and tactics for achieving these strategies.

Before we launch into this too far, let me mention referrals.

It is true that referrals are the easiest prospects to convert. They usually show up gift wrapped and ready to go. Some established businesses do quite well on referrals alone. However, planning to grow your business with referrals and ignoring other methods of finding prospects is a sure way to failure. After all, you have to find some clients or customers somewhere before they can give you referrals, don’t you?

Find More Prospects

Your plan needs specific activities you plan to do to find more prospects.

You could make a list of everyone you know and set up a schedule of badgering them. That’s the basic MLM model that will guarantee to cut back your busy social calendar.

You could grab the phone book and start “dialing for dollars” (cold calling)… if you’re a masochist.

Or you can advertise. More about that later.

Convert More Prospects into Customers

Your plan needs to include how you are going to convert more prospects to customers.

Do you have a Unique Selling Proposition? (That’s a fancy way of asking “Why should anyone do business with you?”) It is a key component of your sales system and needs to be a factor in all your marketing plans.
How good are your sales skills? Don’t laugh. If you don’t like to sell, you definitely need a good sales team – even if it is only one person. After all, the whole point of being in business is to sell stuff. But you already know that.

Increase the Value of Each Customer

Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty. What are you going to do get your clients or customers to buy more of your products or services AND come back for more?

A little attention in this area will yield greater results than almost anything else you can do. Sadly, far too many small businesses focus so intently on referrals and finding new customers that they completely ignore the gold mine in their customer database.

Stay tuned and we’ll be going into more detail on all of these.

I don’t know you, but I’d bet that as an entrepreneur you are a “doer” and not a “planner”.

That is a good thing. Successful people are doers. They don’t sit around day-dreaming or wishing some fairy would come along with the right numbers for the next Lotto drawing. A doer gets in there and makes something happen.

You are probably a good salesperson… maybe even a great salesperson… most entrepreneurs are. But sales isn’t marketing. And that’s where problems start.

It’s a Question of Priorities

As a businessperson, you know all about competing priorities demanding attention. Customer service. Finances. Product development. Employee development. Te list goes on and on. Marketing tends to get lost in the mob of things competing for your attention.

Then the economy throws a monkey wrench called “recession” into the mix. What do you do now?

In the current recession… just like in every previous recession, small businesses are finding it harder and harder to compete. Many small business owners are asking themselves, “How do I ‘recession-proof’ my business?”

The answer is: Do what the Chevrolet Motor Company did during the Great Depression of the thirties, make marketing your first priority! Most people don’t know that Chevrolet rose from an obscure car maker to rival Ford by the early forties because when the economy went sour and businesses were collapsing, the leaders at Chevrolet made marketing their highest priority. While everyone else was “saving money” by cutting marketing and advertising expenses, Chevrolet was gaining market share.

You can do the same thing in your market today. While your competitors are cutting their marketing costs and effort, you can leap ahead and take their market share.

No, that doesn’t mean throwing a bushel of hundred dollar bills at some ad agency.

It starts with a plan… a marketing plan.

We will start building a plan in the next article in this series.