The Buyer’s Journey & Why It Matters

The notion of the buyer’s journey has been used to describe the path that your potential customer would take when making a purchase. However, today’s customers are sophisticated, savvy consumers who do their research.

In case you haven’t heard the statistic before:
“67% of the buyer’s ‘decision’ is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales.” (SiriusDecisions)

This happens because the buyer vets the companies by scouring their websites, reading reviews and asked others through their social networks for a referral. By the time consumers reach a salesperson, they are fully acquainted with your company’s product features, options and prices.

They have done their due diligence to narrow down their options.

What the Buyer’s Journey Looks Like!

As you can see we have included some of the actions you’ll want to take in order to help your lead move from one stage to the next. This way you’ll understand just how to engage your customers in order to help them reach the decision stage and a sale. Remember your aim is to make them re-purchase, thus creating an recurring customer.

In order to personalize your sales process it’s vital to understand the buyer’s journey.

The Traditional (old) Buyer’s Journey model was to build awareness, then drive interest, creating desire, and finally lead to action. That’s been the traditional model of marketing and sales approaches in technology for a long, long time.

However the journey that buyers and prospects take is no longer linear or even neat, it’s more unpredictable and fluid which poses a big challenge to marketers. As we enter 2018, we will continue to see these models get updated.

Why does the Buyer’s Journey Matter?

The answer is simple.

By providing value and answers at every stage, you’re able to nurture customers toward making a decision. When done right, the decision will be to buy from you. You’ll avoid the mistakes of more traditional approaches, like waiting until they’re ready or delivering a hard sales pitch.

Instead, you can give them exactly what they need according to their particular stage and help them move in your direction.

You meet them where they’re finding their information. Make it so you’re the one providing them with everything they need to make the right decision.

Supplying a lead with your expert guidance rather than making an attempt to force their hand will build trust. We all know trust has a tremendous influence on today’s buyer. So it makes sense to nurture a lead according to the position on the buyer’s journey, as it gives you the highest potential to convert them.

Buyers don’t want to be prospected, or demoed, or closed. These steps add zero value to the buyer. Buyers are looking for additional information about your product that can’t be found online.

We hope this article was helpful! Keep it in mind the Buyer’s Journey when creating a marketing strategy for your business.

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Talk Soon,

Nicky and Dave