Buyer Persona Insights

Macro Trends Transforming the Buyer Experience

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Recently, I had an engaging conversation with Lauren Carlson, a CRM Analyst with  Software Advice, as well as read her article Tailwinds for Marketing Automation Software posted on The Software Advice Blog.  Lauren notes that the B2B environment is faced with increasing challenges in marketing to as well as selling to the buyer.  Lauren further adds that a confluence of trends is changing the way buyers experience buying decisions and purchases.  While the main premises of her article is on the macro trends that are pushing buyers to adopt marketing automation, there is perspective in these trends that give insight into how the overall buyer experience is being transformed.

One of the macro trends Lauren highlights is that buyers want content of real value.  As presented in two articles that outline the Seven Phases of the Buyer Experience Journey and the aligning Buyer Experience Interaction Model, buyers and sellers can engage in a continuous “looping” cycle of thought and subject matter expertise that correlates with initiatives and offers rich and robust content to enable the buyer’s research.  Closely related to this trend is another, that buyers will not answer the phone.  It has been written about often over the past year that sales are not able to engage until further down the buyer journey and marketing has a tough job of “warming up” the buyer for sales engagement.  Notably, this trend is changing the expectations buyers have of what is considered to be the ideal “buyer experience” they wish to encounter. 

A macro trend that Lauren notes and that Paul Greenberg has written about frequently is that buyers are seeking “consumerized” types of experiences despite being in the B2B environment.  Buyers desire the same simplification, ease of use, and ease of access that they may experience in consumer type purchases.    Putting pressure on B2B leaders to adopt a buyer experience design orientation of their marketing, sales, and support capabilities.  According to Paul Greenberg, adopt they must for buyers want to be “subjects of an experience” and not an “object of a sale” as Greenberg eloquently states. 

Engagement channels continue to expand exponentially each year which Carlson also notes in terms of the increase number of marketing channels.  A macro trend that is evident when one considers the outgrowth of micro sites, micro blogs, and micro social networks over the past couple of years.  Meaning buyers can engage in the special interests of their choice and find the tightly connected peer-to-peer networks to tap into.  Meaningful in the sense that buyer’s expectations are changing for engagements that offer deeper insights, deeper connectedness, and puts pressure on B2B organizations to have deeper expertise.  Lauren notes that another key macro trend is that sales cycles are longer in a down economy, a trending that is most likely consistent with other down economy cycles.  However, in this cycle buyers may be seeking to make deeper assessments than in past downturns.  Increasing the span of engagement and assessment that buyers and marketers intersect at. 

Two other macro trends Lauren refers to relate to software as a service (SaaS) architecture and marketing accountability.  Closely related in many ways since SaaS and automation represent a sizeable investment and accountability, metrics, and ROI are accompaniments to such an investment.  Undoubtedly, SaaS architecture is proving to be an enabling technology for marketing and sales processes. 

These macro trends, or tailwinds as Lauren also refers to them, are transforming the buyer experience at an accelerated rate.  Presenting enormous challenges to B2B organizations as they learn to adopt new methods and evaluate older more conventional methods of marketing to the buyer.  Necessitating the leadership ability to calibrate how to mitigate the risk of “too much” new and prevent the hasty discarding of proven conventional methods. 

Buyer Interaction Shapes Buyer Experience Design

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One of the most prominent forces of sociological thinking in the 20th century was that of symbolic interactionism.  An interesting man and pioneer of this thinking was George Herbert Mead, an American sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher who developed his theories while at the University of Chicago in the 1920’s.  Mead’s work concerned itself with human interactions and the symbolic nature of the world and languages.  Mead theorized that how people view the world, as well as experienced the world, shaped human interactions and that our interactions with others also shaped our view of society.  He also believed that to research this phenomenon, unstructured qualitative observation methods were the means to understand sociological human interactions.  Mead was most certainly a forerunner to today’s modern methods of qualitative research. 

Many of today’s modern movements related to experience design, social media, and digital engagement have in their DNA at least a molecule of interactionist theory.  Brian Solis, a thought leader on social media and author of Engage!, has as one of his main premises in his fantastic book that we must engage in meaningful conversations with customers to make them true empowered participants in social media.  Suggesting that how we interact with customers in the social engagement ecosystem cultivates customer loyalty and trust.  Paul Greenberg, a prolific speaker and leading thinker on Social CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light has written and spoken often on the notion that customers and buyers are not expecting just a product but are expecting experiences.  He offers us the insight that customers and buyers are saying no to being “objects of a sale” and yes to being “subjects of an experience.” 

B2B executives who oversee marketing, sales, and support must think of how their organization should design corresponding interaction points along the Seven Phases of the Buyer Experience Journey.  Determining how buyer interactions collectively will shape buyer experiences that cultivate the loyalty and trust that Brian Solis mentions and creates subjects of experience as Paul Greenberg states.  The Buyer Experience Interaction Model offers seven aligning and human centered interaction points to the buyer experience journey that B2B executives can make actionable. 

