buying journey
finepoint
buying journey
finepoint
I spend a lot of my time helping clients avoid ineffective B2B marketing programs. I do this with a technique that easily identifies which marketing programs are a waste of time and which are worthy of their resources. My technique is so straightforward that you can start with your own team today. Get your entire team involved in identifying the common obstacles your customers face when they’re trying to buy from you. In other words, improve your B2B selling by improving your customers’ B2B buying skills.
This is not about your lead gen, or sales and marketing alignment, or your sales process. This is all about the customer’s buying journey. It’s about taking an empathetic look at the difficult things groups of people at companies you sell to have to do to get their company to buy from you.
Your typical B2B customer needs to get an average of 6.8 people inside their company to agree to purchase from you. And that’s the easy part. The most difficult thing is to get those 6.8 people to actually agree to do anything at all. The more diverse those teams are, in terms of roles, responsibilities, geography, and so on, the harder this becomes.
If you sell things that one person can put on their credit card without asking anyone else for permission or support, then you have it easier than most. In fact, having only one person involved in a purchase decision makes it 47% more likely that a sale will be made than if two people are involved. The chances of making a sale plummet further if more than five people are involved on the purchasing side.
The group of people who work at your customer organization, and who need to agree to a purchase before you can close the deal, are not a team. They don’t have a coach, or a common goal to buy from you, or regular practices where they rehearse the best ways to send you cheques. In other words, they are not a team.
They are individuals who happen to work at the same company. They have their own goals, processes, preferences, headaches, ambitions, and grudges. And there’s absolutely nothing saying they have to even consider buying anything from you. Not only do they not have to play the game with you, they don’t have to play at all. In other words, they’re the opposite of a team. And they don’t have to work together or co-operate. They can save a lot of time by staying with the incumbent vendor, or doing nothing.
Despite all this, your job is to get them all to agree that they have a mutual need for a shared future that can only be achieved, in whole or in part, by purchasing what you’re selling.
It’s your job to turn them into a team whose goals will only be achieved if they buy from you.
We’ve known about the group purchase dynamic for a long time. One of the more popular approaches to dealing with this problem, and one I’ve used successfully, is “covering the bases”.
We find out who the influencers and stakeholders are, and make sure we meet with each of them and get them to buy into our company’s vision. We get each of them to agree to buying from us. Each of them has different needs, goals, preferences, and priorities so you’ll need to have a different pitch, a different value proposition, for each of them.
I like this model and I’ve used it for years, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to. The problem is, even when you get a yes from each person individually, the group can decide to say no.
The reason why they say “yes” individually and “no” as a group is because individuals behave differently in groups. A group is different than the sum of its individual parts. Five yeses can equal no, because the group thinks differently than the people who make it up.
There’s a lot of research out there about the way individual behaviour changes in a group setting.
Even more relevant to our goal of accelerating our B2B sales is the finding by CEB that when one decision maker is involved, the purchase likelihood is 81%. By the time we get to the average 6.8 decision makers who are involved in the average B2B sale, the purchase likelihood drops to less than 31%. This doesn’t mean there’s a 31% chance that they’ll buy from you, but that there’s a 31% chance that they’ll buy anything at all.
When we cover the bases by getting individual buy-in from the stakeholders and decision makers, we can make the mistake of dealing with a group sale as if it’s a series of individual sales. With each individual, we can on average set the purchase likelihood to 81%. But this is where the math gets weird. Six people, each with an 81% chance of buying get together and talk themselves down to a B2B buying rate of only 31%.
In a company, one group member might lead the rest to a “no” decision for political reasons, or even personal reasons. Or maybe they’re distracted. We each have a finite amount of energy, focus, and willpower. They might be running low or burned out. Or it might be easier for them to say yes to a vendor than to their peers who are more likely to ask pointed questions.
Or maybe they said yes to you, then thought of an objection that hadn’t occurred to them. They share it with the group, and because you’re not there to address it, the entire group flips their votes from yes to no. The point is, there are nearly endless ways for things to go from an individual yes to a group no.
So what are we supposed to do about this? We need to find ways to get the B2B buying group to turn into a team, and make it so that team’s goal is to pursue a future that absolutely cannot be arrived at without purchasing what you’re selling.
The best description of how to do this that I’ve seen is in the CEB’s book “The Challenger Customer“. I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so I don’t make any money from you following that link. But I do think you should read it.
I’ll add a summary of their approach in another article. But right now let’s take a step back and look at the B2B buying journey method I use with my clients.
No matter what level of formalization or alignment you have in your sales and marketing processes I guarantee you will learn something new by doing this exercise. In most cases you’ll learn a few things that will help you prioritize what your marketing and product teams could do that will have an immediate impact on your sales team’s success.
