Persuasion engineering

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.

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