Know where your customers are

In Gartner’s B2B Buyers journey report, the mere maze of moves a buyer makes is absolutely mind blowing. We have already established, that customers do not sit idly in their offices and wait for us salespeople to call us and tell us what’s new on the market.

When a customer is moving within the buying process, they are getting their information elsewhere. If you look at this picture, how many touchpoints do you know that your customer is being faced with?

Depending on your sector, it will be different touchpoints. If you are selling office IT solutions, your customers would be moving round the internet in quite different fora’s than if you are in the banking sector, or if you are selling TO the banking sector.

One touchpoint is actually your website! But the biggest problem with most website, is that it is also, as sales is, stuck in the past. You used to think of your website as a calling card. 90% of websites are still built so that the first page very much proudly presents Who We Are, or Our Product. Do a test? Check out your own website. What is your first impression?

I have two examples here. One more traditional, and one definitely more modern. But even the second one fails, because on the very first page, even without any more meat on the bones, they are expecting a customer to be ready to just book a demo…

I am not a website analyst, but from a sales perspective, this site has just skipped directly to the third or fourth phase of the buying process.

Other touchpoints are

• Social Media (depending on your target customer it would be a mix of Linkedin, Facebook, IG, TikTok, YouTube etc), and before you get all worked up about “my target group is a serious business, they would never be on IG or Facebook, or TikTok for that matter – but they ARE! Because they are human, they have private lives, they do use these other media too
• Industry forums, vertical forums (president’s clubs, CFO networks…)
• Industry specific and nonspecific events
• Webinars

If you are selling fish, it’s no point in staying at your small island, where you have your base of operations. You’d rather set up a stand at the local market. You would be socializing with chefs from restaurants, you would do pop-up stands in large food marketplaces…

It's about being where your customers frequent. Being visible. If you google your main value that you bring to your customer (read here on Value), are you on top of the search result list?

Next post:

Step 5 – Tracking

Read the previous posts:

Intro – Strategy eats tools for breakfast

Step 1 – Value

Step 2 – The Buying Process

Step 3 – Information