Friction is a bit of a dirty word when it comes to sales and marketing.

It shouldn’t be.

Friction is a tool, to be carefully deployed at the right moments to the benefit of your customer.

‍A buying journey that is entirely frictionless might, in many cases, limit the potential value exchange between buyer and seller. Without some form of content gating or progressive profiling, information flows in only one direction. This works in simple use cases, but any good consultant will tell you it is not conducive to solving the complex problems experienced by enterprise buyers.

As we increasingly look to solve complex problems via a digital engagement - 80% of sales interactions are expected to be digital by 2025 - we need to get comfortable with some level of friction in digital channels, or we risk reducing complex problems to simple, cookie-cutter solutions.

Certainly too much friction, or “bad friction” - that is, friction that stems from a technical deficiency or failure to listen to a customer - is going to leave customers with a bad and lasting impression. But our job isn’t always to make life easy for customers, it’s to help them, and friction can be a valuable way to do this.

Don't replicate Consumer Applications

^‍Friction becomes a valuable (vital, even) tool as the complexity of the problem increases.

Consumer businesses tend to solve simple and one-dimensional problems. Find me a cab. Deliver my dinner. Show me funny memes.

These businesses benefit from a wealth of data and resources to support them in quite incredible, frictionless purchasing experiences. Yet, still in some areas, friction remains, and is very deliberate.

A good example is subscription onboarding processes, where friction is deployed as part of a progressive profiling strategy to learn more and encourage specific actions that will benefit the relationship between the two parties.

This friction is extremely deliberate. The benefits are painstakingly explained, and the timing is no accident - everything is made easy until immediately after the point of purchase, when engagement is highest and most deliberate.

The key seems to be the desired outcome. Impulsive decisions are fragile. Considered choices are more lasting, predictable, and can be nurtured by carefully deployed friction.

In B2B marketing, we don’t want an impulsive decision. We want a considered decision to engage with us to solve an active pain.

So, when is the right time to deploy friction?

There are two situations where friction can benefit a customer relationship.

• We need context. We are the experts in our field, but the customer is the expert in their context. There comes a point where that context is essential to them realising further benefits.
• We need to change the nature of the relationship. Similarly, the style, channel or depth of a relationship is no longer sufficient for the customer to realise further benefits.

The problem is, right now in B2B content marketing, friction is a zero-sum game. While we are exploring progressive profiling techniques and improving web personalisation, this is not in the same league as our consumer cousins.

As a result, our attempts to capture context and change the nature of prospect relationships are clumsy. The friction is not proportional to the benefit the customer receives. It comes all at once, in moments determined by our sales process more than their buyer journey, and triggers an internal handoff that is painfully visible to our buyers.

‍3 Tips to Deploy Friction more effectively within your content marketing.

1. Build a first party data strategy centred on converting known users

Publishers have long since cottoned on to the importance of user registrations in building digital relationships. It’s like a handshake or exchanging names at the start of a conversation. A tad pointless, from a cold and functional lens? Sure. But if you understand humans, it is essential.

Building a known, first-party relationship lays the foundation for every interaction from that moment to be personalised and relevant for the user.

The key?

1. Don’t be greedy. Exchange names, sure, but don’t start asking for inside leg measurements.
2. Make it easy. SSO, passwordless authentication, and other tools can remove the hassle from this step and boost conversion.
3. Be transparent, build trust. Explain why this exchange of value benefits your potential customer, and do not break that trust by misusing their data .

The key here is to establish trust. I will shake anyone’s hand, unless their hands are dirty. Think of your digital reputation in this way - you need to show your hands are clean. In providing that critical unique identifier, your customer will not receive unwanted emails, calls, or risk that data being sold on to a third party.

2. Progressive Profiling.

Data capture shouldn’t be a zero sum game. Most B2B sites still capture a laundry list of data at the initial point of conversion. It’s a dead giveaway that you can expect a barrage of cold outreach, with the data collected used to internally route the lead.

As we’ve said, data capture forms let us capture context, and that can be valuable to better serving customers online and offline. But you don’t need it all at once. Look to replace long, repetitive lead forms with progressive strategies that capture context from the customer gradually, and always proportionally to the value you are providing.

It is also crucial to reflect this context in your engagements with that customer. This creates an impression that the context is not just filling out a CRM, it is helping you provide value through more tailored interactions, better curated content, and so on.

3. Reader-led Content Gating

Today, friction is often driven by a clumsy “content-led” estimation of where the customer is in their journey.

“Whitepapers are bottom-of-funnel” is the common assumption, so they are invariably gated and trigger an attempt to engage with the customer on a 30 minute discovery call and 1 hour demo.

This is not how buyer journeys work. They are meandering, varied, and your “bottom-of-funnel” content (defined largely by it’s length and just how proud you are of it) is not necessarily reflective of where the prospect is. Invest in reader-led content strategies, so your decision to impose friction is led by their journey stage, not by the type of content they’re accessing.

‍Want a practical guide to implementing reader-led content gating with a small team?‍

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