Installment 4: The Trigger

Why read this: learn 4 lessons we have learned from 20 years of B2B buyer research.?

Our Starting Point?

In our first 3 articles, we set up understanding your customer’s journey as the product marketer’s path to growth rate optimization (GRO), the holy grail of every PE-backed or VC-funded B2B SaaS company.?

Our observation from 20 years of B2B buyer research is that the companies perform best when the customer journey they offer reflects the journey prospects seek. So the highest-impact and most efficient path to marketplace growth is delivering on B2B customer needs. Go figure.?

Where We Are Headed?

Today we start our tour through each of the 8 stages of the customer journey, beginning with what we commonly call “the buyer’s journey.” With success, you will be able to turn your buyer’s journey into your customer’s journey and your path to purpose and profit.?

Our goal in this tour of stages is to share our learning about how B2B companies can win more at each stage.?

From Situation to Trigger

Ironically, the buyer’s journey starts at a point that neither you nor your sales colleagues are present to witness – the trigger event that starts the whole solution consideration process.?

The more you learn about your prospect, the more equipped you become to identify where and how you can influence their journey. It is a sad but unavoidable fact that each prospect undertakes the majority of this journey before engaging. Perhaps we need to give them a better reason.

Lesson #1: Triggers are Tribal

The funny thing about triggers is that they are just “conditions” -- usually long-standing situations that one day become “situations to improve” or “problems to be solved.” But until a group of humans gets together and names that “condition” as a “problem to be solved”, it’s just a condition.?

The point is, it takes a group of individuals at the company to publicly declare that a “situation needs improvement”. This is almost always a small team of like-minded people who see a situation together, say something must be done about it, and can create a consensus to declare it a “problem to be solved”.??

Thus, it is always crucial that sales teams are trained to identify the initial stakeholders who have put this situation on the map. This should be part of their “discovery” interview that uncovers who were the original protagonists.?

Lesson #2: Solutions Can Trigger Triggers

Many of our clients are B2B SaaS companies that are trying to improve how business is done. That’s great – but it means their prospects must believe there really is a “better way to do business” than what they are doing now.?

Each of the relevant personas at that company must believe that they would be better trying to convince their colleagues to try this new way of working than to just stay in their current sub-optimal but safe state, doing business like they have always done it. No easy feat.?

But if they are able to make their prospects sufficiently aware and convinced that this truly IS the new, modern way to do business, then it DOES become more attractive to be on the side of change than be left behind. In this way, the mere existence of a new solution helps trigger interest and willingness to advocate for change.?

Where there’s a perceived solution, there might be a problem to be solved, as a result.?

Next Week

The next 2 lessons we have learned from 20 years of B2B buyer research.?

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B2P Partners