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Martyn Lewis at the 2022 SAMA Annual Conference

Last week, Market-Partners Inc. Principal and Founder, Martyn Lewis, presented again at SAMA’s Annual Conference. The two-and-a-half-day event was packed with though-provoking presentations, breakout sessions, and corridor conversations. Thank you to the organizers for all their hard work, as well as to the old faces and new friends we had the pleasure of speaking to in New Orleans.

Martyn presented alongside cohost Deb Honea of AWS on Managing the Hidden Buying Journey. Whether you couldn’t make our session or are simply looking for a refresher, we wanted to provide you with a quick summary and some actionable insights from our part of the conference.

Managing the Hidden Buying Journey

Our research shows that salespeople are involved in less than 10% of their customer’s buying activities – yet 100% of these activities can and will affect how likely a customer is to make a purchase. Leaving so much of your customer’s buying process in the dark is the most frequent cause of “buying journeys to nowhere.” This is a critical situation where the salesperson has forecasted the sale, believing their champion is taking things from there; but in reality, the champion is getting hung up on resistance from within their organization, about to decide the seller’s offering is not worth the effort.

The truth is your customer is probably going through this journey for the very first time, having never purchased your offering before. This means your champion can easily be caught off guard when unexpected players come out of the woodwork with objections they don’t have the answers to. As sellers though, we have hopefully seen successful purchases in the past, making us acutely aware of the roadblocks and how and when they occur. Because of this, we are in the perfect position to be proactive – anticipating objections and either resolving, mitigating, or navigating prospects away from friction.

This is why strategic account management and mapping the buying journey go hand in hand. When we map the buying journey, we can see what will happen in the buying process ahead of time: who will get involved, what they care about, and what the concerns will be. And because these patterns are predictable across a specific market, this means we can manage these journeys and operationalize around how our customers buy.

A Key Moment from Our Session

One exercise that resonated with our audiences in New Orleans was asking members to put themselves in their customers shoes. Most of businesspeople have been involved in a corporate purchase at some point, maybe even been the champion themselves. So, think back – what happened the last time your organization bought something?

The shared experience among attendees was that there were many, many people to convince in order to progress the deal, and that the list only grew as more and more players began to stick their oar in. Upon asking when these additional players got involved, the response was always, “At the very end” – to which there were audible laughs of agreement.

Bringing Buying Journeys into the Light

When an organization is considering any kind of large-scale offering, most employees and departments assume the proposal is going to die like a majority of them do. So, it is only when the sale is starting to look possible that coworkers and stakeholders choose to object. Is this brand the right fit for our business? How will this affect existing systems? Why is this initiative more important than what I am doing? Suddenly, objections both big and small begin to pile up.

While late-stage opportunity crash and burn remains an all-too-common problem, it doesn’t have to if a seller has properly mapped the buying journey. These well-equipped salespeople can work with their champions to incorporate key players earlier in the journey, managing them more directly. This not only shortens the overall buying process but massively increases the chance of a successful purchase.

Want to put this into action? Next time you are speaking with a prospect, make a mental note of the steps they are taking and the challenges they will soon face based on your previous sales. Instead of focusing on the “selling” itself, help your customer navigate their buying journey; prepare for any upcoming friction with the proper tools, information, and knowledge to help bypass it as effectively as possible. And voila, the journey has already started to be revealed!

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The Future of Outbound Sales

How many sales and marketing emails do you receive in a week? Well, without making you dig through your spam folder, the obvious answer is far more than you’d like.

Research shows a whopping 36% of all spam emails are advertising, making it the largest portion of junk mail in 2022. But why? how many of these emails are we actually responding to?

Although there’s no agreed upon figure, the reality is very few. So few in fact, most senders have convinced themselves virtual outreach is a numbers game, one that can be solved with whatever tools and technologies allow their bad selling faster.

Let’s face it – just because someone can send countless messages to unknown addresses doesn’t mean they should. Not because a “more is more” attitude won’t get any results, but because the lack of focus won’t get you the results they want. Even misguided campaigns and pitches can look successful on platforms that send it to enough people, while every unwarranted email received along the way only serves to hurt the brand.

