The Evolution of the Buyer’s Journey, or How the Internet Killed the Three-Martini Lunch

The third chapter of my book The Big Data-Driven Business (Wiley).  I will be posting a chapter every few weeks here on LinkedIn.

If you’ve ever watched Mad Men, you know Don Draper and his fellow admen used to drink booze at lunch—a lot of booze. This practice had a name: the three-martini lunch.

One reason why this practice thrived and sharing a drink was an accepted part of the workday was that lunch with salespeople was one critical way that businesspeople learned about their industry. It was also how salespeople formed relationships and built trust with the buyers. In those pre-Internet days, buyers had limited avenues for discovering and researching new products. They could read trade magazines and discover new products that way. Monthly publications, such as Industrial Equipment News and New Equipment Digest, showcased giant inventories of newly introduced products that were essentially rewritten vendor press releases. Buyers could use the reader service cards to get brochures and other content from vendors about their products. The buyers could also attend trade shows where vendors exhibited their products.

And, of course, the potential buyers could go to lunch with salespeople. Over lunch, the salespeople would talk about trends in the sector, pass along industry gossip, discuss their company, and, ultimately, try to win the trust of their potential clients. They did all of this so they could eventually sell the prospect a centrifugal pump, some typewriters, or a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system.

When you think about it, those three-martini lunches were the content marketing of the era. Just like content marketing, those lunches were designed to pass along valuable information, to gain the buyer’s trust, and, in the end, to sell some product.

So why did the three-martini lunch go by the wayside? Cultural norms changed, for one thing and getting drunk (and then driving back to the office) at lunch isn’t as acceptable as it used to be. Plus, the rise of the Internet ultimately transformed the entire buyer’s journey. Buyers who used to rely heavily on salespeople to learn about products could now consult corporate websites, perform Google searches, read product reviews, and solicit the opinions of peers using LinkedIn and other social media before ever contacting a salesperson. The Internet and its various tools of information discovery have forever changed the buyer’s journey, giving more control to the buyer and siphoning much of it away from salespeople. In the process, the marketing department—via the data it gathers on a prospect as he or she surfs the web in search of information about a purchase—has gained more influence over the buyer’s journey than it ever has had before.

Here’s how it happened. In the first phase of the Internet, companies launched corporate websites. They put their company brochures on their sites. Sometimes they put product catalogs and data sheets on their websites, too. Prospects could visit these websites directly, or they could use the first search engines, such as AltaVista, to help them find the products and services they were looking for. But that information was hard to find, and was still largely controlled by the corporation. Salespeople still provided critical details for the buyer during their journey. It wasn’t until Google came along and turbocharged search that finding product information online truly got traction. Google revolutionized search for consumers and business-to-business (B2B) buyers by making it fast, simple, and accurate.

Using Google, B2B buyers could, for example, key in the term “centrifugal pump” and find all the information they needed on that product in seconds—without ever having to leave their office. This was step one in deemphasizing the role of the salesperson. Step two was the rise of social media in all its forms, such as blogs and user review sites, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Social media led to an explosion of online content, and using tools such as Google and Bing, buyers could find the very specific information they were looking for. Additionally, buyers could now easily locate their peers to find extremely relevant information from trusted and independent sources about the products and services they wanted to buy.

With the growth of search and social media, dramatic changes in the buyer’s journey resulted. Salespeople were once involved in almost the entire buyer’s journey. They provided background information on industry trends; they gave specific information on the product; they negotiated; they closed the deal.

Now, because of the information power shift to the buyer, the marketing department is the part of the vendor company that is in touch with the buyer throughout the process. Various studies confirm this shift. CEB estimates that the typical B2B prospect is 57 percent of the way through the buyer’s journey before contacting a salesperson. Forrester Research found that the potential customer has completed as much as 90 percent of the buyer’s journey before reaching out to a salesperson.

What do these numbers mean exactly? A look at changes in the car-buying process can make these statistics about the buyer’s journey seem more concrete, because the car-buying process has undergone many of these same changes. Like many B2B products, an automobile is a considered purchase: it is expensive; it generally involves research by the prospective buyer; it is a purchase expected to last and perform for several years; and it tends to involve a buying team (in the case of a car, Mom, Dad, and the kids, rather than the CIO, CFO, and a handful of middle managers for B2B purchases).

In the past, the information in the car-buying process was asymmetrical. The salesperson, by far, had most of the information. Prospective car buyers could consult Consumer Reports or the guy down the street who could repair the engine on his GTO, but the car-buying process didn’t truly start until the buyer walked into the car dealership. And the car dealership was the car salesperson’s turf. The salesperson knew the wholesale value of the car, had access to what other buyers had paid, knew how well—or poorly—the car model was performing, and knew how happy—or unhappy—previous buyers of the car model were. The prospective buyer had access to the car’s sticker price, and that was about it.

