How customers workCustomers do not purchase through the journeys you define. Buying decisions are complex and buying groups have multiple needs that must be satisfied for a conclusion to be reached. When organisations focus less on controlling the customer journey and instead align themselves to enabling buyers however the buyer wants to interact, deals get larger, close more frequently and produce customers with fewer post-purchase regrets.
Customer journey frameworks provide the foundation for enabling sales and marketing teams to be buyer enablers. They are a shared language for understanding, enabling and measuring the effectiveness of activity to support the customer. They are frameworks for understanding a customer’s journey; they are not a definition of the journey the customer actually experiences.
3.0 Models for understanding customers
Buyer journeys are non-linear. They never have been. The idea that because purchases are now more complex – which we shouldn’t doubt – necessitates a more complex model is to misunderstand the customer journey model’s purpose. Customer journey frameworks are models of reality. They’re maps of how customers can get from A to B that remove the extraneous information that makes them impractical to implement and use.
3.1 Marketing funnels vs customer journeys
The funnel is a practical way to show the flow of a large number of early stage opportunities at the top, some leakage as deals are lost, down to a smaller number of closed business opportunities at the bottom. The leakiness of the funnel is a measure of the efficiency of converting early opportunities to revenue; a high percentage reduction through the funnel could be a product of an ineffective sales methodology, an uncompetitive solution or a poor quality of initial opportunities.
3.2 Great sales is Buyer enablement
A customer journey framework is not how a customer buys. The customer journey framework is a model of a simplified, standardised customer journey that represents an holistic view of the major steps that all customers will go through so that usable customer journey maps can be built to create great experiences.
3.3 Customer purchase mindset
The first rule of sales says that you cannot sell to a customer that cannot buy. You also cannot sell to a customer that has not identified a need to buy. You can, however, take a customer through the process of understanding their need, even if they weren’t previously aware of it. All customers, whether they’re net new, you’re cross selling to new buying centres or you’re upselling within an existing buying centres will go through the same states of a customer journey.
3.4 Marketing funnel stages
The role of sales and marketing is not just to meet customers at their present journey state and leave them there. The objective of buyer enablement is to move customers through their purchase experience. Every sales and marketing touchpoint should have a clear objective behind it to enable buyers to move from state A to state B.
3.5 Customer personality types
Everything you say to a person is filtered through their frames of reference, biases, and preconceived ideas. Now imagine a buying group with every member having a different frame of reference, biases and preconceptions. How do you communicate to them at scale? Because buying groups are have diversity of roles and personalities, the most successful sales teams prioritise their efforts where they are most likely to have an impact.