Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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October 4, 2010

Why B-2-B Is B-2-C … And Social Media is Biz Dev!

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 8:48 am

What Do Business Customers Want?

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I sneaked into publishing through the back door, first I freelanced. Then I worked for a contractor who built products for bigger publishers. It was definitely a b-2-b business. I was all about serving my customers. I was also clueless about how to do it.

I thought my customers were the clients who paid me.

It wasn’t until I became a publisher hiring other contractors that I realized how off my thinking had been. I’d been looking a short-sighted wrong direction.

Why B-2-B Is B-2-C … And Social Media is Biz Dev!

The business to business model (B-2-B) isn’t that hard to understand if you think a few seconds about it. What do business people want most? They want to grow their businesses. They want to know what successful people in their jobs at other businesses are doing to be successful. We can bring that to them in two simple ways:

  1. We can use social media tools to connect them to other people who do what they do. Social media tools are fabulous for starting and building deep networking relationships. Great social media strategists are fluent at making those relationships happen.
  2. We can use social media tools to build occasions online and offline where they can learn about companies like theirs who are growing. Webinars, seminars, teleconferences about business development, integrated marketing, reaching out to customers in new and more relational ways can be key to helping our clients’ business thrive and grow.

What I didn’t get then is that if we stop with thinking of our client as our customer we leave them to do all of thinking about how their customer might respond to what we suggest, offer, and recommend. But if we look through our customers to the people they serve we become their partner in business development.
We grow our own business by aligning our goals to help them grow theirs.

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Do you know how to serve your customers’ customers? Do you think B-2-B and B-2-C at the same time and turn social media marketing into business development?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Filed under Marketing, Successful Blog | 2 Comments »




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2 Comments to “Why B-2-B Is B-2-C … And Social Media is Biz Dev!”

  1. October 4th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
    Heidi Thorne said

    Very good point which is often overlooked in B2B. There are so many layers in some buying decisions, it seems amazing that any sales get made!

    We also need to remember that B2C also has another layer beyond that. For example, selling healthy food choices to moms seems logical since they control the money and children’s nutrition. But if the kids–the ultimate consumer–won’t eat the stuff, it’s no sale. I liked a recent TV ad for (I think) Chef Boyardee that showed neighborhood moms who ostracized a fellow mom for ruining their chances of getting kids to eat the meals by pushing the “this is filled with vegetables” message. Yep, they know who the real consumer is.

    This is a multi-faceted issue so critical to the sales process. Thanks for starting the discussion.

  2. October 4th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
    Eddie Gear said

    Rightly said Liz. We do not focus on both, our main objective is customers, so we aim at helping them the best we can. We have just entered social media and in the process o building a network. Nice write up.

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