People buy from people: why stories are important in b2b
Even in the age of automation, business is powered by people. This is true of every company: people make products, people make the sales, people build the client relationships. And most importantly: people buy from people.
In fact, many companies are able to thrive on referrals, rather than acquiring new business, solely because of the relationships they’ve built over the decades. It's these relationships (and the quality of work) that makes getting referrals work so well.
But what happens when that starts to dry up? We recently spoke with one Business Process Outsourcing company who had hired a marketing manager for the first time in 30 years, because they were no longer getting new business from referrals.
That’s when you need to bring in new leads, new business, and new people from outside of your referral network. You’re going to need to introduce yourself to businesses who don’t already know, or have a reason to care, that you exist.
Here’s where your brand story comes in.
A brand story, business story, or even founder story, is one of the things that will differentiate you from your competitors. Take a moment now to look up five different companies offering the same or similar service to you. You’ll see pretty quickly that they all sound fairly similar, they all talk about the services they offer (but not why they offer them), and none of them give a compelling reason to buy from them - beyond saying they’re ‘market leading’ or ‘award-winning’.
A brand story is part of the solution to this problem.
Having a brand story gives your prospective customers - ones who have not been referred to you, but have been attracted by a LinkedIn post, advertisement, or case study - a reason to buy into you over and above the others they might be considering. People buy from people.
Some prospective buyers will see dozens of service providers, take dozens of product pitches or demos, and still never buy because your website says you’re ‘bleeding edge’ or ‘market leading’ or any of the other most common buzzwords.
They buy when they feel like they can trust their brand (and therefore their careers) with you. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, after all.
Whatever your brand story and its component parts - what you stand for, what you believe in, and how you operate - it’s going to both attract and repel people. If you’re doing it right, it will repel the people that aren’t in your niche, and attract the people that are. It will also give those people something to grab hold of and, dare I say it, something to believe in.
Because ultimately, prospective clients don’t care about what you call yourself - they care about whether or not you can solve their problem, whether you can offer them the ongoing support they need, and whether they can get along with you when things are going well and when things get tricky.
A well-told brand story will give your ideal prospect all of those reasons to believe in your team, and in your company. It goes a long way to building good will, and to helping you to handle objections before the prospect even gets into the room.
Brand stories are also a great way of humanising your company, and letting the people who are buying know that there are real people behind the brand - people who are knowledgeable, trustworthy, and above all accountable.
A brand story isn’t some bit of fluff that you came up with on the toilet. It’s a considered approach that talks about why you started, what you stand for, how you became experts in your target market, and it permeates every part of your brand and your positioning.
It’s worth investing time in, and taking the time to get it right, because it could help you attract more clients, stand out in your market, and build trust with your target prospects much, much faster.
