The unknown influencers

Grant Leboff: Bryony, one of the things you allude to in the book, talk about in the book, is the fact that there may be a buyer, sometimes there might be buyers, but there are also all sorts of influencers and other people that are involved in that decision making. It’s not just one to one, often. How, in your marketing, do you effectively address that situation?

Bryony Thomas: Yes, those third parties that you never see, but have a phenomenal influence on whether or not you make that sale.

Grant Leboff: Exactly.

Bryony Thomas: It’s a really important point, that buying decisions simply are not made in a vacuum. The model in Watertight Marketing is essentially that as you go through a buying decision, typically you will initially cast the net quite wide. You know, “Does anyone know anyone who knows blah?” You see it on Facebook every night, don’t you? “Anyone know a plumber in Bristol?” People do a kind of random shout-out.

And then as you move through your decision, the number of people that you refer to, the third parties that you reference, reduces, but their opinion matters more. So where you might initially have done a social media shout, when it comes to the crunch there might be a few people, and if they said no, there would be no sale. The people with the power of veto.

When it comes to influencer marketing, we take people through a process of mapping the third parties at each stage of a decision, and how much influence they’re likely to have. And then, as with everything in Watertight Marketing, we do everything backwards… We start at the bottom of the decision making process, so the people who are closest to the deal, the people with power of veto, and make sure that we have content for them. We make sure we have materials for them. Whether you go to them directly, so for example, The Finance Director’s Guide To Marketing, which might appear as an article in an FD magazine. Or you might equip the head of marketing with a guide on how to speak to finance directors about marketing.

Either you’ve put it in the hand of your buyer to use with a person with veto, or you’ve put it out into the channels that the person with power of veto is going to encounter – ideally both [in a whisper] – and then work up from there. If you’ve got the people with power of veto, work it up, work it up, work it up, out to the people on the shout-out, the word of mouth. That word of mouth piece comes last. It’s often what people address first. It’s the least important. It’s these people here with the power of veto that I would focus on if you were time poor.

Grant Leboff: How does, from a marketing point of view, make sure you get those messages right? Because, what happens often, isn’t it, is that people address their own customer base. They’ll think about the benefits to the customers, the challenges to those customers. Perhaps, let’s assume they ask all the right questions and create the right sort of content for them, but then when you start to look at perhaps a wider array of influencers, even at the bottom, not at the top, not at the shout-out stage, at the bottom, how do you make sure that you’re cultivating … This isn’t necessarily your target market, is it? It’s a market that you’re reluctantly having to address because they may be preventing sales or whatever else, or influencing sales. So how do you make sure you get the messages for that marketplace, perhaps something you’re not so familiar with?

Bryony Thomas: Yeah, it’s interesting that you use the word reluctantly addressing. I’d say once you’ve got them on side it’s all so much easier and so exciting. So I wonder whether it’s the sense that it’s a reluctance that perhaps we need to address? Actually, when I’ve seen clients look at it through the eyes of that person with power of veto, they suddenly go, “Ah, well of course, I wouldn’t buy it either if I was them.” They suddenly see it through some different eyes. I think if you can take some time to speak to some people like that and to genuinely approach it from the perspective that they mean well, they’re not here just to be painful, they have a job to do, or they have the best interest of the buyer if it’s a spouse or a parent, they’re doing it for all the right reasons.

If you can come at it thinking the best of that person, thinking, “Okay, so if I was them, would I do this?” Work it through, and then do exactly as you would for your original buyer and put together the benefit for them, the outcome for them, and approach it, not reluctantly, but enthusiastically, just them as a human being.

Maybe it’s the reluctance that’s the issue.

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