If the real goal is to sell better, organizations need to adopt a carefully crafted engagement strategy based on how their customers buy and what they truly care about. Simply put, there is no way the future of sales and marketing is thousands of emails requesting a phone call. The future instead lies in understanding your own market’s Customer Buying Journey and delivering value to your prospects from the first interaction.

Bad Selling Faster

When discussing technology enabled sales, what do we mean by “bad selling faster?”

Imagine for a moment a group of orange vendors at the local farmers’ market. They are looking for a way to draw in new business and decide to roll out a new sales and marketing campaign: “buy one, get one free.” As many would expect, this brings in some amount of new customers, and with them, more profit. Based off this success, the vendors believe the logical next step would be to buy a megaphone and further the speed and reach of their message.

If the megaphone results in even more revenue, then their sales strategy could certainly look good on paper… but by what metric? profit compared to before, when the vendors were doing nothing?

There are unwritten drawbacks here that income math can’t consider. Namely, that while giving a discount is a viable strategy, it may not be the best one for these vendors to pursue. Reducing prices will not change the hearts and minds of buyers who weren’t already interested in their oranges. The vendors might find themselves selling at a lower price to customers who would’ve bought anyway, only attracting new, price-sensitive customers who will not stick around during a rougher growing season.

And what about every uninterested shopper who now has to listen to the noisy megaphone? Though some may be neutral to the added noise, there will be a segment of potential buyers who actively resent the orange vendors for this practice, only growing in size the louder and more frequent the discount bellows become.

With many of today’s sales and marketing tools, it is easier than ever to create tactics and success metrics with the flaws illustrated above. Yes, you can show an advertisement or value proposition to enough people, and someone, somewhere, will bite – but it might come at the expense of yourself and others.

A Better Way to Sell

Effective sales and marketing strategies should always begin with strategy. And like all things Outside-In™, good strategy is rooted in a deep understanding of how customers buy and why they don’t.

Returning to the orange stand, it would benefit the vendors’ outreach more to talk to shoppers who aren’t buying oranges. From these conversations, they discover the majority of famers’ market goers actually expect to pay a premium for fresh produce but wouldn’t use enough oranges in cooking to warrant frequent or bulk purchases. Rather than discounting their prices, the vendors realize they should be using their megaphone to tell passersby about the amazing orange sauces, marmalades, meringue pies they could use the fruit for… and maybe lower the volume a little bit.

Despite being an example of a relatively straightforward, B2C sale, these ideas are even more important for organizations dealing with complicated, B2B transactions. When reaching out to many leads, who are at varying points in their buying journeys, it is crucial for sales outreach to be personalized and intelligent. Salespeople must deliver tailored content that is relevant to where each prospect truly is in their buying journey, and the specific needs and wants for that time. This is a very different approach than blasting out generic messages, but one aimed at gaining genuine resonance with a market.

Only then can teams truly connect with buyers, deliver value, and be a part of the future of sales and marketing.

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The Hidden Buying Journey

A famous parable tells us about six men in a dark room, each of whom has never seen an elephant before, touching one in the shadows. The first man feels its tusks and believes the animal is like a spear. The second, its trunk, believing it is like a snake. The third, its leg, believing it is like a tree. Once every man has felt the elephant, each of them leave with their own partially true, yet uniquely wrong belief about what the creature “was.”

Like the men in the story, we are all guilty of using limited information to make bold claims about the world around us – but nowhere in business does this have larger consequences than with customers and their buying journeys. As sales and marketing departments begin to feel out different parts of their customers’ buying process, they often feel more confident guessing about other aspects of buyer behavior.

However, similar to the elephant, there are almost always differences between the “buying journey” we can see, and the buying journey we can’t. Even the smallest assumption can lead to a disconnect between sales strategies and a market’s buying process. Wasted resources, lost deals, and missed forecasts have left many wondering what is happening in the hidden parts of the buying journey. Luckily, taking an Outside-In™ approach can help us turn the lights on and see the bigger picture.

