The Effective Effort Experience

The value and impact of reducing customer effort in service interactions has long been proven. "The Effortless Experience" is, or should be, an aspirational goal of most (if not all) service interactions.

But should "effortless" be the goal for complex B2B buying efforts? I don't think so, but some discussion is needed.

For starters, a service experience is different than the buying effort. With service, you've made the purchase, you just want things to work. And you don't want to do more work to make it work. (Work, work, work).

But for complex purchases, you need to put in some work. We decided to explore some of our research on departmental tech purchases through the effort lens. To do this, we took 4 different questions that had a list of activities that a buying teams might perform:

• Internal Activities
• Interactions or "content consumption" from independent third parties
• Activities with the vendor considered (we focused on the chosen vendor)
• Content Consumption from vendors considered (we also focused on content from the chosen vendor)

For all questions, respondents could select all the the things they did (not limited to Top 3 or Top 5 most valuable or any other similar constraint). We then created quartiles based on the groups that did the most activities, the middle and least. Make sense?

In looking at things this way based on High Quality Deals (see graphic above), we see a significant overweighting of the group that exerted the most effort in that pool.

Diving into the details, a few things stood out for me. The High Effort group was more likely to seek validation from other users in a variety of ways: references, reviews, and through communities. They were more likely to engage in activities around planning for value and success. And, they were more likely to create KPI driven business cases.

Fundamentally, this says to me that effort matters. We've also seen evidence in other B2B studies of the value of taking guiding a customer on course correcting actions if they are taking a path that is not better for them.

Beyond course corrections, what are some other vendor implications:

1. Level of effort is a signal of commitment to the project and they increased likelihood of a better and faster decision (Buyers with higher effort complete the entire buying cycle faster than low effort buyers for significant purchases).
2. Vendors should reduce the effort for the customer to put in good effort. By easing the path to critical content; aiding in connecting to third parties like analysts, influencers, and other users; and offering structured engagements that dive into the path to value.
3. Your work on your Ideal Customer Profile (aka Enterprise Persona) is important here. We naturally see buyers in orgs that are more likely to be effective buyers (using our New Chasm model) be more likely to put in high effort. If your ideal customer is in those groups, you should expect and prepare for more effort. If they are the others, then you made need to be prescriptive and really focused on making it easier for them to put in some effort.

Making great decisions and planning for value takes effort. Guiding the path to the right effort should be your effort reduction strategy. Effective Effort is a path to a great buying experience.