Standing Out in the Sea of B2B Sameness
Brand building is having a renaissance, yet it's still hard for brands to stand out in a sea of B2B sameness.
In today’s B2B SaaS market, your brand is everything. It says who you are, what you stand for, why you’re different. Yet, there are so many tools out there that basically do the same thing with maybe a couple of extra features, which makes it really hard for a buyer to discern which one they should really buy.
In Dentsu’s 2024 Superpower Index, they claim brand has never mattered more in B2B than now. Buyer inertia (when companies stick with the same tool even though there is better out there) is even more prevalent today, and personal decision drivers are outweighing professional decision drivers in importance compared to years prior. Let’s unpack these.
Brand
Your brand needs to be memorable. How you achieve this are not through one-off tactics, but through repetition and carefully curated activities.
Demandbase just had a mini brand refresh where they launched a new storyline and messaging surrounding it. The story is compelling and the video is polished. However, when you look side by side at all of the ABM tools out there, what’s really different between Demandbase, 6sense, Terminus, and RollWorks? Don’t they all kind of basically do the same thing? Kind of.
Differentiating the brand is what is so hard to do in a sea of sameness. Usually brands opt for differentiating by listing out features, e.g. “our tool will help you automate X” or “drive XX revenue with X feature.” They focus on the “whats” in their product rather than the “whys.” When you talk about the ‘whys’ you start to make someone feel the benefits of your product. Just look at this example by Apple.
When you think about the iPod being introduced in 2001, an MP3 player entering the game when MP3 players had already been around since 1997, it needed to stand out in a sea of sameness. How did Apple do it? Instead of touting the amount of storage capacity like the others, Apple (Steve Jobs) talked about how it would feel to walk around with “a 1000 songs in your pocket.”
Buyer Inertia
Some people don’t want to move to a new tool because of switching costs. They know their existing tools benefits and weaknesses. The cost to learn a new tool comes at the price of time spent on learning a new tool versus spending time on something else to move the needle.
Again, I’ll use the same example above of ABM tools. If it isn’t broke, why switch? Why would you bother ripping out an ABM tool to switch to another one when they basically do the same things, albeit, each one has their separate strengths? You wouldn’t. The switching costs are too high to change and the cost savings would have to be significant or you’d have to have an internal resource change which forced you to make a change here.
Personalized GTM
The buying team has expanded and is now around 5-8 people on average, with almost always a C-Suite member, plus someone from both procurement and legal. This means it has never been more important to personalize your brand and make it relevant to each buyer persona, even the junior people in the buying process.
People buy based on how you make them feel. In B2B that could mean you make them feel smarter, more efficient, more fiscally responsible, or more free to do other tasks.
Often we only concern ourselves with the champion and the economic buyer, but in today’s B2B buying cycles, you need to reach as many people as possible with your brand and get them involved in the sales process.
Standing out in a sea of sameness
Recently I interviewed at two companies who were both “The AI Solution for Enterprise (X industry).” Hmm, can they really both be THE solution for this? It’s akin to when people say we’re the #1 X. These statements are meaningless and a waste of space on paper and on your website.
To stand out among others in your category you need to:
Be bold, loud, and get others to share their success of using your product. Clay and Common Room do a great job of this and they do it on LinkedIn where their customers are.
Have a strong website with clear messaging on the why you are different. This goes back to the art and science of brand building. When people come to your website they only want to know two things: what you do and can you solve their problem at a reasonable price point.
Allow B2B buyers to conduct a significant amount of their research through various channels. (I am a huge fan of letting them try before they buy with tools like Navattic or a Walnut walkthrough demo).
Take for example, Amplitude, they allow you to sample and try their software in a demo environment, however, competitor Mixpanel does not.
Be consistent in your brand attributes - including your messaging. Hammer your message over and over again until you’re tired of saying it and they’ve finally heard it. You can’t change your message every 3-6 months and expect people to know what you do. Pick a key message and stick to it for 12 months, minimum. This isn’t always easy to do when you have a CEO telling you to change your message constantly. (CEOs take note here), but it’s what you should do.
Take for example, Webflow, they’ve always been true to the fact that they provided a way to design, build, and launch powerful websites visually — without coding. Now they’ve evolved with the acquisition of Intellimize, and now they are a website experience platform bringing together marketers, designers, and developers to build, manage and optimize website without code:
Have strong peer recommendations. These could be in the form of case studies or testimonials, or live stage talks, but the best peer recommendations are found in dark social - when people recommend you when you’re not in the room. Here’s an example from one of the 20 Slack groups I am apart of where someone was asking about two softwares who do similar things and those companies are not present on that Slack channel.
It’s not easy to stand out in a sea of B2B sameness, but we need to try. Otherwise we make it really hard for a buyer to tell the difference and so we perpetuate buyer inertia or worse, they do nothing.