The Elephant in the Room

If we want to know what we don’t know, a good place to start would be understanding how much of the “elephant” we are even touching. Our research shows that customers tend to contact sellers when they are 50% or more of the way through their buying journey. Additionally, sellers are typically involved in less than 10% of their customers’ buying activities across the end-to-end customer journey lifecycle.

These two statistics explain why so many organizations have such a skewed perception of how their customers buy and why they don’t; when taken together, it becomes apparent most businesses can only see a fraction of a fraction of the buying journey.

But how much does this matter? “Hidden” or not, an extraordinarily perceptive and experienced businessperson might be able to fill in the rest of an elephant based off only few details. Yet such minds are exceedingly rare. Studies show it is far more difficult than most imagine to “put themselves in their customers’ shoes” and make the necessary inferences. This is for three key reasons:

1. If we were our customers, our Buying Journey DNA would not be an accurate reflection of our actual offering’s market.

2. We are far more biased towards our own offering, and towards purchasing a solution in general, than the average buyer.

3. Even if we could separate ourselves from our experiences with our offerings, we would still be influenced by our own expectations about customer behavior. This includes oversimplifications surrounding the demands and priorities a prospect has to balance.

In short, attempting to understand the buying journey from an opaque, internal perspective will almost always result in inconsistencies between selling and buying. It’s only a matter of how big.

A sales team might deliver some genuinely great presentations, based on many value propositions they believe a rational prospect like themselves would care about. Then, after knocking it out of the park with their offering’s astounding ROI, be left stunned that the would-be-buyer has decided to do… nothing. Not purchase from you. Not purchase from a competitor. Do absolutely nothing.

Situations like these happen all the time: a salesperson has found their champion who seems very excited about an offering, and everything is going smoothly until a few internal meetings turn it all to dust. And while it may be tempting to re-explain the amazing features and cost saving benefits, there’s likely more happening with the “elephant,” or within the hidden buying journey, than a simple misunderstanding of value.

Turning on the Lights

At the aforementioned firm, there is friction the salesperson can’t completely make out. For example, adopting the offering may require digitizing part of a process that has been industry standard for decades to do by hand. Perhaps there is some ongoing politicking surrounding this issue, as a respected higher up believes going digital could create a security risk for clients. There also may be hesitance to acquire something so “innovative” for fear of low adoption at a company that likes doing things “the old fashion way.”

This is only a sliver of the real-world problems we’ve found when analyzing buying journeys.

The aforementioned champion may not know how to navigate the hurdles placed in front of them – how to calculate the time to convert the existing library of documents, how to do the necessary risk assessment to appease the higher up, how to create engaging end user training to make sure employees use the offering optimally. Before anyone knows it, the deal has run out of gas. To get everyone aligned, smooth over every objection, consider every alternative, implication, detail that may change… sometimes things turn out to be fine the way they are.

This is why taking an Outside-In™ approach and mapping the buying journey is so important. In the minds of too many salespeople, when the proposal is in, the deal is done – if they were the customer, there is no way things could go wrong! But in the prospect’s eyes, the real buying effort has just begun. That said, once the buying journey has been mapped, it becomes apparent that customers within a specific market buy in remarkably similar ways. When you truly understand the customer, you not only know every obstacle they will face along the way but can better help your prospects buy and adopt your offering.

Certainly easier than trying to feel your way around in the dark – wouldn’t you agree?

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How Do You Manage the Customer Buying Journey?

Every year, the Customer Buying Journey becomes a hotter and hotter topic of discussion within the business world. And while we, as one of the earliest proponents of and educators on the buying journey, are thrilled to see it catch on in such a big way, we also can’t help but notice two worrying aspects surrounding these conversations.

First, much of the readily available information being written and shared on the buying journey only gives a surface level explanation of this incredibly deep, rich, and integral subject matter. Second, the amount of expertise required to gain a truly comprehensive understanding of the buying journey is being woefully underestimated.

That is why we want to use our two-decades worth of buying journey research to create the best possible resource for mastering Customer Buying Journey. This article will serve as the third in a three-part series, giving in depth answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about this essential business concept.

1. What is the Customer Buying Journey?

2. How Do You Map the Customer Buying Journey?

3. How Do You Manage the Customer Buying Journey?

Now, it’s time to wrap this series with how to apply this learning thus far.

