The Buyer’s Journey: Do You Fall into the Trap?

Much is written about "The Buyer's Journey" these days; it's one of the next shiny things.

What is it? It's the active research process that buyers go through that culminates in a decision to make a purchase or not. The theory is that today's buyers go through a significant portion of this journey before ever engaging sellers. Therefore, marketing and sales must adjust accordingly.

Identifying and understanding your customer's "buyer journey" is important; however, if it is followed too closely, you risk missing sales opportunities, low closing rates, and leading with product rather than solutions. Additionally, your sales process will become very reactive.   

While understanding the buyer's journey is important, it's equally important to understand the traps that you will experience along the way.  

There are 3 major traps that we, as salespeople, can fall into if we're not aware of them.  

First, for many organizations, a significant part of their sales come from customers who weren't aware how the seller could help them increase sales, decrease costs, or increase productivity. It was only after a salesperson helped create a trigger event, that there was a buyer's journey.

The buyer's journey concept does not adequately take developing trigger events into consideration.

Second, most customers seek multiple quotes or proposals, typically 3 or 4, during their journey. How does this impact us? The buyer's journey is designed to keep the 3 companies who are going to lose the order engaged to ensure that they invest time and resources developing their proposal and responding to the steps in the journey. This is why across all industries, the average closing rate is 25%, or more accurately, the losing rate is 75%.

The buyer's journey is designed to motivate you to invest your limited time and resources on opportunities you are not going to win.

Third, customers do not always know how to buy. How many times have you walked into a customer meeting to be met with, "Tell me what you have." If we don't handle this correctly, it makes for a product-led sale and stifles your opportunity to identify or develop trigger events and provide solutions. Just because the buyer has a journey mapped out, it doesn't mean that it is in their best interest.

The buyer's journey assumes customers know best how to solve their trigger events with your product or solution. Additionally, it assumes there is no value with your sales team developing innovative solutions with state-of-the-art products and services.

While there is value in understanding your customer's buying journey, just make sure you don't fall into any of the traps!