Business-to-business marketers are spending millions on communications and brands that have about as much chance of reaping rewards as Jerry Falwell has getting backstage at a Marilyn Manson concert.

That’s because most of the business messages and brands out there don’t take into account what prospects are really buying, what they’re interested in hearing and what they already think of the marketer’s product/service offering.

Instead, business communication is overpopulated with messages that are so inward-focused they amount to little more than companies telling themselves how great they and their products are.

Welcome to the land of me, myself and I
Of course, the awful truth is that that doesn’t matter.

All that really counts out there is what your customers and prospects think.

Because they own your brand. They control information, communication and the purchase process. And most importantly, they make the buying decision.

So even though statements like “America’s largest whatever” or “the industry’s premier what-cha-ma-call-it” may warm the hearts of your management, they mean very little to your prospects. (Except, perhaps, conceit.)

In other words, they are irrelevant ideas.

They are, in fact, corporate belches. Loud noises which no one is particularly waiting to hear. And aren’t much impressed with once they have.

Pull my finger
In fact, at this very moment, thousands of business marketers all over the planet are devising sophisticated strategies to tell prospects all the things they (the marketers) want them (the prospects) to know about their products.

Unfortunately, these are seldom the things that prospects are interested in hearing.

So they (the prospects) don’t. They ignore them (the messages and the marketers).

Wrapped up somewhere in that mess of mismatched messages, expectations and beliefs are two implications for business marketers.

Value, value, who’s got the value
The first is that eventually you’re going to have to put anything you want to communicate to prospects in terms of what’s in it for them. And you can’t find out how to do that unless you listen to them.

But, in the process, you must also delineate a position for your offerings and company that’s relevant to the way your potential customers see their businesses. Not the way you view yours. And you can’t find out what they truly value to create that position unless you listen to them.

That is true whether you want it to be or not. And it’s true no matter what you sell. Or more accurately, what they buy. Even if it’s one of those amazing, handy-dandy, super knives that can saw through a suspension bridge and still do delicate radial keratotomy eye surgery.