Driving demand that results in customers is Marketing’s primary mission. Yet Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) struggle to deliver predictable pipelines which has hurt its credibility in the Board room. Every year, they embark on a quest to solve the same riddle with programs based on what industry analysts/experts say are effective; past experience of what yielded quality results; and a dose of new ideas to try. In other words, there is a good amount of educated guessing going on.
The riddle is rooted in social media’s affect on how buyers purchase.
In today’s socially engaged world, over seventy percent of the buyer’s purchase process is completed before a sales person is every contacted. The process is self-directed and leverages the transparency of markets as buyers research their problem, potential solutions and the efficacy of those solutions without needing, or wanting, to talk with a sales person. By the time the buyer engages with a sales person, they have a preferred solution, a list of open questions and a price in mind. Sales, in turn, find they have limited influence on the buyer’s process.
What most B2B marketers overlook is that the experience the Buyer wants as a customer is as important in the purchase decision as the capabilities of the product or service. If CMOs want to drive growth, they need to engage with the Buyer on their terms.
Solving the riddle requires a new mindset, one that is rooted in aligning to the Buyers’ Journey. A core principle of the Buyers’ Journey is that everyone is a buyer all the time, even customers. A set of organizing principles, the Buyers’ Journey aligns company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers.
By adopting the Buyers’ Journey, there is a clear opportunity for B2B CMOs to achieve two significant goals: Proactively shape the buyer’s experience and, by doing so, accelerate revenue growth. Since the buyer self-defines their journey, it is Marketing’s responsibility to intimately understand and enable the buyer by offering the right content and calls to action through the information channels the buyer prefers at each step in the Journey. Done correctly, vendors can achieve the twin goals as well as build the trust and credibility needed to earn preference when the buyer enters the Purchase stage.
How can marketers discover what’s largely invisible?
There are four major steps that buyers typically go through before they purchase: Enablement stage: Problem Definition, Solution Search, Evaluation and Validation.
Buyers begin their Journey not by looking for a vendor but by understanding the issue’s root cause, explorting best practices, and learning how peers have addressed the need. In the Problem Definition stage, buyers are doing the homework necessary to decide if and how they might want to approach solving their problem. In the Solution Search step the organization agrees on target outcomes and success metrics, the desired approach, and any particular constraints that need to be addressed.
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