The whole process is based on the computer architecture rule of optimization. When I was earning my Master’s degree in computer engineering they would tell us to “Make the common case fast.” In computer design we realize that there are tradeoffs to every design decision. You can’t optimize for everything, so you figure out what parts of the system are used most often, and make sure those are fast. That’s how you get the biggest speed increase in your entire system. You don’t spread your bets evenly. You focus everything on the few areas that are going to account for the majority of your work.
In the case of B2B sales acceleration, you focus on the few areas that repeatedly frustrate your customers while they’re trying to buy something from you. Again, this is not about your sales process. It’s about understanding that your customers have a very difficult time getting to “yes” as a group. You have to find out where they’re getting blocked and remove those obstacles. Each obstacle you remove will speed up every single deal of that type. Here’s how to do the B2B Buying Journey exercise.
This is not the same kind of generic buying journey exercise you might have gone through with other consultants. My approach is actionable. It doesn’t spend time defining lots of personas and defining some kind of ideal buying journey. We look at how your customers buy, find out where they get stuck, and remove those obstacles. It moves quickly and gets results immediately.
Notice the obstacles and deficiencies that keep coming up. Prioritize these and you have your team’s to-do list. These are the things on which you can start running sales experiments. Validate with customers, provide the tool, and start measuring the impact it has on sales velocity.
First of all, it gets everyone involved. It’s not sales demanding urgent support mid-funnel. It’s your whole company coming together to figure out how to better prepare and enable your sales team to succeed. It gets marketing to shift focus away from top of the funnel activities to revenue generating activity.
This is a huge shift for marketing. How well does this following describe your marketing team?
The verdict? Sales needs more and better leads from marketing! But this is misleading. Sales doesn’t need more leads as much as it needs the resources to close the leads it already gets.
Great leads are finite. This is specially true in the B2B world. You don’t have millions or billions of consumers to target. You have thousands, maybe even only a few hundred companies in your target market. Because of this, it is worth much more to your bottom line if marketing can help turn the leads you already have into revenues.
Here’s another way to look at it: Leads are potential revenue. Revenue is actually revenue. Which would you prefer? My clients pick actual revenue over potential revenue every time. If you shift your marketing team to contribute more to actual revenue, they will get more respect and be happier. And your whole company will accelerate its success.
How does this buying journey exercise work in real life? I’ll publish a follow-up with some client examples, but feel free to call me in the meantime and I’ll tell you. Reach me at 647-479-5856 or contact me here.
Talk about what they want to be good at.
Think of ways to help them succeed. Talk about what they care about. Let them know you understand how important those things are. Then show them you understand what contributes to their success in those areas. Then, talk about how what you do makes those things happen faster, cheaper, easier, better.
Once they trust you to help them achieve those things, help them share this vision with their peers and bosses. They probably won’t ask for your help here. Nobody wants to say “I don’t have enough influence.” But they probably need your help. Find ways to offer it before they need it.
B2B purchases that involve more than one person at the buyer’s company usually call for a lot of due diligence and vendor management. That means a lot of questions.
The problem is the more questions your prospects have to ask, the more times they have to contact you, the more meetings they have to set up, the more tired they become. They find themselves losing energy and interest. And they decide the incumbent isn’t so bad after all. Or they decide to put up with their home-grown system for a while longer.
This happens regardless of how promptly you answer their questions or how nice you are. Why? Because it’s not their job to buy from you. Nobody has a job description that includes buying from you as a key performance goal. They have other decisions to make, and if they could avoid making a decision about you, they would. With every extra decision they make they become more tired and more likely to stick with the status quo. You don’t have to take my word for it.
Start by having sympathy for the B2B buyer. Then follow these 5 steps:
Say you’re a company that routinely out-performs your larger, more well-established competitors. But nine out of ten prospects eventually get around to asking you about your financial viability. They worry that you might not be big enough to sustain their business. They worry that you’re too small not to fail.
You find yourself facing this question late in the customer’s buying process when their legal, financial, and vendor management teams get involved. By then you’ve spent a lot of time and energy on the prospect. So when you’re faced with this question your team scrambles to re-assure the buyer that although you’re small, you’re mighty. You’re here for the long run. You have other large customers that are all happy with you. You run a tight ship, financially. And so on.
Maybe you fly a couple of your executives to the customer’s office. Maybe your CFO and CEO scramble to get on a call with their counterparts at the buyer’s company. And sometimes it works.
