0402 340 250 chris.fell@g2msolutions.com.au www.g2msolutions.com.au

Understand how your buyer makes a purchasing decision fundamentally

changes the way you approach sales and marketing to your prospects

and radically increases your conversion rates. This opinion piece from

g2m solutions, leaning heavily on concepts generated by our partner

MathMarketing, clearly illustrates how B2B purchasing occurs and what

you must do to influence the decision in your favour and supercharge

your sales!

Selling and marketing teams in the B2B world, (or business to government

world) need to acknowledge some fundamental truths about the way the

B2B buyer makes his or her buying decision.

B2B products and services are usually complex. There are likely to be

multiple influencers in the decision making cycle, it may be a protracted

discussion and your value proposition is likely to be complex. Pricing of

products is rarely simple there may be a range of options. Purchasers do

a great deal of research before they buy often on their own and without

reference to you

The buyer’s journey

So how do B2B buyers process all of these multiple variables and make

sense of all the information thy have access to? B2B buyers take a

journey through a series of sequential "decision gates" to go from a state

of intertia and a lack of awareness to the eventual purchase decision.

But we need to start with a more fundamental question. Why would a

buyer start on this complex and time consuming journey. The answer is

disarmingly simple. They have a business problem. Not only that, but the

problem is sufficiently severe that is is causing the business pain, the

organisation is in distress. Simply put, there is a wide gap. They have way

too much of a bad thing or nowhere near enough of good thing.

This is a key point. Buyers who acknowledge their business is “in pain”

take action. If the pain is unacknowledged or not viewed as being severe

enough, few buyers will take action to resolve it. Your sales team need to

know who is in genuine pain and who isn’t. Those in genuine pain make

purchasing decisions. Someone is going to sell them something.

“Walk a mile in your

buyer’s shoes” &

supercharge your sales!

Buyers who

acknowledge their

business is “in pain”

take action. If the

pain is

unacknowledged or

not viewed as being

severe enough, few

buyers will take a

action to resolve it.

Those in genuine

pain make

purchasing

decisions. Someone

is going to sell them

something...

By Chris Fell

Managing Director,

G2M

Page 2 of 3

Buyers commence their purchasing journey blissfully unaware they even

have a problem, however something occurs in their organisation and that

state changes; they become aware they do indeed have a problem. They

show interest in fixing this problem, they define a specific need and they

start looking for suppliers who can solve this problem. Eventually they

select your firm's product or service and become your customer and start

receiving the value they paid for and, if they have chosen well, remove

their pain.

So the buyer’s journey is a deliberate cognitive process.

Our partners at MathMarketing coined the term 'the buyer's journey' to

describe this progression of thought. Buyers can start their buying journey

at different times and progress at different rates, but above all buyers

don't skip steps in this journey. Of course some times these steps may

occur rapidly, perhaps even within one meeting, but buyers consciously

move from stage to stage and state to state.

Implications for sales and marketing teams

You can and must honour this process, you cannot force buyers to skip

steps, as frustrating as that may be. In fact the keys to success is to

match your prospects buying journey with your own selling journey.

Buyers journey stages Sellers Journey stages

Untroubled and unaware Find names & position in category

Pain acknowledged Identify, qualify and credentials

Solutions sought Propose and prove

Purchase decision Defeat competition

Value received Deliver and grow

Sales and marketing teams need to be aligned around the buyer’s

journey, not their own solutions’ features functions and benefits.

Sales and marketing alignment is a frequently acknowledged

Align sales and

marketing teams

around the buyer’s

journey, not your own,

parrallel, seller’s

journey.

Page 3 of 3

issue in sales and marketing teams that wish to boost their

effectiveness. Align around your buyer’s, not the seller’s journey.

Sales and marketing teams need to know where their buyer is on

this journey if they are to market and sell to them effectively.

The tools and tactics you develop to engage with buyers and

move them through the stages of the buying cycle need to be

specific to that stage. Clearly your buyer has different purchasing

criteria at the “pain acknowledged” stage than at the "purchase

decision “ stage.

Supercharge your results!

What rewards will accrue to those organisations who tackle these

questions effectively? In other words, is this a problem worth fixing?

Research from a global study of 1400 firms around the topic of sales and

marketing alignment, produced by MathMarketing and MarketingProfs,

concluded that firms who were aligned:

Had 5.4 percentage points more of growth than their industry

Closed 38% more deals

Turned over 36% less clients

Find a piece of scrap paper and work out what would happen to your

sales figures if you could achieve this sort of increase in your numbers?

There are truly significant benefits in terms of lead conversion and the

speed prospects move through your pipeline. Your sales and marketing

team’s alignment also means the efficiency with which they work is also

greatly increased. All of these factors allow you to supercharge your sales

figures!

g2m solutions works with our clients to create blistering clear go to market

plans using the world class Funnel Logic™ methodology from

MathMarketing. http://www.mathmarketing.com/sales-marketing-planning

Central to this methodology is the concept of sales and marketing aligning

themselves around the buyer’s journey and baking this concept into the

selected go to market tactics and plans. If you would like to hear more

please contact the author on the contact numbers listed at the bottom of

the first page.

Firms whose sales and

marketing teams were

aligned:

Grew 5.4% faster

Closed 38% more

deals

Turned over 36%

fewer clients