Why is the B2B journey such a struggle to define?
Cognitive Fixedness. This may be the most significant roadblock to creating innovation in the customer journey. Why?
If asked, most of us will agree consumers and B2B buyers have changed. And most are still trying to sell the same way.. This has been true for years.
The unconscious fixed thinking we have prevents us from breaking out of our boundaries. We keep creating sameness.
Innovation requires breaking away from our beliefs, being aware of our assumptions, and trying to better understand the situation at hand. That’s difficult. All the marketing technology in the world isn’t going to help you create a meaningful experience if you fail to understand people. And this matters because buyers are trying to do more buying without you.?
In fact yesterday I saw a poll which was an almost perfect 50/50 split - asking, “Is cold calling dead?” Yet Korn Ferry recently published a blog explaining, “Merrill Lynch Wealth Management rolled out a new advisor training program that bans trainees from making cold calls”.?
And...
“Plus, there could even be a glorification of cold-calling, or at least a natural reluctance to change. Guarino calls any nostalgia for cold-calling “pretty silly and poor leadership,” but admits that it likely happens in finance and other industries.? It’s akin to veteran doctors being upset that younger physicians don’t have to work 100-hour weeks—a practice the veteran doctors went through, says Linda Hyman, Korn Ferry’s executive vice president for global human resources. “There’s kind of a built-in embedded idea that if my grandfather did it then everyone else should do it,” Hyman says.
-Korn Ferry, Cold Calling Goes Cold.
Warm calls are a different story. Two things: what makes a call warm? And how do we take into consideration that trust has been eroded? When you answer a call on your personal mobile device from a company or name you do not recognize, do you answer with delight, curiosity, indifference, caution or immediate annoyance? You've got only seconds to distinguish between a cold call and a warm call. And for complex sales, I think it's a stretch to say the call is WARM because someone downloaded a white paper. If a team has a $3 million budget for digital transformation this year and someone visits your site and downloads a relevant white paper, a 'warm call' might be getting ahead of yourself.
Emails are problematic too. How many emails do you get in your inbox, that you simply don’t read? Or even if you do, you don’t answer, because even though you have a need NEXT quarter, you suspect that once you reply that you are interested, that company will try to push you to make a decision in THEIR timeframe, on their terms, this quarter.?So how do you know when to engage?
How do you create a journey where you are:
…and so on…?
You re-think the customer journey
In 2022 Harvard Business Review published an article on Four Types of Customer Journeys in a matrix depending on how predictable or effortless the journeys should be for each archetype. All of the examples were based on B2C.?
(Source: Harvard Business Review, What You’re Getting Wrong About Customer Journeys, July-August 2022)
Using HBR’s labels - I created a B2B Customer Journey Matrix focused on the types of transactions or projects that many of us can relate to:
Quite often, we see B2B campaigns for high value purchases that fall into the Effortful quadrants, but with triggers and messaging that push people to make decisions quickly – at the pace you might expect for a Joyride. This creates the WRONG kind of tension because the focus isn’t on what the buyer needs, it’s focused on meeting much shorter term KPIs.
My view is that B2B journeys for high value purchases are a struggle for many to map, for several reasons:?
Here’s a personal example from years ago:?
I’ll give you an example that many of you can relate to. Years ago in an interview (I was hired) a CEO asked me if I had enough product marketing experience to transform IP they had into a product. (Spoiler alert: Yes, and I did…and you know the result as Sitecore Experience Accelerator).? [
The company had tried many times to sell its IP as “WordPress on steroids” and “Campaign as a Service”. I sat in on demos and they were LONG. As a non-technical person it was arduous to pay attention. I understood why the development team wanted to show the remarkable IP in its entirety, but the complexity of the demo contradicted the value of what we were selling. Cognitive Fixedness leads us to do things the way people thought they’re expected to be done. It was believed that demonstrating the complexity of the IP, demonstrated the value. But that didn’t validate the value proposition…
Initially, we thought it was more likely we could license to other agencies. At some point I was shown a couple of spreadsheets with intelligent, complex, well-thought through pricing models. I read it thoroughly. I went back to the CFO and declared that it would not work. It was an uncomfortable truth to convey back! The underlying story of what we were selling was to SIMPLIFY the experience for developers so they did less repetitive work, make it easier for marketers to control and create the content they needed freeing themselves from technical backlogs, enable agencies to design and redesign faster, and simplify UI work: the value propositions centered around simplifying.
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Therefore, I reasoned that the pricing model had to mirror the value propositions in simplicity. I think I just about fell over when I got to an agreement on a very simple pricing model. I insisted that the demo team be able to demo something interesting to each of our 4 buyer personas in less than a minute! And that after getting interest we could demo for a maximum of 5 minutes before further affirming the prospect’s interest.?
