Hello. Welcome to this section, "What is B2B marketing?" Part 2. In the previous section I compared B2B marketing to team sports, therefore, marketing should be a team activity, and that's why I call it total marketing. And even though individual performance matters, team performance also matters. This is obviously a reference to basketball. If the opposing team has five players, you also need five players. You also need a pivot, also power forward and also a shooting guard and a point guard. We can imagine total marketing as being a total department, or a multi-functional effort. And not all can be under the sun. Using again a sports analogy, it's about winning, and who scores matters less than winning or losing. So as a player, I think sometimes we should have a much more supportive role, rather than a point-scoring role. And at the top level, the CEO and the executives should be aware of the contributions that are made. This can be reflected in a reward system, it has to be reflected in your evaluation, because otherwise, they will not be motivated, they will even be unmotivated to help other departments that get all the recognition. Another aspect of total marketing is the concept of rotation execution. Marketing has several stages, of which we will speak later, let's not make it more complicated. Imagine B2B marketing in three stages. The first stage, we can call it pre-marketing or even pre-engineering since it is very technical, very specialized. But of course we reach the offer stage, where we have to ask for proposals and prices. And once the contracts have been completed, after the delivery, there can be a long sales period. Then there are these different stages. And regarding who takes the role of leader, it depends on the stage, on who has the influence and experience. Then we can think of this as in football. I'm a big fan of Real Madrid because I have relatives in Spain, especially in that area, but I admire the other team, Barça, the FC Barcelona team with Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and other magnificent players. It's the playing style we call the Tiki Taka in football, where we have this rotation in terms of positions and therefore there is not a defined formula in terms of who should be the midfielder, or who should be the striker who scores the goals. It is based much more on the circumstances, and I believe that as a company we must adopt that way of thinking. In B2B, marketing relations matter much more than in the context of B2C. If you have few clients, you need to maintain a good relationship. This can be encouraged depending on the types of idiosyncratic investments that have been made, then they are based on those so-called closed relationships. But I think it should be much more positive. It can be based on people, such as between providers, we refer to the existing network of providers and some gatekeepers such as the purchasing manager. And even in this case, I think the wrong idea is that it's a bad thing, because from a transactional point of view, relationships help reduce costs and I think that these types of ties can be based, especially here in Asia, in school or in religion. In other regions, they can also be based on the fact of having a similar functional past. Again, although the perception is that relationships are bad, from a long-term transactional point of view, They can help reduce costs. Let's see the case of airplanes. Of course, in the first instance the price matters but also has additional costs, such as the cost of training, the cost of maintenance, or the cost of supplies, and this is where dealing with a seller that you already know can help you reduce these costs. Let's see, B2B is done in a very formal way. You can think of this as a SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. A highly formalized operational process. Then I will not go into the details of each step. The point is that in each step, the space to move that the buyer has differs. This is what I call the advantage of the opportunity. And as you will see here in this inverted triangle, the lower, the less margin the buyer has. And therefore he can run out of options. This implies that if you are proactive enough, you should enter as soon as possible. That's where the concept of an early buyer participation, also called EVI, Early Vendor Involvement, comes. This implies that the best stage to enter is the first stage. Of course, if you can do it. This is an example of a company or companies that do it, steel companies here in Asia such as Posco or Tata do it. And I'm sure that other steel companies in other places do the same or try to do the same, which is to enter as soon as possible, and thus they try to collaborate. The key word is to collaborate with the buyers in terms of formulating their problem. So somehow I think the business definition for these companies, has evolved to one where they not only sell steel, but they sell solutions to a problem. In the case of Posco, how to make lighter cars, because it improves the speed of the cars. And in the case of Tata, how to optimize and reduce the processing costs of the buyers of their excavation and lifting products. Then it is worth to enter soon. So what we must learn in this section both in the first, as a second part, is that B2B marketing is very complicated. But we can simplify it to the point where we can identify who is in the purchasing center. You should know that you must create the appropriate counterpart, which is called sales center. We have also learned that B2B processes can be very, very systematic, and therefore marketing should also be aligned systematically to what the buyer does. The last point is that, again, you must be proactive in B2B marketing. And therefore you must enter as soon as possible.
