There is a classic 5-step customer journey that every B2B buyer takes on the way to a final sale. By understanding how you can improve every step of this journey, you will have a powerful tool for boosting B2B sales.
Step #1: Recognition of problem
One of the biggest differences between B2B sales and B2C sales is that you don’t have to “create a problem” for the B2B buyer – he or she is already plenty motivated to find a solution. Most likely, this problem has been keeping him or her up all night. So you need to make sure that your company’s solution is a perfect match for this problem. This may take some iterative steps and fine-tuning, but the closer the match between the problem and the solution, the easier will be the job of finally closing the sale.
Step #2: Search for information
As soon as the B2B buyer recognizes the problem, the next step is to start to assemble all the information needed to make the final purchase decision. The temptation here is simply to provide a “specs sheet” and hope to compete on performance only. But the B2B buyer is looking for more than “speeds and feeds” – he or she is also looking for a trusted solution. That’s why you need to play up your industry expertise, domain knowledge, and market-leading position.
Step #3: Evaluation of alternatives
Sooner or later, the B2B buyer is going to want to see how all the alternatives stack up against one another. This is a major difference with B2C sales, where sometimes it seems like the goal is to prevent the customer from knowing about all the other alternatives out there. The goal here is to keep the customer on your website, so one tactic many companies use is to provide charts and grids, showing exactly how the competitors stack up. This is also a great way to steer the conversation away from price, towards a certain feature that your company is particularly well suited to offer.
Step #4: Purchase decision
The B2B buyer has finally narrowed down the choice to 2-3 alternatives. Now comes the “moment of truth” – the moment when the B2B buyer comes back to you for a final validation of their purchase decision. The organization may be ready to make the purchase – but only if you can answer 1-2 brief questions that may have arisen in Step #3. This is why you absolutely have to prepare for this “moment of truth” and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your product.
Step #5: Sale
Every step of the sale should be easy, convenient and streamlined. If it’s an online process, it should be a single click. You absolutely don’t want to lose a sale due to “cart abandonment,” the dreaded online problem when the final checkout process is so convoluted or complex that the buyer starts to develop buyer’s remorse and simply abandons the sale. You’ve worked so hard to get the buyer to this point, so a major emphasis should be guaranteeing that the final sales process is as streamlined as possible.
In the best-case scenario, all of these steps will be tightly integrated with each other. Step #1 should lead to Step #2, which should lead to Step #3. In some cases, it may requiring simplifying your portfolio of products and services, so that the process of getting information, evaluating alternatives and making the purchase decision are as easy as possible. You can also leverage solutions such as WebEngage, which offers a tool called Journey Designer. The goal is to automate interaction across a user’s lifecycle with customer journey mapping.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.