3 January 2014
Customers are a finicky bunch. They are never sure when it comes to parting with their hard earned money. They love to check, double check and rinse and repeat that whole charade whenever they feel like it. You aren’t in the clear until they cut the check and it clears!
Gone are the days of employing smooth talking, silver tongued devils to charm people to buy your product or service. These days, customers have become very cautious and are highly research oriented. The advent of Internet and social media has only made the sales pipeline more convoluted now than ever.
In a couple of clicks, a customer can quickly run down the entire history of your business. And, they can easily cross check all the tall claims that you’ve made. One single blip in their radar and it’s time to kiss the order a good bye!
Selling has always been a high touch job. Now, with a ton of choices and intense competition, this is more pronounced than ever. Customers expect you to hold their hands not only during the process of decision making, but also after closing the deal in the form of maintenance, after sales support, training and more.
Even though it gets unproductive to spend more and more time on each and every deal, comforting customers all the way through has its own set of perks. In addition to the obvious benefit of building a warm rapport with the prospective customer, you’re always aware of how a customer thinks.
You’ll know the very instant the customer is getting a second thought and the reason for it in the first place. It it your pricing or is it the sweeteners that your competition is luring the customer with? Staying in the loop all along the customer’s decision making process is a highly rewarding experience to fine tune your sales lead management skills.
The good thing about the buying process is that it’s short (atleast on paper) and finite. There are just five stages to it. Some people like to split the purchase decision process into two (purchase decision and purchase), but, it’s prudent to stick to the widely admitted five steps for this article.
John Dewey’s brilliance is evident with the ease with which he was able to define the complex human mentality before opening up their wallet in just five steps. And, the beauty is that he has made it so simple and straightforward to comprehend is a work of a genius. It’s like containing a genie in a tiny jar!
Conceived well over a century ago, the five stages of the buying process hold water even in this era bogged by too much window shopping and the starkly opposite drive for impulse buying. The business that gets good at taming the beast that’s the buying process, stands to roll in money for years to come.
In the next thousand words or so, I’ll try to explain each and every step of the purchase decision making process, the bottlenecks a customer might find in these stages and how best you can fix them up better than the competition.
Yep, it’s just like every other thing in our lives. You gotta admit that you have a problem in the first place. Unfortunately, it is very hard to convince prospects that they have a problem that could use a permanent fix.
The internal stimuli that Dewey explains is when the customer makes up his mind on his own intent. It’s always better if they realize that they have a pressing problem that needs a solution, but life isn’t that easy isn’t it?
As long as the customer has access to some duct tape and industrial glue, he won’t realize the need to replace the broken pipe that might one day give up for good, ending up emptying thousands of gallons of raw material down the drain.
The key is to use the external stimuli smartly enough to trigger the internal stimuli. An external stimuli is something that you initiate from your end. It could be an advertisement, a marketing collateral, a cold call or a positive word of mouth from another satisfied customer.
Your success in streamlining this first and important step in the decision making process plays a pivotal role in steering the course in the stages that follow. The easiest thing would be to point out to the customer the worst case scenario when the issue is overlooked and the best case scenario by embracing the solution that you offer early on.
Hinting at the dire consequences like loss of revenue, safety violations etc. ought to be covered in the former case, while, significant improvements to bottomline, enhanced productivity etc. are solid arguments for the latter case.
Essentially, the following external stimuli could help your customer realize the problem, and identify you as a trusted partner who could get it fixed:
Targeted Advertising
Instead of resorting to “spray and pray” techniques, make it your mission to find your target audience and the channel that commands their attention. Your advertising campaign should speak about the problems bogging down the vertical that your customer operates in and the effective fix that you have in your possession.
Marketing Collateral
Instead of passing around pamphlets and brochures that are a riot of colors and pretty pictures, it helps to circulate collateral that single out problems and how they tend to disrupt a business. Drug companies usually do a great a job in these cases and an example of this would be their Hepatitis B vaccine drive.
Retargeting
As noted earlier, people won’t be convinced that they have a problem in just one sitting. Hit back hard by running retargeting campaigns for those who have already been made aware of the problem. Take the nature of problem definition one step further with an increased emphasis on the solution that’s in offing.
It’s a given that prospective customers won’t take whatever you say at face value. They’ll ask around and do due diligence on you and the general state of the competition. Fortunately, with some clever brand positioning tactics this is one step that can end up helping you turn the table around in your favor!
