AI and the Buying Journey

2023 has seen an absolute explosion in the quantity and quality of AI-powered business tools. Whether it’s recruiting, scheduling meetings, or even reading legal contracts, there is now an AI that can do almost anything for you. But as always, what is of particular interest to us is how these new technologies can help you manage your specific market’s customer buying journey.

Depending on how your buyers buy, what journey management entails could include a wide spectrum of activities and touchpoints. However, there are two offerings I am sure we have all heard about, if not used at work ourselves. The first are the AI apps that can help you automate and personalize your sales emails to prospects and existing clients. The second are the AI tools designed to create marketing content, both entirely new and from the existing library you already have.

But while the potential is clearly there – are these kinds of customer-facing AI offerings adding value for buyers in their journeys? And if they can, what organizations could benefit the most?

Certainly, AI can save almost any business time, effort, and resources. Yet as buyers ourselves, nearly all of us have had a make-or-break experiences with AI before. Just last month, I was redirected by a chatbot to FAQs I had already found on Google, leading me to buy from their competitor who had a phone number listed and a human to talk to. Ultimately, if an AI is not helping your buyers buy, it may not have a place in your organization’s tool belt.

How Your Customers Interact with AI

To understand how your market interacts with AI, we must first understand how they interact with your brand. We define a market as buyers who buy in similar ways. Conversely, if two buyers purchase the same offering but in a different manner, that indicates two distinct markets. While many factors contribute to a buying journey, we can get a foundational understanding through one strand of the Buying Journey DNA – the buying style. The buying style encompasses the one of four ways any market engages with an organization or offering. Although this style can change throughout a buying journey, we can use these four ways to approximate how two opposing markets might feel about sales and marketing AI.

1. Sort and Select: the buyer knows exactly what they need and believes they have a choice of potential suppliers or offerings.
2. Trusted Advisor: the buyer needs help determining a solution and has a favored organization to turn to for assistance.
3. Search and Choose: the buyer needs help determining a solution, but at the same time, believes they have a choice of who to turn to.
4. “Starbucks”: the buyer knows exactly what they need and has a preference for a particular supplier.

For Sort and Select markets, many firms tend to compete on price and availability given that the buyer doesn’t view competitor offerings as substantially different. AI could be an incredibly good fit for these kinds of organizations as it can keep overhead costs down while still having a sizeable marketing presence on multiple channels. It can also make your business more convenient to interact with by allowing sales to automate responses to straightforward inquiries or quickly analyze what the best headline is for email outreach.

However, if you are a Trusted Advisor, this may not be the case. If you are viewed as a thought leader in a particular area, AI generated content is only as good as the existing material it was trained on. It cannot create novel, substantiated connections between concepts like a subject matter expert can. AI could also be a bad fit if your market expects a personal connection with your sales team. A key relationship could be undermined if you send a follow up email written by an AI to be someone perceptive to its style of writing.

Putting Intelligence Behind Technology

When consulting with clients, we overwhelmingly recommend they chose one market to go after, and either shift their brand to match it or drill further down if they’re already there. Trying to compete in two markets nearly always leads to conflicts in messaging, experiences, and approaches – including the tools and technologies behind them.

Let’s go back to the chatbot I encountered last month. From that experience, you can probably guess I would have been Search and Choose for that brand and offering; I needed help choosing a solution, and their AI lost them a customer. That said, I may not be reflective of the market the organization is trying to capture. If this business has an overwhelming number of the “Starbucks”-style customers, then their usual visitor might know what they need or only ask the chatbot basic clarifying questions before purchasing. A buyer like me could simply be an outlier.

The only way to ground your market selection though is to have a deep understanding of how your buyers buy: what triggers a journey, who gets involved, what they value, what their concerns are, how they evaluate your offering, and how each of these factors can, and likely does, change along the way. When taking all of these elements in, it becomes clear that it takes more than just technology to positively influence the entirety of the customer buying journey. But leveraging the mind of your buyer will show you how to put real intelligence behind AI and guide your market to a successful purchase.