The more a B2B product does, the harder it is to sell. Past a certain point, buyers don't look at a more complex product and think it means it is more capable. It can have the opposite effect. More features and products and services can cause confusion that kills the deal.

Selling everything all at once

The company built an impressive solution for commercial real estate that could include a variety of sensors, hardware, mobile and desktop apps, analytics software, installation services, and ongoing maintenance services. It was a full-stack solution, but the full-stacked-ness of the solution was also the problem because there was no simple way to say exactly what it "was."

It could be described in many ways, and everyone said something different. Marketing content was hard to produce because it would wander across focus areas and never covered the full stuck of products and services in adequate depth. The marketing content that did exist talked mostly about employee-facing features, the apps and screens, while the economic buyer people cared about something else entirely: using occupancy data to cut or restructure costly real estate they didn't need.

In hindsight, it makes sense that inbound was nearly nonexistent. So, every lead came from outbound effort, but salespeople reached for different pitch decks and would customize it for every meeting. Here, too, the message was inconsistent.

One message, made navigable by three categories

The fix was to organize. Working with the leadership team, we anchored everything to a single core value proposition, then made that one message navigable by splitting the products into three clear categories: Data, Analytics, and Experiences.

First, that gave the solution a shape a buyer could actually hold in their head, and it let the company describe the benefit of each part instead of trying to pitch the entire stack in one breath. Customers could finally see how the pieces fit together.

Second, it gave the company a framework for their marketing. Every new marketing asset, including the sales deck, the brochure, SEO articles, ads, LinkedIn posts, and customer stories, were rebuilt around those three categories and aimed at what buyers were searching for.

From 74% outbound to 73% inbound

Over the course of two fiscal years, the new content contributed to 600+ marketing-qualified leads from blog content, downloadable guides, and digital advertising, and 20+ sales-qualified leads directly attributed to digital content, with more offline deals influenced by it along the way.

The larger change was structural and can be seen when comparing outbound leads to inbound leads. Before, 74% of qualified leads came from resource-intensive, time-consuming outbound work. By year two, 73% came from efficient, scalable online sources.

The shift was noticed by sales representatives, who said sales calls increasingly opened with a line to the effect of: "We saw your online content and wanted to know more." Prospects were arriving already interested, which is the clearest sign the message was finally starting to do some selling for the company.

Is your product too big to explain?

Many B2B brands have complex products, and the buyers can't repeat back what you do. In situations like that, more features and products and services won't fix it. What helps is a structured message that gives your team and your buyers a framework to grow.

If that sounds like what your business needs, let's talk.