There hardly is a person who doesn’t search online before buying something even if that product or service has nothing to do with technology or Internet. In fact, more than 90% of customers begin their journey at a search engine.
Interestingly, a major chunk of this sample don’t have the habit of looking past the first two or three pages of the search engine results! Now, owning these first few pages of search engine results with information that’s directly related to your business or with a link to it some how is golden.
Imagine when the results for “reliable spur gear” churns out links to your website, content from your blog, white papers that you have produced, case studies of your customers, your guest posts related to the topic and the like!
Content Marketing
Unique, quality content is the quickest way to get in the good books of Google. By getting your thoughts published in your own web properties and across widely read online publications, you stand to benefit from the tag of being a thought leader, all the while earning the much needed SEO juice in the process. Staying active in social media adds to the effect as well!
Landing Pages
Landing pages that talk about the pain points of an industry or niche and the solutions that your offering brings to the table are a great way to educate people during the information search stage.
Focus on the problems that their peers faced and how you have helped them overcome those in a profitable manner. These industry specific landing pages peppered with relevant keywords are a must have.
Manage Your Online Reputation
Lot of people miss out on this most important aspect of managing the reputation of their brand online. In the rush to build a positive image around the brand, people often miss or even ignore the negative feedback and commentary that show up online.
These could be damaging reviews, irate customers or disgruntled employees speaking badly about your brand. Unfortunately, these results tend to dominate the search results page more often than you think.
You don’t want a link to a page calling you a “rip off” when customers are searching for you online. So, pay attention to get rid of these negative commentary online before they start wrecking all your content marketing efforts.
How boring life would be without some competition? A customer will almost always check out the alternatives and will compare you with their offerings side by side. This is no secret, and not taking advantage of this stage in your favor is a silly mistake.
Just in the case of the information stage, a customer will dutifully kick off with a quick search online for the alternatives available. Now is the time sit down with the marketing team to come up some dirt on your competition.
No, I am not suggesting a smear campaign, as that always has the downside of making you look like sinister and might even backfire at times. But, it never hurts to call a spade a spade, right?
Chart out the plus points of your brand and the downsides of going with the competition. Read their fine print and expose what they don’t explicitly say during their sales calls. Find out the strings attached to the their price tag and the hidden costs. Work out a cost benefit analysis for a set duration if you are in a price sensitive domain.
Put all the details in a web page, and sit back and relax. When someone is searching for “acme industry alternatives” or “acme vs roadrunner inc” the next time around rest assured, they’ll know where you stand!
In the offline domain, it definitely helps to have this comparison as an integral part of your pamphlets or brochures. As long as you aren’t inflating the truth, you are good to go!
Think nothing can go wrong in this stage? Absolutely not. This is when the personal rapport you have built over all this time helps. The customer in all certainty will start double checking the referrals and will check up on the customer feedback all over again.
If you haven’t come clean on hidden charges or if the customer comes to know of any caveats that he wasn’t made aware of earlier, it’s gonna spell trouble. You won’t have to worry a bit if you have been candid and straightforward all along.
Make absolutely sure of the entire payment structure, payment terms and the bells and whistles that’ll come with the deal. Extended warranties and other upsell tactics have to be pitched subtly.
No one wants to hear you say that they’ll have to fork extra for support at the time of signing cheque. The same is the case with the VAT that just mysteriously showed up in the invoice. Stay transparent and stay safe!
Unless the customer isn’t happy after closing the deal, you won’t be able to do business with him in the future. You can also kiss those positive feedbacks and word of mouth good bye, hurting the whole streamlining of the purchase process for your other customers.
In many ways, the various stages of the purchase decision making process is like a feedback loop. Any hiccup in one stage is bound to affect the next stage of the decision making process.
The worst part is, if you do badly in the post purchase stage of a customer, the reactions are bound to hurt your chances in the information search and evaluation stages of other customers.
After closing the deal, decent customer support is more than enough in most cases to keep customers happy. A quick turn around time to get their issues resolved will save you a ton of pain during the next sales pitch.
A small training session after closing the deal is a time tested way to get the customer support queries down. Self help channels like manuals and online knowledge bases act as another layer of cushion. And, you won’t get a scathing review published online damaging your chances when other customers are searching for information online.
There you have it! That’s all I have to say about streamlining the purchasing process. Got any tips you would like share with the rest of us?