Rather than creating one lengthy brochure to share, we created four versions. The personalized approach captured the attention of many including the Sitecore team. It was novel and it resonated with the popular personalization narrative. Even though the four variations were distributed randomly in the conference bags, people somehow became aware there were different variations. And luckily people who received a variant that resonated with them, headed over for a demo.?
What resulted was spectacular. We had streams of people lined up for demos throughout the conference. And when people expressed interest, any one of us on the team from marketing to development could articulate the simplicity of the pricing. An acquisition by Sitecore was the dream but we were fully prepared to scale up licenses first. (That said, I will never forget John West walking up to me at the party and asking me who he could talk to about making ‘Zen Garden’ part of Sitecore!)?
The unclear messages, sales strategy and demos had made it difficult to take the buyer on a journey. The product hadn’t changed, but once every step in the buyer journey mirrored the key value proposition – there was magic!?
How is the buyer journey changing in 2023?
What worked before doesn’t necessarily work as well as it did.? In the last few years everyone has been forced to be more creative, to continue to work,? and to achieve objectives. In some ways we’ve become more methodical, more analytical, and more distrustring. Korn Ferry research has found that the number of people in any particular B2B buying journey has grown. At the same time, people are trying to make more of their decisions on their own without a sales person, but they value the trusted advisor. In McKinsey’s report, “The Future of B2B Sales: The Big Reframe”, the truth is plainly delivered, “Today’s buyers are more technically savvy. They're more digitally savvy. They're spending more time on their devices. And they want to engage on their time, not your time.”
What does this mean? You win by understanding B2B buyers better than anyone else.?
No, I’m not suggesting scorching the earth. I’m suggesting that customer journeys need to focus more on understanding the jobs, pains and gains.?
The Job
Typically, everyone thinks they understand the job of their customers but often they only understand a superficial element. If you know the famous milkshake story, an example of the job of the milkshake was to be a MEAL REPLACEMENT. Most people assume the job of the milkshake is to be a desert, or alleviate thirst. It was not, and that was why sales failed to increase. Once the jobs were understood (meal replacement, not messy, easy to drink while driving in heavy traffic, lasts a long time, good mouth-feel) the sales of milkshakes increased on average for $100,000 per location per year.?
In Harvard’s Disruptive Strategy and Design Thinking courses, professors emphasize how understanding the real jobs to be done is one of the most superior ways to maintain a competitive edge, and enables you to disrupt before being disrupted.?
Digging deeper into jobs can identify opportunities to better meet the needs of buyers. The Job is the PROBLEM the customer is trying to solve.?
The challenge and opportunity is understanding what customers want. Do they want to read through content to see if the product ticks all their boxes? Or do they want guidance along the path to realizing what is possible? Or what else?
Some very simple examples:
How often do you think about the social and emotional jobs of your buyers? Sure if you’ve been certified in Miller Heiman, you probably do, I concede.?
So when you’re thinking about a journey what is the customer really looking for? If I think back to a time when I had to redesign a site 3x in one year, there were entirely different goals and the journey was completely different.
The first time was to update the look without having to use significant resources internally or externally while getting a designer to use what became SXA.?
The second time was to rapidly deploy a new design in an entirely unreasonable amount of time so that we looked like the cool kids when the announcement hit the wire that we were being acquired by WPP.?
The third time was to actually do a visual identity rebrand before doing the actual redesign on the site.?
The requirements were entirely different each time. The first journey was a Joyride. It was very unpredictable and relatively effortless because we began without a specific deadline and the costs (therefore risks) were very low.? We were using the redesign substantially to understand how a designer would use our platform in real life. The second journey was so sudden we ended up doing it mostly internally. The third journey was an Odyssey because we had time, money, and a mission to make a huge shift in our image. We spent the most on the third journey.
Anyone who misunderstood the goal of the first job, trying to persuade me to spend significant sums on the redesign would have eventually been blocked out of consideration. The team we hired in the end was subjected to many meetings before we signed an agreement. AND they were an agency in our own network! The point is that by the time we made a decision to move forward with the agency, we were absolutely confident that the process would be successful. That is what you want from a buyer. You do not want cognitive dissonance (not to be confused with cognitive fixedness) once a buyer decides to move forward with you. As they say easy come, easy go.?
If you want to be radically successful in creating B2B buyer journeys, you have to stop making assumptions that what you are doing works. Sticking to the status quo is a potentially dangerous gamble. And if you were certain that the way things are being done now is working fabulously – well, I doubt you would have read this far.?
Want to know more about breaking through Cognitive Fixedness? Feel free to message me.