The Buyer Experience Interaction Model:

 

• Thought: The buyer experiences thought leadership and subject matter expertise when  initiatives arise.
• Content: The buyer experiences accessibility to rich and robust content offerings that enables research.
• Engage: The buyer experiences multi-channels of engagement options that allows for adequate assessment.
• Value: The buyer experiences value-based solutions and justification that enables a buying decision.
• Expertise: The buyer experiences the expected level of expertise when implementing complex solutions.
• Access: The buyer experiences ease of access to expected levels of support for products, services, and complex solutions.
• Loyalty: The buyer experiences two-way loyalty when faced with considerations to renew products, services, or address new initiatives.

The “buyer” is a term used in the B2B context by which the “buyer” represents the target buyer persona and the stakeholders that represent the multi-disciplinary buying committees.  What this interaction model does recognize is the complexity of the buying decision and the process by which buyers seek to mitigate risks associated with multi-faceted solutions.  The buyer's views on implementation and support are critical to the overall buyer experience.

Aligning the Buyer Experience Interaction Model to the Buyer Experience Journey can address sales and marketing alignment issues by enabling a buyer experience continuum orientation.  At the same time, including support along these same buyer experience continuums and ensuring it is not positioned as a separate adjunct function outside of the overall experience. 

 

(In the Social CRM arena, Esteban Kolsky, who has a fantastic blog crm intelligence & strategy, with graphics help from Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group came up with a wonderful graphic of a “loop” that represents the social customer experience continuum.  Admittedly limited in my graphic design capabilities, I concur with Esteban on this point and advocate a loop overlay on the buyer experience interaction model and buyer experience journey to include feedback, end-to-end process, and actionable insights.)

The challenge for B2B executives lies in how well they can lead efforts to design and calibrate different  buyer interactions for various target buyer personas, engagement channels, and segments along the Buyer Experience Interaction Model.  Fueled by qualitative buyer insights that informs on buyer experience strategies, buyer interactions can be a significant part of the buyer experience design process and help to determine just how to design experiences for segmented buyers and channels. 

What is still true nearly ninety years since Mead is that humans desire meaningful interactions.  The rise of social media and the digital age has heightened the awareness on the part of B2B buyers to seek more meaningful ”buying” interactions on a humanized level.  These drivers making buyer experience orientation on the part of B2B organizations an important new core competency. 

The Seven Phases of the Buyer Experience Journey

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At one of the last TED Conferences held in the intimate setting of Monterey, California and led by its’ founder Richard Saul Wurman, I listened in awe as Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks described the journey to making the movie Shrek.  Katzenberg unveiled before the audience the experiences they underwent as they tried various story boarding processes and began using revolutionary technology to create animation like never before.  Most revealing was how many phases of production took place and how each phase was an experiential process in of itself. 

Complex B2B buyer experiences, in similar ways, have the nature of involving experiential processes within seven phases of the buyer journey.  These processes also have a tendency, in a B2B context, to recycle during the entire buyer journey and contribute to the overall buyer experience.  Jeffrey Katzenberg that day told the story of how many times they went back a step or two in the production journey to get the right film they were looking to produce.  The B2B buyer journey can take on this need to cycle as well as recycle through various phases to educate themselves and to discover the right set of solutions and investments needed to achieve strategic initiatives, strategies, and goals.

Mapping seven experience phases of the buyer journey can be one of the most significant undertakings an organization can do to gain deep rooted knowledge about their markets and buyers.  Mapping the buyer journey provides a basis for making informed decisions on how to align strategies, structure, and go-to-market processes with enhanced relevancy to buyers.  It also will set the stage, along with buyer insights and buyer persona development, to lead the organization through the efforts of Buyer Experience Design to create highly memorable and fulfilling buying experiences.

The seven experience phases of the buyer journey can be labeled as:

• Initiative
• Research
• Assess
• Decision 
• Implement
• Support
• Renewal

Often times, when “inside-out” views of the B2B buyer journey, buying cycles, and buying processes are used, the focus conventionally has been on the phases leading up to the decision.  Buyer Experience Innovation calls for viewing experiential phases beyond the decision.  I had a wonderful mentor, now residing with the experts in heaven, who had a mantra that the “sale” begins when you get the signature.  How many “won” deals have gone south falling off the precipitous cliff of poor implementation and support experiences?  B2B executives can lead by giving the same attentiveness to implementation, support, and renewal as they do B2B marketing and sales tactics leading to a decision.  Evolving strategies and technologies also are paving the way for an important role that B2B marketers can play in creating experiences that resonate with buyers throughout the entire buyer journey.  Let’s take a brief journey through each of the seven experience phases:

    Experience Phase 1: Initiative

There are two tiers of thinking in this phase.  The most common has been around a term that has existed for several years in mapping the customer or buyer journey.  That is the concept of “triggers” or “trigger events”.  This thinking implies that an event triggers a customer or buyer to begin the search for a resolution.  In many situations, this will undoubtedly be true that an event will create a response to find a resolution and an opportunity for the seller.  Equally, if not more important, is to recognize that many B2B organizations have a yearly set of strategies, initiatives, and goals by which a planning process is put into place.  Part of the planning process involves preliminary thinking on how to achieve initiatives and how much should be allocated to an expense or capital budget.  Initiatives are often accompanied by buying strategies and policies.  Insights into initiatives and the planning process can yield monumental clues for content marketers on how to map to the buyer’s mindset during this phase.