What Does it Mean to Manage the Customer Buying Journey?

In part one, we discussed how today’s buyers are faced with unprecedented choice and information during their buying process. These two factors have changed the landscape of every market, as with more choice and information comes significantly more control in the buyer-seller relationship. Prospective buyers no longer depend on the seller to get offering information – and in some cases, don’t need to contact you at all to complete a buying journey.

While these circumstances may make sellers seem helpless, taking an Outside-In™ approach and managing the Customer Buying Journey leaves as little of the buying to chance as possible.

Once an end-to-end buying journey has been properly mapped, it becomes evident that specific markets, when acquiring a particular offering, buy in remarkably similar ways. Because of these similarities, sellers can create ultra-effective, repeatable strategies to manage these journeys towards more favorable outcomes.

In practice, this means forgoing an internal focus on a sales process in favor of comprehensive selling activities that support the prospect’s buying activities at each step of their buying journey. It cannot be overemphasized that these selling activities must be based on how your customers truly buy, not how you think or wish they would buy.

What is the Role of Sales and Marketing in the Buying Journey?

The new role for sales and marketing is to positively influence the Customer Buying Journey. Using the customer-centric strategy outlined above, these departments should aim to not only help the customer navigate their buying process as to not get lost or caught in the friction along the way, but also to keep the seller relevant across the entire journey.

Exerting such positive influence can be best summarized by the Selling Imperatives. These are the four, and only four, ways to impact the Customer Buying Journey:

Initiate: to motivate a buyer to start a buying journey

Expedite: to motivate a buyer to move through their buying journey quicker than they otherwise would

Complete: to motivate a buyer so that the probability of them completing their buying journey, and buying from you, increases

Augment: to motivate a buyer to invest more than they otherwise would as a result of their buying journey

How Does Organizing Around the Buying Journey Help My Business?

Though almost everyone has a generic idea of what their buyers goes through (from part one, the flawed “Awareness,” “Consideration,” “Decision” archetype), high-level journeys cannot help you create meaningful business strategies. Certainly, you need 1.) enough of a brand presence that prospects can become “Aware” of your offering, 2.) good enough features you will be “Considered,” 3.) a logistical way to purchase and deliver the offering anticipating a “Decision.” But once you’ve covered the bare minimum… then what?

You can’t complete a sale if a customer doesn’t complete a buying journey. Pseudo-steps and cookie cutter sales processes will not give you the insight or approaches to address and resolve underlying concerns slowing or stopping the journey. They will not show you how to have higher-value interactions, more productive conversations, and build stronger relationships within your unique market. Only organizing around a deep understanding of how your customers buy (and why they don’t) can help you accomplish those goals.

This is why deeply understanding the mind of the buyer remains the ultimate source of competitive advantage. It might take time and energy, but the majority of organizations have not yet leveraged it to the fullest possible extent.

What are the Results of Taking an Outside-In™ Approach?

If you are a numbers person, we’ll cut straight to the chase. Our clients see a:

12-20% increase in revenue

10%+ decrease in selling costs

15-35% increase in productive selling time

12-27% increased win ratios of late-stage opportunities

17-120% increase in average order size

What Types of Organizations and Industries Benefit Most from an Outside-In™ Approach?

Though it may sound like an exaggeration, any organization, regardless of size or industry, can benefit from taking this Outside-In™ approach.

Let’s say that you just founded a brand-new medical device start up and have successfully launched your first product or service. While you’re seeing an encouraging number of sales based off the innovative nature of your offering, what happens when you’ve passed the early adopters and enter the early majority? This is a problem we’ve seen many smaller, entrepreneurial clients face. A genuinely excellent value proposition suddenly meets unforeseen resistance.

On the opposite end, let’s say you are an established software firm with only a handful of competitors. Though you have a healthy amount of repeat business keeping you afloat, there is growing pressure from the board to increase market share. Yet despite improving your features and lowering your prices, you seem unable to break the loyalty of your competitor’s customers. What next? This is a familiar situation for our larger clients.

