What causes your prospects to start searching for solutions? What are the factors that might change their status quo? What industry-wide events and trends affect their behaviour? What internal changes might signal the potential for your solutions?
Catalysts are the events that upset the status quo and initiate buying processes. They make the prospect recognise that "business as usual" may not get them where they want to go, and cause them to start searching for solutions - and as such they represent the first step in the prospect's buying journey.
Trends and catalysts...
Trends and catalysts may be predictable months or years in advance, or occur without warning. But they all serve the same purpose - to alert the prospect to the fact that they may have to take action.
- Industry trends can include industry-reshaping mergers and acquisitions, regulation and legislation, and any other factors which may change the prospects for an entire industry, region or category.
- Catalyst events can include changes in senior personnel, new funding or investment, new product launches or entries into new markets, mergers or acquisitions, significant changes in financial performance and significant changes in go-to-market strategy.
The impact of trends and catalysts...
A prospect's sense of what they need is at its most pliable shortly after the catalyst event has occurred. They know that they probably need to do something but their definition of what they need has not yet been finalised. They are searching for answers and hoping to be educated.
The presence of a catalyst event is a powerful predictor in qualifying potential sales opportunities. Brian Carroll - in his B2B blog - estimates that "companies with catalyst events appear 400% more likely to buy than companies without catalyst events".
Catalyst events create vendor opportunity...
Catalyst events represent a key opportunity for vendors who are already known by the prospect, or can be easily found or strongly recommended when the prospect starts researching potential solutions. These vendors enjoy a powerful opportunity to shape the buyers agenda.
Conversely, vendors who get involved late in the buying process - long after the catalyst event has passed - often find themselves having to respond to a list of requirements that a competitor has already strongly influenced.
Identifying trends and catalyst events...
First, we'll help you collate the information about trends and trigger events that invariably already exists within your organisation through a combination of surveys, interviews and workshops. We'll validate this through structured customer interviews spanning recent wins, losses and "no decisions".
Then we'll equip you to determine the trends and catalysts that most affect your target markets and help you translate them into prioritised lists that you can monitor using events and alarms, as well as probing questions your sales people can use to validate the strength of new opportunities.
We conduct this as part of our discovery exercise in order to help you quickly identify your ideal customer profile, understand their most pressing problems, and map out the influencers that affect their behaviour.
If past experience is anything to go by, these insights could enable you to significantly sharpen the focus of your marketing and sales efforts, and eliminate wasted effort - why not give us the chance to prove it?
Here's how we might be able to help...
Achieving sales and marketing alignment is particularly important to any organisation that is trying to achieve a step-function improvement in marketing effectiveness or sales productivity, to out-perform strong competitors, or to successfully launch new products or enter new markets.
We've been able to help a growing number of B2B organisations to realise their ambitions by diagnosing and dealing with the constraints that have been holding them back. We may be able to help your company achieve the same. You can learn more about our approach by browsing this website.
When you are ready, please complete our contact form, drop us a line at info@inflexion-point.com or call us on +44 (0) 845 519 0295.
We look forward to finding out more about what you are trying to achieve, to sharing some ideas - and to helping you achieve the benefits of alignment throughout your sales and marketing organisation.