Takeaways:
- Your prospect isn’t deciding whether to buy. They’re deciding who to buy from, and your competitors are one tab over.
- The consideration stage is where a real difference either shows up or disappears. Vague “trusted partner” language loses here every time.
- A brilliant consideration strategy dies at the handoff if sales takes five days to call the lead back.
Picture the person you most want as a customer sitting at their desk with six browser tabs open. One of them is you. The other five are your competitors. This buyer has already admitted they have a problem worth solving and money worth spending. What they’re doing right now is deciding which of you deserves the check. That moment has a name in the customer journey: the consideration stage. It’s also the exact moment where most B2B companies lose deals they should have won.
The 12 Battles™ Framework from The B2B Marketing Revolution is the set of twelve mindset shifts you have to win before your marketing can deliver guaranteed results. Battle 7 asks you to advocate for an investment in each stage of the customer journey, from awareness all the way through to the post-purchase experience. Today I want to plant a flag in the middle of that journey, at consideration, because that’s where your differentiation either becomes a decision in your favor or evaporates into a coin flip.
What Your Prospect Is Actually Doing in the Consideration Stage
By the time someone reaches consideration, the easy part is over. They know they have a need. They’re past wondering whether a solution like yours exists. Now they’re actively researching and comparing their options, and they’re doing it with a skeptic’s eye, because they’ve been oversold before and they don’t intend to be again.
This is the stage where a prospect is looking for reasons to eliminate vendors from the list. Every generic claim you make gives them one. When your website says you’re a “trusted partner who delivers results,” you’ve told them nothing they can’t read on all five of the other tabs. You’ve made their comparison easier by making yourself interchangeable. That is the enemy in this fight.
Where Differentiation Turns Into Decision
Here’s the shift I want you to make. Awareness is about getting noticed. Consideration is about getting chosen. Those require different work, and confusing the two is how good companies stall out.
Getting Chosen Is a Different Job Than Getting Noticed
At the awareness stage, you cast a wide net and settle for being remembered. At consideration, a narrow and slightly uncomfortable claim beats a broad and comfortable one every time, because specificity is what a buyer in comparison mode can actually grab onto. “We reduce logistics onboarding friction by 60 percent in the first 90 days” gives a prospect a reason to pick you. “We care about our clients” gives them permission to forget you. I put the strategic stakes plainly in The B2B Marketing Revolution®:
“Investing only in prospects with a high intent to purchase misses all the opportunities further up the funnel and limits your ability to scale.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
Why This Stage Carries the Competitive Weight
Read that quote carefully, because it cuts both ways. Yes, you have to feed the top of the funnel so consideration has something to work with. And you also have to respect that the consideration stage is doing heavy competitive lifting that awareness simply can’t. This is the stage where you stand next to your rivals and the buyer decides who’s different in a way that matters to them.
Four Ways to Guide the Decision in Your Favor
So how do you actually move a comparing prospect toward you? The book lays out why the consideration stage earns real investment, and each reason points to a concrete play.
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- Guide the decision itself. Prospects here are researching and comparing, so give them content that helps them navigate the choice instead of just praising yourself. Position your company as the trusted advisor who makes their evaluation smarter. Email nurture, credible third-party voices, and honest customer reviews all do real work at this stage.
- Qualify while you nurture. Not every lead deserves equal effort. Nurturing prospects through consideration lets you see who’s serious and who’s browsing, which sharpens where your sales team spends its energy. As the book states:
“Not all leads are equal, and dedicating resources to this stage enables you to identify which prospects are most likely to convert.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
- Press your competitive advantage. Your competitors are courting the same buyers at the same moment. Consideration-stage marketing is your chance to put your specific value proposition in front of them in a way that makes the alternatives look generic by comparison.
- Build the relationship early. Engaging with a prospect’s real pain points now, before they’ve bought anything, creates trust that carries straight through conversion and into the post-purchase relationship. You’re not just winning a deal. You’re starting a relationship on the right footing.
Proof That the Consideration Stage Pays
Let me put numbers behind this. A $35M data analytics and consulting firm came to us having poured most of its budget into brand visibility. The CEO, Lisa, had rightly championed awareness, but she also admitted the company had neglected the stages that come after it. We rebalanced the investment, putting 40% into awareness and 45% into consideration, with the remainder split across conversion and post-purchase.
The result was striking. In the first five months, the consideration investment produced 226 qualified leads, compared with just 21 from awareness, and those 226 were companies actively weighing a purchase at an average lifetime value of $50,000 each. Awareness matters, and it climbed too, because it lays the groundwork that makes consideration convert. But the stage that turned interest into a shortlist of qualified buyers was consideration, and it wasn’t close.
Don’t Let a Great Consideration Strategy Die at the Handoff
Now the warning, because winning the consideration stage means nothing if you fumble what comes next. An $8M logistics startup wanted five new qualified leads a week, with each customer worth roughly $65,000 a year. The president, Richard, ran a divided playbook: marketing would generate the leads, sales would independently close them, and the two would stay in their own lanes.
The leads came. The conversions didn’t. When we dug in, the reasons were painfully fixable. Sales reps were taking an average of five business days just to make first contact with a lead who was ready to talk right now. The company’s distinct value wasn’t being communicated clearly. Follow-up was so inconsistent that more than a quarter of the leads were simply left hanging. On top of it, new customers were churning because the onboarding experience had too much friction.
Every one of those failures happened after the marketing worked. Richard agreed to a full sales and marketing alignment inventory, and we brought the accounts team in too, since they owned onboarding. Once the handoff from marketing to sales to accounts was treated as one seamless motion instead of three separate departments guarding their turf, conversion rates climbed and the whole company moved forward together. The lesson is blunt. A prospect you win in consideration can still be lost in the silence between your teams.
Make the Consideration Stage Your Advantage
Your best-fit buyer is comparing you to your competition at this very moment, whether you’ve invested in that moment or not. The only question is whether you show up with a sharp, specific reason to choose you, or with the same interchangeable language everyone else is using. Differentiation is not a branding exercise you file away. It’s the thing that closes the gap between “on the list” and “chosen,” and the consideration stage is where that gap gets closed.
Feed your funnel, sharpen your claim, and make sure the moment a prospect leans toward you, your team is ready to catch them without missing a beat.
Start a Revolution: ADVOCATE for an investment in each stage of the customer journey.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution®: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution™ is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