Both of these organizations are facing hidden friction in their respective customer’s buying journeys that cannot be pushed past by simply reinforcing value or cutting costs. Yet this is an assumption we find in every industry, with every kind of offering: “if the value is high enough and the price is right, the customer will buy.” But as customers ourselves, we know this isn’t true. Every one of us turns down great offers at great prices that could demonstrably improve our lives. This dated belief about value and price far oversimplifies the often complicated, external reality of buying.

How Can I Start Influencing the Buying Journey Today?

While many understandably want to jump ahead to the selling, these strategies should always start with the buying. That means speaking with customers to map your specific market’s end-to-end buying journey. Though some firms feel these projects should be handled in-house, if choosing a third party, we believe there’s no better company to help than Market-Partners Inc.

While there are certainly many things you already know about your market, even the most successful organizations develop incorrect assumptions and biases – sometimes overlooking the critical subtleties of the buying journey. Seeking expertise in mapping a buying journey is one of the highest return interactions your organizations can have. Market-Partners Inc. is so much more than just a fresh set of eyes. With over twenty years’ worth of experience, our clients repeatedly share that how we bring fresh insight to their sales and marketing departments. This is because we not only have the right models and methods to swiftly deliver deeper customer research than anyone else, but can bring it to life in an actionable and resonant way for any organization.

Looking for Even More on the Customer Buying Journey?

As a result of more than twenty years of research that included in-depth conversations with several thousand buyers, Martyn Lewis of Market-Partners Inc. has uncovered, defined, and documented exactly what goes on in the Customer Buying Journey.

In his book How Customers Buy …& Why They Don’t, he makes the argument that anyone wanting to sell anything in today’s business world has to start by gaining a profound knowledge of their market’s buying journey, and he provides the ingredients and recipe for mapping and managing the very DNA of a specific market’s buying journey.

Order your copy on Amazon today.

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How Do You Map the Customer Buying Journey?

Every year, the Customer Buying Journey becomes a hotter and hotter topic of discussion within the business world. And while we, as one of the earliest proponents of and educators on the buying journey, are thrilled to see it catch on in such a big way, we also can’t help but notice two worrying aspects surrounding these conversations.

First, much of the readily available information being written and shared on the buying journey only gives a surface level explanation of this incredibly deep, rich, and integral subject matter. Second, the amount of expertise required to gain a truly comprehensive understanding of the buying journey is being woefully underestimated.

That is why we want to use our two-decades worth of buying journey research to create the best possible resource for mastering Customer Buying Journey. This article will serve as the second in a three-part series, giving in-depth answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about this essential business concept.

1. What is the Customer Buying Journey?

2. How Do You Map the Customer Buying Journey?

3. How Do You Manage the Customer Buying Journey?

Without further ado, let’s dive into some of the most intricate aspects of the buying journey.

Why Do You Map the Buying Journey?

Mapping the DNA of the buying journey is the number one job for any organization interested in optimizing their sales and marketing approaches. Without understanding how the customer is going to buy, a business is essentially leaving everything to inefficient process and chance. Sure, shoot enough arrows in the dark, and some of them might be able to hit a slow-moving target – but it would certainly be easier if you could see the target, knew where it was headed next, and of course, were taught how to use your bow.

How Do You Map the Buying Journey?

There is no substitute for talking directly with buyers and prospects about what happens across their buying journey. This can be trickier than it seems, as many buyers couldn’t tell you much in actual detail; they may have documented their purchase process, yet most customers do not keep track of their end-to-end buying journey.

This is why asking the right questions and listening to the customer is so important. Find out how different players across the organization perceive events and look for benchmarks of how they typically progress through their buying journey. Discover why they do what they do, where and when they get hung up, and why. It’s all there, but it takes detective work, patience, and unbiased eye to pick up on the true, underlying logic. And when you start hearing the same details, the same sequences, the same reasoning – which we can assure you will happen – then you will know you have decoded the DNA.

What is the “DNA” of a Buying Journey?

Over our decades of research, Martyn and the Market-Partners Inc. team have developed a model to effectively decode and create a map for any buying journey. The key is the Buying Journey DNA, which are the six strands (or factors) that comprise and influence all buying journeys.

