You’ve got a prospect on the phone. There’s high demand for IoT technology in their field and the call is going well so far. Then comes the question: “What exactly does your product do?”  

You’ve been waiting for this moment.  You mention things like Zigbee and RFID. You subtly weave in information about tech stacks and gateways.  Hubs. Sensors. And, of course, The Cloud.

You pause for a second, eager to hear the prospect’s excitement at the magical future their company is about to join.

Instead, comes a tentative: “Um, yeah. My buddy was telling me about Ziggy. Let me talk it over with my boss and get back to you.”

What went wrong? You let specs get in the way of problem-solving.

The IoT market is maturing, which means prospect awareness and pain points are changing. 

Early adopters are already on board, as are large businesses who could afford to experiment. They were highly motivated but make up a very small part of the potential market for IoT products and services. 

What remains is a much larger pool of companies who know IoT can probably streamline their processes and save them money but aren’t sure exactly how. They don’t want to throw a bunch of cash down the drain to find out.

These are your people.

To turn these prospects into buyers, you have to talk directly to them — about the things they care about, in the way they understand.

Recycling a spec sheet won’t work. Flattering prospects into being part of the future won’t work either — if that were a motivating factor, they would have already bought in.

Nearly 2/3 of buyers look for a solution when they actively have a problem. Solve that problem, get the sale.

To do that, you need to reverse engineer your marketing strategy. Every asset you create is informed by what the prospect needs to hear or know at that stage of the buying cycle.

Think laterally, not literally
A prospect wants to talk about embedding sensors into their manufacturing machinery. They want to check the mechanical health of their equipment and predict component failure.  They’re curious about IoT but aren’t sure if the expense is worth it.

You might be tempted to talk about the sensor reliability, cloud security or how easy the dashboard is to use.  Your prospect doesn’t care.  

What they want to know is if installing an IoT stack would cost less than the downtime they currently experience on the line, if this will make them look good to their boss and what the chances are that it will create more problems than it will solve.

To address these problems, you might show them a case study or two from companies that have significantly reduced their downtime and maintenance calls thanks to the new sensors.  

Perhaps follow that with unforeseen benefits of increased monitoring — perhaps the data can be used to assess safety problems and inform employee training programs.  Increasing the number of days between accidents is always a good look.

Then, talk about how your company has a dedicated support team assigned to every customer to make the IoT stack installed is right for their factory. And that any glitches are attended to immediately.

Show, don’t tell

This classic rule from novel writing applies also to marketing materials. It’s why smart IoT marketers don’t use the same assets for every client. And why a combination of explainers, videos, white papers, testimonials, case studies and web copy are essential for getting the sale.

• We’re the leading X in market Y.  
• Product A helps you to do B better/faster/more reliably.

Those are both telling.  Showing would be:

• Here’s how X customer used Product Y and saved $Z million in compliance fines.
• Here’s how Product A helped Company B do AC with 50% less downtime. 

The show don’t tell approach takes more time to research. You need figures and stories. Fortunately, you already have the best possible source for this kind of information: your sales team.

Take the time to ask them not only why customers buy, but why they don’t buy. Why do they choose your competitor instead?  What sort of problems do they have that your marketing is not addressing?  If Sales doesn’t have a clear picture, consider asking customers directly.

Then, take this information and turn it into an education. Create the case studies and white papers, map out the email campaigns and optimize your web copy based on that information.  Think about how you might share these assets on social media.

It may seem like a lot of trouble to do all this research. Why not just send around the same spec sheets that have always worked and hope for the best? You could, but you can be sure your competition won’t be.

LwM2M and Ambient Genetic Frameworks might be cool. But solving problems sells.