Michael Moon

Given that 50% or more tendered proposals for B2B products end in “no decision indicated“ … An insight from sentiment and semantic analysis of 2 1/2 million B2B sales calls transcripts during Covid and just after … most failing proposals lack two important dimensions 1/ Proof of value demonstration around 3 to 5 use cases that directly correlate to meaningful progress on the customer’s strategic plan, OKRs or budget improvement plan 2/ a concrete and co-created with the customer “organizational change management plan” that addresses obvious and non-obvious organizational resistance to making a needed improvement. Given that most proposals, lack both of these dimensions, they lose

Again, this misses the point. The job to be done is the buyer to Discover and quantify the cost of inaction, and who in the customer’s organization or family suffers from this institutional/familial in action. Getting this job done also requires interviewing, having your change – mobilizer interview, individuals within his or her organization, and then document / video record verbatim expressions of their frustrations, pain, and loss of time, needless reworks etc. However, this is barely 1/10 of the job to be done

I take a contrarian view on this point. Conveying “my” expectations is the least effective way of inspiring writers. It’s not about effing me! It’s about empathy and feeling the pain, confusion, and “wouldn’t be cool if“ experience of the reader. It’s not about what I want the readers to do, but it’s about connecting with their reality, and walking them through a progressive disclosure of a better way.

I submit that we must accept the sunset, demise and diminishing returns on investments in content infused with posturing, promotion, and persuasion…the three primary moods of 99% of marketing content today. Buyers today thirst for and rarely get messaging, communication and interaction infused with empathy, personal narrative, and strong social proofs.

A good recommendation to yesterday’s problem and a source of waste for solving problems that are emerging in today’s market. Let’s cut the crap. Again, working backwards from all the content and crap that you and other vendors have thrown over the wall to your overwhelmed customer, either build into or license the capability for customers to aggregate all their emails, IMs, attachments, and web research in one Curation portal… That is also Attached to a permission access as well as your CRM system… So that you can see buyers interacting and downloading your content in real time. Mind you, I have over indexed on sales enablement and buyer engagement. That’s where the action is today.

This is complete waste of money and a fast track to hell and career pivots. Again, working backward from the business capabilities that your B2B customers, or from a whole-self lifestyle design and daily flow plans of your B2C customers seek help in building, define the core or catalytic digital assets, that when rendered as purpose-built content, will help your customer clarify the jobs to be done of a complete solutions, to which you will have contributed a piece or two. With the intent of maintaining coherence throughout your digital asset management / content distribution value chain, make the bold decision migrate all customer-facing materials to universal HTML5 objects and defund creation of dead, orphaned PDFs, PPTs, etc.