The festive season brings with it a unique set of challenges for the business-to-business commercial community. We take a sideways look at exactly why B2B companies hate Christmas.
To borrow a phrase from noted industrialist C Montgomery Burns, Christmas for B2B companies isn’t all ham and plaques. In fact it poses some very specific challenges, some of which, with tongue only partially in cheek, we describe below.
December – Warm Prospects, Cold Shoulder
Few things are less rewarding than trying to move prospects along the sales funnel in December. It’s like trying to push a herd of cows through a narrow gate into an enclosure they don’t much like the look of.
While it’s difficult enough trying to motivate prospects to take any action at all this month, they often compound the frustration by cancelling things that are already in the diary. The pretext for this is usually that they need to get everything boxed off before Christmas and won’t have time for anything else.
The thing is, whether this excuse is true or not, your sales prospects aren’t daft. They know full well that even if they completely ignore you for the entire month, you’ll be straight back in touch on 2nd January looking to pick up where you left off.
And what happens then? “Reschedule the meeting? Yeeees, but there’s a lot I need to catch up on first….”
Hang on a minute – I thought you were boxing everything off before Christmas?
“Yeah, well you know how it is. OK, let’s do this – how’s your 19th February looking?”
About seven bloody weeks away, that’s how it’s looking.
Walking in a Marketing Wasteland
Christmas marketing is all about B2C. It’s all fancy baubles and Michael Buble.
Nobody, but nobody, is interested in your B2B marketing at this time of year.
Your engagement on social media channels goes through the floor. Your direct marketing emails replete with carefully considered Calls To Action barely motivate prospects to even open them, let alone click through to anything.
You once tried to generate some seasonal interest by dressing one of the Technical Sales Executives in a Santa Claus outfit, filmed him walking around the warehouse pointing out random widgets, and then putting the resultant footage on TikTok.
Unfortunately he looked like the kind of Father Christmas who frightens children, and the video to this day is still your one and only post on that platform.
Little wonder that your marketing department throws in the towel early December, and opts to spend the entire month on LinkedIn arguing about the latest John Lewis advert.
Ain’t No Party Like a B2B Party
Organising the company Christmas festivities usually starts in August. Not because venues get booked up early (though this is a factor) but for the principal reason that it will take a least two months for everyone to stop arguing about where to go.
Venue A? Don’t like the music. Venue B? Don’t like the clientele. Venue C? Not central enough. Venue D? Sue’s friend’s Auntie went there and said the chips were soggy. Venue E? Can’t go there, it’s where Darren’s fiancée dumped him in 2016. (And so forth.)
It gets worse. The prolonged negotiations over the party’s location are a veritable stroll in the park compared with the Machiavellian wrangling that is about to descend with regard to the seating plan.
While everyone has a rough idea who they’d like to be placed next to, they are adamant to the point of criminality who they wish to avoid. The back-room trade-offs to ensure that cliques are gathered on the same table are often so intimidating they make ‘House of Cards’ look like ‘Teletubbies’.
HR’s approach is sometimes geared towards what appears at first glance to be an eminently sensible measure, that of interspersing colleagues from tech and non-tech departments on each table, to foster stimulating inter-disciplinary conversations on B2B matters.
This usually only happens once, after the hapless HR manager notices halfway through service that the entire employee complement are eating in complete silence (and as quickly as possible) so they can return to the bar and see their actual friends.
Pity the company director at such gatherings; one eye on the potential eruption of longstanding petty disagreements into full scale punch-ups – the other eye meeting the gaze of an ambitious junior executive, who has chosen this precise moment to describe in excruciating detail their unworkable business development ideas for the coming year.
Advent – Where Your Sales Forecast Goes to Die
Are you waiting for that big deal to finally drop? The sale you’ve been working on since Easter and which is now about to reach port? Line item numero uno on your revenue forecast for this calendar year? The one your Managing Director told you to call about the moment it landed, day or night?
Forget it pal, it’s December. It’s not happening.
The final proposal might well be with the prospect’s decision-making unit and sitting right on the desk of the final signatory. That individual may have read your rock-solid business case and flawless return-on-investment calculation from cover to cover. They could have reams of approving due-diligence material elicited through the organisation’s fine-tooth comb procurement process.
Unfortunately, one single phrase blows all that carefully-curated work completely out of the water. If you are in B2B sales and you’ve never heard it before, nothing quite prepares you for the shattering body blow when someone directs it at you for the first time.
“Let’s get Christmas out of the way first.”
No-one really knows what it is about December that has this effect. What everyone knows however, is that if the only person with a vested interest in capex being signed off during the three weeks leading up to Christmas is you, it’s not happening.
Still, January will be a bumper month won’t it?
(Cue catastrophic geo-political event that causes industries across the globe to halt all non-essential spending.)
