How can a sales-focused business drive sales growth when the digital age has completely revolutionized the process a buyer goes through when attempting to solve a business challenge? In 2021, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016.
Why is this fact so important to B2B businesses?
The buyer’s journey is an active fact-gathering process that unfolds in 3 phases to promote buyers with better decision making when selecting the right product or service. The common three-stages cover:
- Awareness: The buyer realizes they have a problem.
- Consideration: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
- Decision: The buyer chooses a solution.
Your sales personnel can assist prospective buyers in their buying process by designing actionable steps for each of the three stages. Here’s how:
- The Awareness stage begins with the buyer identifying a business need or problem, initiating a research phase based on 3rd party information. Reviews and other supporting content form the basis of this research. Salespeople can take strategic steps to assist the buyer here. Strategies can include using social media, blog posts and email marketing platforms to bring attention to marketing campaigns.
- During the Consideration phase, buyers now have a clear idea of what their business challenge is and they start to prioritise which available approaches and possible solutions are most ideal for solving their problem. An opportune advantage opening up to your sales staff is to maintain a follow-up rhythm with the buyer by a quick check in to answer any discoverable questions they may have.
- By the time the buyer has reached the Decision-Making stage, they have formed a very good idea of the best possible choices with more than one stakeholder influencing the final decision. A key strategy here is to maintain direct contact with the buyer and to refer to testimonials and positive customer feedback from satisfied customers with similar business-related challenges.
With proper inbound marketing tactics applied to each of the three Buyer’s Journey stages, you’ll be able to make content available through the appropriate channels and map each content to the right stage in the funnel. When you are building your Buyer’s Journey, make a point to speak to your sales team. They have a unique perspective because they are speaking to prospects and customers every single day.
Remember: The main goal of the Buyer’s Journey is to take advantage of a more customer-centric philosophy to better position your company for addressing the needs of your target audience.
As a Gold Coast Hubspot provider and award winning agency, iOnline offers highly sought after digital marketing support to help B2B vendors attract new customers.
Aligning your sales process to your buyer’s journey is a very intelligent way to empower your sales personnel and in turn enjoy more successful target-driven campaigns.