In the digital age, however, the prospective car buyer has easy access to information once available to only the salesperson at the dealership. Online, prospects can find the wholesale price of the car they are considering; they can discover what previous buyers have paid for similar models or even for the exact car they are considering; and they know, through product review sites, how owners feel about the car’s performance. They even know that the same exact car is available a few towns away and at a better price. Buyers now have data that puts them on equal footing with the car salesperson; the information is no longer asymmetrical. And by the time buyers walk into a dealership, they know the model they want and often exactly what they want to pay. By the time a buyer comes face-to-face with a salesperson, the buying process is essentially over except for some minor haggling and signing the documents.

The evolution of the Kelley Blue Book from an information source reserved for dealers to a free website aimed at consumers is emblematic of the shift in data availability. The Kelley Blue Book, which is the de facto pricing guide for used cars, was started almost by accident by a California car dealer named Les Kelley, according to a history of the Kelley Blue Book published on the KBB.com website. An expert at repairing and restoring cars, Kelley used his expertise to create what was at one time the largest car dealership in the United States back in the early part of the twentieth century. To other dealers, Kelley distributed a list of the used cars he was interested in buying and the prices he would pay for them. Kelley’s list became widely trusted as the barometer for wholesale used car pricing.

Ever the entrepreneur, Kelley saw an opportunity and began publishing his list as the Kelley Blue Book, a reference to the Cleveland Social Directory, also known as the “Cleveland Blue Book,” which listed the prominent society families in Cleveland. Kelley published his first book in 1926, and his publishing business quickly became a bigger revenue producer than his car dealerships. For decades, Kelley sold the book exclusively to other businesses—mainly dealerships, car insurance companies, and banks that made car loans. It wasn’t until 1993 that the first print edition of the Kelley Blue Book was published aimed at consumers. Two years later, information from the Kelley Blue Book made its first appearance online at KBB.com. Kelley initially charged consumers $3.95 for a report, but within weeks stopped charging consumers, made the information free, and adopted an advertising model to support the site. The end result was a big first step in leveling the playing field in the car-buying process by offering consumers access to the same information that dealers had been privy to for decades.

A similar evolution has happened in the B2B buying world. Prospects research their potential purchases online, using Google to find product data, visiting product review sites, and soliciting peer opinions on social media. By the time the B2B buyer reaches out to the salesperson, there is often little to be learned. The salesperson is perhaps there to negotiate some terms and take the order.

But even if the salesperson is in contact with prospects much later in the buyer’s journey, the marketing department has a window on buyer behavior much earlier in the process—if they are looking. Marketers can observe how prospects are visiting their website, responding to e-mail, interacting with social media, and behaving after viewing online display or search engine advertising. Steve Woods called this process gauging a prospective buyer’s search history and online behavior or “digital body language.” In his book Digital Body Language (New Year Publishing, 2010), Woods wrote, “A sales professional’s ability to observe and understand the buyer’s body language was an irreplaceable component of his success. That’s no longer possible in the new paradigm. Instead, marketers must rise to the challenges: marketers must cultivate new skills to observe and understand the buyer’s digital body language” (p. 39).

And like salespeople, marketers can adjust their actions based on a prospect’s digital body language. For instance, a marketer can target prospects with tailored display ads based on what part of the marketer’s website they visited or what previous display ads they’ve viewed (a technique called “retargeting”). A marketer can follow up with the offer of a discount if a prospect opened a specific e-mail. Marketers can also reach out to their Facebook “likes” or Twitter followers with suggestions on what content to download, what white papers to read, or what videos to watch—across millions of interactions—in a completely automated manner.

When prospects raised their hands to show their interest in a particular company’s product or service, it used to be the salesperson who did the talking, supplying the content and interacting with the customer. Now, however, when the prospect visits a website or otherwise offers digital signals of interest in a company’s product or service, the forward-thinking marketing team automatically directs the prospect to the appropriate online content. For instance, if prospects visit the website, they may be directed to a white paper. If they read an e-mail, they might receive a follow-up e-mail with a discounted offer. If they click on a search ad, they could be retargeted with a gated content offer trying to get contact information. Only if they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL) do they get handed off to the sales team to try to touch base in a human-to-human interaction.

Content produced by the marketing team has always played a role in educating buyers, long before the Internet. In the days before digital, marketers produced brochures and industrial videos that the sales team could use as calling cards. In the early days of Google, digital content—often in the form of blogs or web pages—quickly became more important, because content, especially good content that generated a lot of hyperlinks and was a powerful search engine optimization (SEO) tool for Google’s algorithm—was a critical way that a website could earn a high ranking on Google’s search results. Having gated content (content that prospects would turn over their e-mail addresses to read) became critical to generating leads.

Every interaction that prospects have with a potential vendor’s website, social media pages, or online advertising creates data. It is this data—the big data—that Woods refers to as the potential buyer’s “digital body language.” Some marketers see prospects creating millions of data points every month, every week, or even every day. To track this data and ensure that they are processing it correctly and ultimately interacting with prospects in the proper way online and offline, marketers are installing arsenals of software that can include marketing automation systems, customer relationship management software, data management platforms, analytics tools, and content management systems.

This software is called the marketing technology stack. And the ability to implement it properly, use it effectively, and integrate all the pieces together efficiently is what will separate the great companies from their competition.