What’s the last item you purchased? Go to your Amazon orders and look. For me, it was a pair of gym socks. Who says you need to start back in the gym at the beginning of the new year? Better now than never. Maybe you ordered a business book, kitchen supplies or whatever you didn’t want to leave your house for. Regardless of the product, we all made conscience decisions along the way. Now, what about for your business? Think about the last service you paid for. Did you just invest in Zendesk, upgrade your Slack account or hire an agency to redesign your website? Same thing. You went through a process before making that purchase.
You’re probably thinking, yeah, I had money and I spent it on that product/service. Well, that may be true but there was a lot going on subconsciously that you may not have recognized.
Since the early 90’s, we’ve coached literally hundreds of businesses on a principle of identifying where a customer is in their unique buyer’s journey. When we work with businesses, they self-diagnose themselves. “FitzMartin, we NEED a new website or a new logo.” We are totally capable and would be honored to go down that path, but you may be putting the cart before the horse. Have you stopped and wondered where your sales are dropping? Are you having a lead conversion problem? Maybe you can’t sell your products because of your outdated website. Think about your cross-selling solutions. Are they working?
Because everybody goes through a journey when buying a product, we think it’s important for you to understand the journey that a customer takes. We’ve written a whitepaper that fully illustrates what process facilitates movement through the buyer’s journey. We call it the Customer Decision Journey. Need an example?
i.e. You don’t have a lot of leads that submit their information to your website. You have a web traffic problem. You’ve been throwing around ideas with your Marketing Director but nothing quite works. Primarily, you’ve focused on filming testimonials and creating demos of your product. But the leads that do come to your site convert into customers. Not quite sure what’s wrong? You’re missing the first process of the entire journey, Consciousness Raising. The goal of this conversion point is to create awareness of the problem and how your product or service solves the problem.
It’s important to know where a customer is in their journey. Our model and research is rooted from the transtheoretical model of behavior change. The stages of behavioral change we mention in our whitepaper outline the different conversion points and stages for how and why customers progress through a series of stages, before making a decision. If you apply this model to your sales and marketing process, it will increase your efficiency, save you a lot of time and money and create more net revenue than you know what to do with. To learn more about the Consumer Decision Journey, click here.
