How do your customers buy? Most marketers understand their company's sales cycle, which is the purchasing process as seen from the viewpoint of the one doing the selling. The buying process is the other side of that door; it is the purchasing decision as seen by the one making the purchase. Understanding both sides is important if you want to maximize your sales and optimize your marketing efforts.
Through Their Eyes
To fully understand the buying process, you have to look at things from the buyer's point of view.
That is a deceptively simple statement. When your company provides a product or service, you naturally never need to shop for that product or service yourself. It is the one buying process you have no experience with. And even if you did go through the buying process yourself, you are too close to the situation; you already know all of the information, and therefore may not notice when important details are left out or are not explained in layman's terms.
To map the buying process, you have to fully understand your customers and what they are looking for. Creating buyer personas can be very helpful in this regard, as they spell out how your customers think, what information they need and what objections they must overcome.
You may need to invest some time or money into researching your customer base, so that you truly know how they go about buying, and how to tailor to their needs.
Mapping Benefits
By mapping out the process your customers go through, and what steps are required before they will commit to buying, you can improve your own processes and marketing materials in order to produce more sales.
One benefit of mapping the buying process is that you can identify problem areas that are costing you sales. For example, increasing your closing percentage on leads would obviously improve sales. But if your closing percentage is already high, such improvements will be small and difficult to achieve. By mapping the buying process, you may discover that your real weakness lies in attracting visitors or converting visitors into leads. Improving the weakest point in the process will improve sales down the line, even if your closing percentage remains the same.
Other benefits of mapping the buying process include:
- Changing outdated notions of how people go about buying your product or service.
- Identifying which marketing channels you should be utilizing, and how to make them work together to present the right message.
- Adjusting your content and marketing messages so that they more clearly speak to the prospects' immediate needs.
- Gaining a better understanding of a person's mindset at each step of the process, allowing your salespeople to have more productive conversations with prospects.
- Identifying gaps where you are not providing the information that prospects need to make a decision.
- Adding helpful steps, or removing unnecessary ones.
- Learning about buying signs you can look for in order to shorten the sales cycle.
- Improving your brand image to better appeal to the right people.
Essentially, the better you understand the buying process, the better you can become at managing the sales process and getting more people to buy.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
