When a business is mapping their customer journey, they may plan for prospects to go from Point A to Point B to Point C, etc.
But that’s not how buying decisions are made, warned Paul Ince at B2B Forum in 2023.
Instead, Paul says that some companies will bounce around quite a bit between options, while others will make a prompt decision.
Get Paul’s insights into the customer journey in the video or transcript below.
Paul returns to B2B Forum in Boston this November to discuss the chaotic customer journey and what you can do about it to increase sales. One B2B Forum attendee said, “It was excellent. The speakers were dynamic and engaging and I came away with solid knowledge and creative inspiration.” With more than 50 engaging sessions to improve your marketing, plus workshops and networking, you’ll return to work feeling inspired and refreshed. Don’t bounce around on this journey—click here to join your peers at B2B Forum.
Now, this is what I would consider a very linear, straightforward kind of customer journey.
You might see this presented in the form of a funnel. I think we all understand some of these terms that are on this slide here, going from the awareness stage through to the sale.
And I’ve put on here some typical bits of content that we might create in this very linear journey.
So we might, for awareness, be doing things like advertising. Perhaps we’re networking and getting ourselves out there just so that people know who we are. Maybe we’re doing some social media to increase reach, particularly if we’re doing all the TikToks and all the rest of it.
We are hoping that perhaps we can draw them into some kind of lead status, whether that’s a lead magnet or a webinar, something that we get their details from.
And we can then nurture them, look after them to the point where we are maybe hopefully getting a proposal out to them.
And again, in that nurture stage, we might be sending them emails. We might be doing some more engagement through social media. Even in the proposal, the information that we send out is still content.
How do we word that proposal? What do we include in the demonstration? Maybe we do that via video. Maybe we write terms and conditions for the contract and we issue those using language or bits of content.
Even the order confirmation email or statement or whatever it is that you might produce at this sale point is still a piece of content.
All nice and easy to understand. We can map it out. If you’re having to take it to your senior leadership team, you can go there, you go, this is what we’re going to do. These are the sequences that we’re going to use.
That’s great, but it kind of means that people go from Point A to B to C to D in a very structured way.
And as we’ve seen with flamingos, maybe that’s not always the case.
For example, do you think Beyonce and her role as CEO of Destiny’s Child Inc is being forced down a linear journey and reading all the emails?
No, because obviously she just decides what she wants to do and buys it.
So let’s have a look at how different journeys may actually take in reality.
So we’re going to use the flamingo analogy here.
The Greater Flamingo—this customer of ours—they absolutely understand what it is that they need.
They do lots of research themselves. Maybe they go to Google, maybe they get somebody in to talk to them.
But in their process, their sales process, they have some kind of budget to work with, so it’s got to fit that budget. They know that they’re going to be tasked to bring that in on budget. So they’re comparing prices and maybe what they’re doing here is they’re going backwards and forwards.
No one else is involved at this stage, by the way, in terms of you as a business perhaps looking to provide the service.
But they’re going to conduct lots of research and to the point where they feel like they need to understand, “well, is there any evidence that you can deliver what it is that you promise?”
So they seek that proof.
They request some proposals.
But they have a bit of crippling doubt.
They’re not quite sure whether or not they’ve picked the right long list, but they make a recommendation to the board.
And the board don’t buy it. They’re not happy with the recommendation.
So they’ve got to start that process again. They request some more proposals. They have more crippling doubt.
They make another recommendation. It still doesn’t get past.
This is what I call the “Toxic Purchase Process Cycle of Doom.” They’re stuck in the end—probably through centrifugal forces.
They managed to get the board to approve it and out there go and then make the sale.
Quite a complicated journey for this process, for this particular service that they’re buying.
But if we contrast that to a different company, a different customer buying exactly the same, I dunno… IT Support services, perhaps.
This customer knows exactly what they want!
All they need is someone to say, “yes, that’s fine. Let’s go ahead with that.”
They decide because it’s a smaller business, perhaps they’re in control, they make the key decision and they just buy it very, very fast.
This is what I call the “Nothing-is-Stopping-Me Velocity Waterfall.”
And then we’ve got the Chilean Flamingo.
No idea what they want. No idea.
They think they’ve got a need, but they dunno what it is.
They research constantly and forever.
They can’t get themselves out of this cycle of trying to find out they’re real bad indecision makers. They seek constant reassurance.
This is the “Will I be Fired? Indecision Vortex.”
In the end, they’re so overwhelmed by the whole process of deciding that they just pick one and buy it and hope for the best.
Each three of those is a very different journey.
They’re all buying the same thing.
And those types of customers may be buying your product, your service.
But they all act differently.
For me, linear, predictable journeys… they just don’t exist.
It’s nice to think that they do, but the reality is that they don’t, and this is partly responsible for that.
As I said earlier, this is where people start.
Search engines: great for research, terrible for decision-making, because the options are endless.
But we know that this is where people often go.
We need to accept a certain loss of control over these customer journeys because when we do that, we can all move forward and adapt to the way that things really work.
Published July 31, 2024
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