While the nature of these strands can vary greatly between different markets, a very interesting fact came to light during our investigations. The buying journey for a particular market, when buying a specific offering, will share the same DNA. In fact, a similar DNA code will define a single market, and conversely, if two buyers purchase the same offering but in a different manner, that indicates two distinct markets.

Here are the six strands of the Buying Journey DNA:

Triggers (and Dependencies): the catalysts and prerequisites that initiate and precede a buying journey.

Steps: the activities and stages that a buyer will likely engage in.

Key Players: the relevant individuals and groups across all the steps of the buying journey.

Buying Style: how a buyer determines what and where to buy.

Value Drivers: the motivations of the buyer.

Buying Concerns: the inhibitors that can slow and/or stop the buying journey.

It is the DNA of that particular Customer Buying Journey that forms the basis of a successful market engagement.

It also crucial to restate from the previous installment that strands 3 through 6 all can, and likely will, change with each step of the buying journey.

Where is the Most Friction in most Buying Journeys?

The amount of friction in the buying journey is directly correlated to the amount of effort required to reach the next step. Typically, becoming aware and interested in an offering at an early stage in the buying journey (barring an immediate, glaring objection) is very easy. Seeing an ad, doing cursory research, having a conversation, even listening to a pitch requires little input and few hurdles for a would-be-buyer to overcome. That said, actually committing to an offering requires substantially more effort, and the amount necessary only scales upwards with the size and complexity of the sellers offering and the customer’s organization.

At the point of commitment, your prospect is going to be faced with a laundry list of challenges to work though if they ever hope to align and mobilize their respective organization. They need to: handle all the outside friction and competing agendas, worry about implementation and adoption, manage all the implications of moving forward, continually explain why this purchase is a higher priority than many other initiatives, show why the “status quo” is not good enough, and jump through so many more hoops it’s difficult to even imagine… unless you’ve ever tried to get your own company to adopt anything new.

Ironically, despite this being the time where the buying effort skyrockets, this is usually where the selling effort stops. Most salespeople are busy celebrating a tentative, verbal agreement to purchase, while their “champion” is spinning their wheels due to pushback, just one more no away from deciding this isn’t worth the effort.

What is the Friction in the Buying Journey?

Buying Concerns are probably the most critical facets of the Customer Buying Journey DNA. They are widely overlooked, often trivialized, and usually the least understood aspects – yet explain precisely why customers don’t buy offerings that would unquestionably bring them value. As stated in the definition, these are the inhibitors, the pinch-points that can slow, or even stop, a buying journey. Though they come in all shapes and sizes, but like with all things buying journey, we have found for a specific offering in a given market there is great commonality of buying concerns across each step. After much analysis, we have defined nine categories of buying concerns – any one of which can derail a buying journey from its tracks.

Process: the actual process – purchasing, sourcing, and so on – within the buying organization expressly for the acquisition of this type of product or service.

Priority: the urgency and timing of the purchase, and how it aligns with the organization’s current and upcoming directives, strategies, and goals

Individual: the personal motivations and objections of the individual “carrying the ball” at any stage of the buying journey.

Organizational: the “political” friction, including all the various agendas, objections and concerns that are likely to arise across the organization.

Alternatives: any and all alternatives an organization may consider before they move forward with a particular acquisition, including doing nothing.

Business: the fiscal side of the equation – the business case. Is there a complete and compelling business reason to trigger and complete the buying journey?

Implications: the logical implications of acquiring a certain offering – what actually happens when someone buys something.

Fit: the way a potential acquisition aligns with how and what that company would usually buy.

Change: the intangible changes, including the very perception of change, that must occur to adopt the new offering. This concern can be especially deadly and is potential deal-breaker territory.

While some buying concerns are very straightforward and objective, others are completely subjective and emotional. Handling a long list of concerns like this may seem complicated at first, but once the DNA has been mapped, the patterns emerge. You will know what to expect around each turn of the buying journey, and how to avoid or resolve these concerns every time.

Are Buyers and Their Buying Journeys Logical?

