Transforming Customer Perceptions to Accelerate B2B Business Growth in Manufacturing

Japan’s manufacturing industry is facing challenging conditions, including the commoditization of products, intensifying competition with overseas manufacturers, and chronic labor shortages across functions ranging from sales to factory operations. Under these circumstances, the burden on sales organizations, which are responsible for developing customers, selling products and services, and generating revenue, continues to increase. Furthermore, as products and services become more advanced and complex, the effort required of sales increases even further, and labor shortages are driving an upward trend in the workload per individual. As a result, there are many companies for which maintaining their sales organizations themselves is becoming increasingly difficult. Many companies would ideally like to have sales focus on the negotiation phase and concentrate on higher value-added activities in order to improve performance.

Against this backdrop, not only business-to-consumer companies but also business-to-business companies are being strongly required to advance their marketing capabilities—that is, to deepen customer understanding and process design. By appropriately identifying and discovering customers and approaching them effectively, it becomes possible to improve the accuracy and efficiency of sales activities. This enables sales to focus on high-value sales activities, while also leveraging customer information acquired through marketing to increase the rate at which leads are converted into opportunities and to improve the probability of success for each individual deal.
However, there are limits to realizing these initiatives as mere extensions of individual sales activities. Growth models that depend on the activity levels and skills of individual sales representatives are unable to fully respond to changes in customer purchasing behavior and the increasing difficulty of opportunity creation.
Accordingly, it has become essential to strategically integrate marketing as a mechanism for engaging from the early stages of the customer purchasing process and creating and nurturing prospective customers.

In advancing marketing in this way, it is important to accurately understand the customer purchasing process and the awareness (perception) that is formed along the way. In marketing, there are perception flow models, such as AIDMA, that organize the stages of customer awareness. In BtoB business, however, the organizational purchasing process serves as the premise for decision-making, and awareness of a company is formed in line with that process, which is a key characteristic (Figure 1). For this reason, in order to increase customer purchase intent, it is important to design what kind of perception should be formed at each stage of the purchasing process.

Based on these premises, the next chapter organizes the role of marketing from the perspective of building relationships with customers.

So how should this be advanced in practice?
BtoB marketing is a process in which strategies are formulated based on analyses of customers, competitors, and the company itself, followed by the design, execution, and improvement of initiatives. While conducting customer segmentation and analyzing the purchasing process of customers in each segment to understand key needs and touchpoints, companies also analyze their own strengths that competitors do not have. Based on this, they design and execute a series of steps: determining what appeal points to communicate to each target, and through which touchpoints and channels to convey them (Figure 2).

Within this process, the early stages of customer understanding and strategy design largely determine outcomes. When companies develop their business, they first seek to build awareness of their products and services, attract customers in the information-gathering stage and nurture them as prospects, hand them over to sales, and then connect them to negotiations and orders. Precisely executing this “upstream lead nurturing” and creating a large number of high-quality prospects is one of marketing’s most important roles and a key factor that directly leads to revenue growth.

To achieve this, it is necessary to systematically conduct customer segmentation, purchasing process analysis, persona design and customer journey visualization, and touchpoint design. BtoB marketing becomes truly effective only when these elements are integrated into a consistent strategy design rather than implemented as isolated initiatives, and when execution and improvement are continuously cycled.

To improve the accuracy of initiatives, it is first necessary to understand and analyze overall market trends, collect internal and external insights through interviews with sales representatives and customers, design personas and customer journeys by customer type, and then translate these into initiatives and customer strategies. Within this flow, analysis of customer purchasing processes by segment is also conducted.

For example, consider the introduction of robots (Figure 3).

In robot purchasing, customer purchasing processes vary greatly depending on the products being manufactured, the maturity of factory automation, and organizational structures. Large companies manufacturing machinery or electronics, for example, need to rebuild production lines when products change, and therefore have specialized organizations and functions dedicated to considering production line automation. As a result, they possess extensive knowledge of robots and tend to seek highly specific and detailed information focused on new product features and performance.

On the other hand, companies that have organizations considering automation but are unable to handle robot setup internally seek information not only on robot product features but also on know-how for robot introduction and line construction, specific methods, and implementation support services.

Furthermore, companies such as those in cosmetics or pharmaceuticals, where production lines themselves do not need to change significantly even when product contents change, often consider robot introduction not for producing new products but for advancing labor-saving initiatives across entire factories. These companies typically lack specialized departments responsible for robot introduction or production line automation and have limited knowledge and experience, so they seek information on how to formulate automation concepts, how to think about line design, and support for upstream stages.

