In fact in my experience, creativity is key. You don’t have to do what everyone else does, and maybe you really shouldn’t. You’re still selling to people, after all, and people are busy, and flooded with interruptions in the form of marketing calls and email. You need to get past that filter of “who the hell are you”, “why should I care” and “why should I believe you”. So, your proposition needs to stand out from the crowd in a good way.

Contrary to the belief of all those entrepreneurs and inspired techies out there, technology does not just sell itself. Build it and they will come? You might be waiting a while 😉

I’m currently involved with a creative B2B campaign which aims to stand out from the crowd while doing its job, which is to show prospective customers that we understand them and their customers, that we can help them and in a way that implies that we might be good people to do business with. We want to have a conversation with  our prospects and this is where we start to do so.

The customer journey navigator http://customerjourney.egain.com/ is an infographic with a difference. The info is all there about recognised consumer problems on their journeys, their solutions, organisations’ benefits and (softly now, we don’t want to scare people off) the technology which can help. Or at least how it can help. But it approaches it in an unobtrusive, fun way. It’s interactive, it has lots of levels and different media and tells 5 different stories each with their own sub-stories. The viewer is in control; the media we chose just led them to visit. The customer narrative leads the way through the journeys, reminding us all that the consumer is our ultimate driving force – that’s why your company is in business and organisations like my employer are supporting them with multichannel customer experience software.

Sometimes it pays to be different and you don’t have to spend the big bucks to do it. If you can’t compete with the big boys in terms of media reach, then you can always fight a different fight. The customer journey navigator is a good example of that. We chose our fight carefully and this is starting some conversations that we didn’t get close to before. It may be B2B, but remember it’s people that we’re dealing with.