Many would consider it a “no brainer” for a buyer to buy when they are faced with the opportunity to do something better, cheaper, or faster. This is why so much of business, sales, and marketing is based upon that notion; if you position your offering correctly and show the value to the prospect, surely, based upon sound economic reasoning, they will buy.

In today’s world, this is almost never the case. But before you walk away thinking this means no logic in how customers buy, we can assure you, there is. Once you have mapped the Buying Journey DNA, the internal reasoning and line of thinking become obvious. Take for example a client we worked with who was debuting an innovative medical device that could save more lives – more reliably, more quickly, and at a lower cost – than the product it intended to replace. All it required to use was 20 minutes of training to use.

Yet that modest 20 minutes turned out to be a deathblow for prospects. While the hospital faculty fully believed in the device’s benefits, any additional training would have required union approval, before taking almost a year to fit the course into every potential users’ already busy schedules. And while you might be tempted to jump to the seller’s defense, arguing, “But this could save lives!” – that isn’t what the concern is about. The old procedure was effective enough that a hospital’s time and energy was better spent elsewhere.

Friction like this is precisely why even the highest, most convincing of value propositions cannot singlehandedly drive sales across the finish line. Only by mapping and managing the buying journey can a seller effectively deal with these concerns and move the deal forward.

Can’t Wait for the Next Installment?

As a result of more than twenty years of research that included in-depth conversations with several thousand buyers, Martyn Lewis of Market-Partners Inc. has uncovered, defined, and documented exactly what goes on in the Customer Buying Journey.

In his book How Customers Buy …& Why They Don’t, he makes the argument that anyone wanting to sell anything in today’s business world has to start by gaining a profound knowledge of their market’s buying journey, and he provides the ingredients and recipe for mapping and managing the very DNA of a specific market’s buying journey.

Order your copy on Amazon today.

by

What Is the Customer Buying Journey?

Every year, the Customer Buying Journey becomes a hotter and hotter topic of discussion within the business world. And while we, as one of the earliest proponents of and educators on the buying journey, are thrilled to see it catch on in such a big way, we also can’t help but notice two worrying aspects surrounding these conversations.

First, much of the readily available information being written and shared on the buying journey only gives a surface level explanation of this incredibly deep, rich, and integral subject matter. Second, the amount of effort required to gain a truly comprehensive understanding of the buying journey is being woefully underestimated.

That is why we want to use our two-decades worth of buying journey research to create the best possible resource for mastering Customer Buying Journey. This article will serve as the first in a three-part series, giving in depth answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about this essential business concept.

1. What is the Customer Buying Journey?

2. How Do You Map the Customer Buying Journey?

3. How Do You Manage the Customer Buying Journey?

Without further ado, let’s get started with some buying journey fundamentals.

What Is the Customer Buying Journey?

The Customer Buying Journey is the spectrum of activities a buyer is likely to engage in when deciding whether to buy a particular offering, plus all the factors that could impact those activities and decisions. Counter intuitive to its name, it should be clarified that not all buying journeys end at a purchase, and some journeys do not end with purchase at all.

Though the specific steps and number of steps depend on the market and offering, all buying journeys share a basic macro anatomy: 1.) the journey starts from the first awareness of an opportunity or challenge, 2.) continues through the acquisition of the offering (including any additional products and services required to use it), and 3.) is “completed” with successful adoption and/or with an ongoing supplier-customer relationship.

Keep in mind that buying journeys can, and often do, stall or stop prematurely or end without resulting in the purchase of your offering. For example, a prospect could decide the acquisition is not worth the effort, may decide it’s better to revisit it at a later time, or buy an alternative from your competitor without even talking to you. None of these scenarios mean a buying journey did not occur.

What Isn’t a Buying Journey?

A buying journey is not the activities a supplier imagines their prospects would engage in or believes their prospects should engage in. Far too often, we see “buying journeys” mapped either using incomplete sales and marketing data on interactions or in accordance with a pre-existing sales process, pipeline, or cycle. Both of these cases come with their own distinct shortcomings.

