B2B Marketing Strategies: The Road to Business-to-Business Success
At Kültepe, about twenty kilometres north-east of Kayseri in central Turkey, more than twenty thousand clay tablets were unearthed from the houses of Assyrian merchants. Most are letters, contracts and account records. They were written roughly four thousand years ago, in the ancient city of Kanesh. The Assyrians called their settlement here a "kārum", Akkadian for "harbour", even though it was far from any water.
The system worked like this: women in Assur wove textiles, and their male relatives loaded them, along with tin, onto donkey caravans and brought them to Anatolia, covering a journey of about a thousand kilometres in an estimated six weeks. On the way back, the caravans carried silver.
One of the tablets is a letter from Puzur-Aššur, a merchant in Kanesh, to Waqqurtum in Assur. First he confirms payment: the silver, with tax and transport costs paid, has set off under his own seal in the hands of Aššur-idī. Then he places his order:
He asks Waqqurtum to make and send more of the same fine textile she sent before, saying he will pay half a mina of silver for each. One side of the cloth should be beaten but not shorn, and the warp should be close. Each piece should use one mina more wool than the previous one, yet the cloth should stay fine. The other side should be lightly worked; if it still looks hairy, it should be shorn. Then a complaint: "Don't send me any more of the Abarna-style textile you sent." An alternative: if she can't make fine cloth, he has heard there is plenty for sale there, so she should buy some and send it. And the measurements: a finished textile should be nine cubits long and eight cubits wide.
This is less a letter than a product specification. Price, the person making the delivery, product features, a quality complaint, alternative sourcing and standard measurements. A B2B order written four thousand years ago.
From Kanesh to Today: The Unchanging Rules of B2B Marketing
Business-to-business marketing looks far more complex today: long sales cycles, many stakeholders, a market crowded with competitors. But most of what the merchants of Kanesh did still applies.
Know Your Target Audience Down to the Weave
Puzur-Aššur knew the product he would sell down to the finest detail: a fine, closely woven, smooth textile. And he never wanted to see the Abarna-style one again. The foundation of an effective B2B strategy is likewise defining your ideal customer: which industry, what size, what problem, who makes the buying decision. Place customer needs, industry trends and your competitors within that definition.
Make Your Content as Clear as a Specification
In B2B, content exists to inform, teach and solve problems. Blog posts, guides, e-books, webinars and case studies make you an authority in your field, as long as they're concrete. Instead of writing "quality solutions", talk in nine-cubits-by-eight terms: figures, processes, before and after.
Seal the Trust
At Kültepe, important contracts were sealed inside a clay envelope. A summary of the text was written on the envelope, and the parties and witnesses pressed their seals into it; these seals made the document legally valid. Forging a document inside a sealed envelope was normally impossible. A recipient who wanted to read the letter had to break the envelope.
Today's seals are customer references, case studies, certifications and transparent contracts. In B2B, trust is a precondition of the sale; every delivery adds another impression to that seal.
Manage the Relationship Like a Family Business
In the business language of the Assyrian merchants, the boss was called "father" and partners "brother". Trade ran on family ties and long-standing trust. In B2B, too, partnerships and networks are decisive: industry events, joint projects, regular contact. For a practical starting point on growing your professional network, see LinkedIn marketing strategies.
Keep Records and Decide with Data
The vast majority of the Kültepe tablets came from archives in the merchants' own homes: who sent what, who owed what to whom, which contract was made on which terms. Today this job is done by customer relationship management systems, marketing automation and data analytics. Trust the record, not your memory.
Who Is the Customer?
The Turkish word for customer, "müşteri", comes from the Arabic "muštarī": the one who buys, the buyer. The Turkish Language Association's dictionary also records an old meaning of the same word: the planet Jupiter.
In B2B, however, "the one who buys" is rarely a single person. The concept known in marketing literature as the buying centre describes everyone in an organisation involved in the process of purchasing a product or service. The concept took hold with Robinson, Faris and Wind's 1967 study of industrial buying; in 1972 Webster and Wind also published a general model of organisational buying behaviour.
Even Puzur-Aššur's order involved a master weaver, a carrier, an administration collecting its tax and an Anatolian who would wear the cloth. In a software sale today, the user, finance, IT, procurement and management all sit at the same table. Each has different fears and expectations, and your marketing has to be able to speak to each of them separately.
Final Word
In The Practice of Management, published in 1954, Peter Drucker put it in a single sentence:
"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer."
Who is your customer: the person who signs the contract, the one who will use the product every day, or all the people in between?