As illustrated, even within a single market, the information customers seek and the support they expect vary significantly by customer type. In the robot market, differences in needs and purchasing behavior by industry were substantial, but diverse factors such as “company size,” “the primary purchasing department or organizational structure,” and “the length of the industry’s and company’s history” can also serve as segmentation axes. It is necessary to segment based on the factors that create differences in purchasing behavior and to design information and communication for each segment.

After conducting customer segmentation and purchasing process analysis to understand customer-side conditions, initiatives are designed by determining what value should be communicated to each segment and which touchpoints are optimal.

In the robot case, companies in machinery and electronics segments often have clear information needs, and in many cases information gathering through websites and YouTube is sufficient. For these companies, content centered on product specifications and technical information is effective. In contrast, companies with limited automation experience have strong needs to meet people and receive explanations or to consult from the conceptual stage of implementation, making face-to-face touchpoints such as exhibitions and seminars effective. These companies require more upstream information, such as overall automation design and implementation steps.

In designing initiatives, companies disseminate information through websites and content marketing in line with customer purchasing behavior, analyze customer search keywords, and create and publish content that addresses the information customers seek. It is also effective to deploy public relations initiatives around themes such as new visions of factories enabled by robots, thereby sending messages to the market. Furthermore, at exhibitions and seminars, it is necessary to design exhibits according to objectives, such as providing basic knowledge to beginner segments and promoting new products to more mature segments.

By combining appropriate channels and information for each customer segment and executing initiatives with clear priorities, the accuracy of lead nurturing increases, and the quality of leads handed over to sales improves.

As described thus far, marketing is the function that handles the upstream stages of creating prospects and connecting them to proposals and orders by sales. However, even if marketing functions effectively, that alone does not generate revenue. After marketing brings in customers who “want to listen,” it is sales that actually makes proposals to those customers and leads them to orders. In other words, the basic division of labor is that marketing handles customer creation in the first half, while sales handles harvesting in the second half.

However, gaps often arise between these two functions. From the marketing perspective, there may be dissatisfaction that even after handing over many prospects to sales, sales does not make contact and opportunities do not materialize. From the sales perspective, marketing leads may be perceived as “not people who want to buy what we want to sell” or as having many poor fits. As such miscommunication and misalignment accumulate, the activities of both sides become misaligned and results become difficult to see.

Furthermore, these challenges are not limited to the relationship between marketing and sales. In some cases, misalignment also arises with product development departments. If product development does not take customer needs and market changes into account, it becomes difficult to achieve results no matter how much effort marketing and sales put in. Conversely, when the value envisioned by development does not align with the value customers seek, communication direction can become unclear.

What is important is to carefully analyze such “challenges that arise when attempting to sell at customer touchpoints” within the overall marketing process and redesign interdepartmental collaboration accordingly. By not only improving the quality of leads created by marketing, but also establishing mechanisms to hand them over in forms that are easy for sales to follow up on, and by sharing consistent customer understanding across development, sales, and marketing, it becomes possible to strengthen organizational sales capabilities as a whole.

The role marketing plays in enhancing such organization-wide sales capabilities is the establishment of perception. When sales moves into the scene and begins conversations with customers, if the strengths and characteristics of the company and its services are already communicated—that is, if perception has been established—conversations can begin from a state where customers have a certain level of understanding and expectations. This enables discussions with clearer objectives and higher resolution, significantly increasing the likelihood of opportunity acquisition.

Marketing is not merely a lead generation function; it is the foundation for creating an environment in which sales can focus on their core proposal activities and for enhancing the overall revenue generation capability of the organization. By optimizing interdepartmental collaboration and resolving challenges at customer touchpoints, digitally enabled sales transformation in the manufacturing industry becomes more robust.

ABeam Consulting supports the reconstruction of processes in which marketing and sales work in tandem, starting from customer understanding and perception design in the manufacturing industry. The firm has extensive experience partnering with clients, from formulating brand strategies that realize top-line growth to deploying initiatives. In recent years, through advanced customer data analysis and hypothesis design using artificial intelligence, ABeam Consulting has improved the accuracy and speed of initiatives from planning through execution and improvement. Going forward, the firm aims to contribute to the creation of sustainable business results through digitally enabled sales transformation by providing execution support that spans organizations, processes, and technology, not limited to conceptual planning.