But sometimes it’s just not enough. And the work you’ve done to reassure them is wasted, along with all the work you did to get them to this stage. It would have been nice to know sooner that this would be a deal-breaker.
Next time you engage with a large customer, you gather the sales team together and you say
“Look, this prospect fits the profile of companies that tend to worry about our size. Here’s what we do. We bring the size issue up earlier in the sales process. We let them know that a lot of companies their size have this concern about us but that once they learn more about our company they realize that the bigger risk is not going with us.
Once we have an NDA signed, we can send them these documents that include our audited financials and in-depth customer reference videos talking specifically about our size, viability, and ability to support our customers. We then offer to schedule a CFO-to-CFO call to walk them through the numbers.”
The fewer things they have to ask about the better. And the fewer questions they’ve asked by the time they face the tough questions the better.
Don’t wait until they’re exhausted from two weeks of feature comparisons and proof of concept demos before answering a deal-breaker question. Bring it up while they’re fresh, and take the burden of asking the question off their shoulders. It can make a huge difference to your ability to guide the deal in the right direction and close the deal more quickly.
Has your marketing team ever made one of these three mistakes?
“Everybody needs some case studies, right? You have to have a blog, right? You can’t be a real technology company without a stack of whitepapers, right?”
“None of our competitors have an Etsy page, so to stand out, we’re going to do that.”
“This one sales guy said he’s this close to closing a really big deal, and all he needs is for us to have a booth at this one conference in Barcelona where the buyer’s going to be next month.”
None of those seem like good reasons to spend product marketing resources. If your team has run a marketing activity based on those kinds of decisions, leave a comment below letting us know how it’s gone for you.
Here’s an approach that works for me and my clients:
This is a simplification, but it can help avoid some of the more common traps.
If you can’t figure out how a customer would be moved closer to making a good decision because of something you do, why would you do it?
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Say you’ve spent some time creating your buying experience map.
And say you’ve figured out where your deals are getting stuck, and you’re ready to create that key piece of collateral or that key sales enablement tool that you hope is going to get your customers past that obstacle. You’re ready to create something that will accelerate your revenues and make life better for your customers.
Before you start creating that tool, do a quick check. Ask one question:
Could it be used shoulder to shoulder?
To explain what I mean by shoulder to shoulder collateral, let me use the example of the product brochure. Most of you probably don’t rely as heavily on the printed product brochure as you once did, and that’s probably for the best. But I use it as an example because everyone has either made one or been given one at some point.
Now imagine how that printed brochure would get used by your salespeople. Would it be something they leave behind as they’re on their way out of a sales call, hoping it doesn’t hit the bottom of the recycling bin before the door closes behind them?
Or is it something they can use to get invited to the same side of the table as the prospect, literally shoulder to shoulder, and work through how the product is going to solve the prospect’s problems?
A really good sales enablement tool, whether it’s a product brochure, or an ROI calculator, or a live demo on a tablet, or anything else that your customer needs to see, can get you invited to the customer’s side of the table. If this doesn’t happen literally, it will at least happen in the customer’s mind.
When you’re creating these tools, ask yourself “How would this be used to have a shared conversation about a problem the customer has?” It might wind up being a tool that gets shared digitally, and your salesperson’s shoulders might be situated nowhere near the prospect’s shoulders, but if you can imagine them using it this way, you’re more likely to be creating something that will build understanding and rapport.
When in doubt, think of the opposite situation. Think of the last piece of ordinary vendor collateral that was sent to you or you found on a website. You know, the one with a lot of product shots, maybe some acronyms, a couple of quotes from satisfied customers, a reference to a magical quadrant of some kind, and maybe even some pictures of shiny happy people pointing at a laptop and smiling.
What did you do with it? You probably either recycled it or deleted it from you device. But why? It did all the things it was supposed to do, right?
So why was it a dud?
If you can’t see your problems being solved in what you’re reading (or more likely, scanning quickly) you lose interest. If you don’t get a sense that the vendor is on your side, you’ll ditch it and move on to the next thing. And this is as it should be, because you’re busy doing your job, and it’s not your job to buy things from vendors.
Your customers are a lot like you. So the next time you’re creating some collateral for them, imagine yourself or your salespeople pulling up to the same side of the table as the customer and using the collateral to share a conversation.
And your salespeople will appreciate it too. They don’t want to clutter their prospects’ desks with glossy paper garbage stapled to their business card. They want something they can use to develop a relationship of trust.
If it’s done right, the customer will make it their own. They will save it to their favourites, or they will print it and scribble some notes on it, or forward it to a colleague with their thoughts attached. It becomes their tool for getting what they want, not just another piece of nameless “content” that you leave in your wake, destined for the recycle bin.
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