In the first scenario, we have a business putting far too much emphasis on the few, limited pieces of the buying journey they can see. For example, their “buying journey” shows a prospect visiting the company website, sales giving them a call or two, and a month later, the prospect making a purchase. However, this “journey” does not account for everything the business can’t see; any investigating the customer did off the company website, how the customer found out about the offering, what prompted them to accept the calls, as well as every conversation, alternative, approval, budget, and competing agenda they delt with in that month leading up to the purchase. To put it all in perspective, our research shows that sellers are engaged in less than 10% of all buying activities.

The second situation puts too much faith in the organizations own offering. “Buying journeys” mapped to a business’ own internal sales process, pipeline, or cycle assumes there is nothing more valuable or important to the customer than the acquiring their product or service – but this is hardly ever the case. Buyers live and work in highly complex and dynamic worlds. They have many other things to do and think about. And when they do decide to instigate a buying journey, they have unprecedented information, choice, independence, and access to all markets.

What Are (and Aren’t) the Stages of a Buying Journey?

As stated above, there are no set “stages” of the Customer Buying Journey; they are entirely dependent on your market and offering. Although it may be tempting to think of journeys in terms of easy, catch-all pseudo-steps like “Awareness,” “Consideration,” “Decision,” this oversimplification is inherently dangerous. While these three things certainly happened – but what started the awareness? who was involved during consideration? how did they ultimately reach their decision? and were they satisfied with their choice after the fact?

Generic steps also don’t consider how vastly different, lengthy, and complicated journeys can be. Consider the difference between purchasing a car and purchasing car insurance. Your buying journey with your car likely ended whenever you finished its payment plan, but your buying journey with your car insurance is… hopefully… ongoing. Moreover, insurance goes beyond adding a fourth, band-aid step, like “Renewal.” Some customers will need to file a claim between their “Decision” and “Renewal,” but not every driver and not every year. And before you separate “Filing Claim” into its own journey, if you have ever filed a claim, you know this experience will greatly influence the chance you “Renew.”

These are the types of considerations that must be accounted for if an organization truly wants to understand and strategize around the buying journey. Generic steps leave far too many questions not only unanswered, but un-asked.

What Changes Across the Stages of the Buying Journey?

One of the most important dynamics of mapping a buying journey is understanding that things can change throughout it. For example, the buyer may gain new knowledge, and as a result, consider new alternatives, raise new concerns, or change their priorities. Another important factor would be to know how and when different key players get involved. What about procurement or technical resources?

As you are likely starting to realize, buying journeys are incredibly dynamic and intricate processes. But while these permutations and combinations may seem endless, this is all part of the Customer Buying Journey DNA. Once the six strands of a buying journey’s DNA have been decoded and mapped, you will see that a particular market buys in a remarkably similar way, and that the variables across any given buying journey can be anticipated and managed.

How has the Buying Journey Itself Changed?

The Customer Buying Journey has changed dramatically during the course of the new millennia. Up until the end of the 20th century, the salesperson held the keys. The buyer had to come to them to gain information, to understand the product, and learn how and if the offering matched what was required.

This has all changed. With the advent of the internet, the buyer now has all the information they need at their fingertips. Our studies have shown for the last 10 years that buyers don’t even contact salespeople until that are more than 50% through their buying process – more recently, 70% or further. This is easily understood when we consider that 74% of B2B buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase.

This clearly demonstrates revolution in the buying-selling equation, as the power has completely shifted from the seller to the buyer. The buyer is no longer at the mercy of the seller to get information; it is the buyer who now has the information that the seller needs. This is why the very notion of a sales process is outdated, and why mapping journeys to such a concept is fruitless. It is no longer the salesperson or sales process that sets the pace or dictates what happens next. It is the customer and their buying journey.

Can’t Wait for the Next Installment?

As a result of more than twenty years of research that included in-depth conversations with several thousand buyers, Martyn Lewis of Market-Partners Inc. have uncovered, defined, and documented exactly what goes on in the Customer Buying Journey.

In his book How Customers Buy …& Why They Don’t, Martyn Lewis makes the argument that anyone wanting to sell anything in today’s business world has to start by gaining a profound knowledge of their market’s buying journey, and he provides the ingredients and recipe for mapping and managing the very DNA of a specific market’s buying journey.

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