    Experience Phase 2: Research

In the B2B buyer journey, researching potential solutions or even ideas are often delegated to a person, a team, a task force, a committee, and numerous other naming conventions that can be assigned.  At any given time, you may have multiple people researching on the same initiative but from different perspectives.  This no doubt causes challenging assignments for digital and content marketers.  Understanding this phase in detail can lead to creating consistent research experiences yet tuned to the potential different perspectives. 

    Experience Phase 3: Assess

B2B complexity has a robust chemistry of sales, content marketing, partners, and channels that all provide various touchpoints in the assessment phase.  How buyer companies go about availing themselves of interacting with this robustness and the experiences they encounter can shape their opinions about whether to place a considered organization in the running for the decision phase.  This is the phase that a potential buyer can encounter support for the very first time.  How?  As is often seen pricing, billing, and implementation questions can get routed to the “back office” and can be a road filled with craters if support is not designed with buyer experience in mind.

    Experience Phase 4: Decision

The higher the stakes, the greater the need to create a confidence building decision experience for the buyer.  Insight gained through mapping can reveal the process by which buyers follow establish policies for decision-making that often involve multiple stakeholders.  Is their buying experience aligned well with what they must comply with internally?  While facts, figures, and ROI are heavy components in this phase, selling organizations can be attentive to the emotional side of the decision process.  The higher the stakes, the more emotions you can bet will be involved.

    Experience Phase 5: Implement

This phase consist of the many experiences that can be related to delivery, packaging, on-site implementation, and roll-out.  An important factor in this phase is to recognize that the buyer is still “buying” at this phase.  Ensuring that the buyer’s goals related to an initiative are achieved and that this particular phase of the buyer experience stays “on message” throughout becomes paramount.  How many times after a purchase decision is made in a B2B context has the implementation experience felt starkly different than those leading up to the decision?  Insight into the buyer’s expectations as well as established processes in this phase are critical.

    Experience Phase 6: Support

Is support embedded into the entire buyer experience?  Or, is support an adjunct department outside the buyer’s sphere of experiences with the organization?  B2B complexity can make support a critical component of the overall buying experience.  As mentioned before, support can be called upon in the early phase of Assess.  If support is not embedded into the entire buying experience and positioned as an adjunct function, there can be a severe disconnect in the buyer experience.  There have been many good advancements in support related capabilities however there appears to be a tremendous upside potential for digital content marketing to play a role in enabling support to enhance the overall buyer experience.  B2B marketers today can view support enablement, in addition to sales enablement, as an important element of a buyer experience strategy.

    Experience Phase 7: Renewal

Renewal, in the experience sense, refers to not only annual renewals of services but renewal of the buyer experience that involves new initiatives and challenges.  Does the buyer undergo a vastly different buying experience because he or she is in the renewal category versus the new account category?  Insight gathering respective to the buyer’s practices and processes for renewal consideration can yield establishing buyer experience strategies aimed at customer retention and customer loyalty.

Buyer journey mapping, combined with buyer insights and buyer persona development, will set the stage for an organization to make informed decisions on Buyer Experience Design.  By concentrating on these seven experience phases of the buyer journey and mapping the different journey paths that exists for each of their markets, B2B leaders today can design innovative buying experiences that will help them to achieve the all important goals of top-line revenue growth, customer retention, and enduring customer loyalty. 

The 7 Principles of Buyer Experience Journey Mapping

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A few years ago at the first mPlanet conference ever held, I had the opportunity to listen to  and speak with Dan Henson who was then GE’s Chief Marketing Officer for all of GE’s divisions.  The topic that day was "How World Class Organizations Innovate in B2B Markets."  It sparked a personal journey and quest around a simple phrase that Dan discussed back then: identifying how customers buy.  I began to use this phrase quite often afterwards, adding that  why customers buy is equally important, but the origins and credit really belongs with Dan Henson.  This is a simple yet brilliantly profound concept that can be challenging to accomplish.

In a recent article I wrote, The 4 B’s of Buyer Experience Innovation, highlighted was the importance of buyer journey mapping as one of the critical “B’s” to consider for Buyer Experience Innovation.  The use of buyer experience journey mapping is one of the, although not the sole, important means by which an organization can attain a deep understanding of how and why customers buy.  A profound understanding that, as Dan Henson highlighted back then, can lead to innovation in services, products, and relationships. 

There are seven principles that are foundational to buyer experience journey mapping:

Qualitative Research Based

Presumption arrived at in a conference room can be detrimental.  To uncover a detailed buyer experience journey mapping, an organization will need to invest in qualitative research that employs ethnographic and anthropological attributes. If not conducted, an organization will sell itself short, very short, in mapping the buyer experience journey.

1 to 1 vs. Generalization

Executives must now account for one of the key transformational changes in the B2B buyer world.  That is, that no two buyer experience journey maps may look alike for certain industries and/or markets served.  Basing strategies on one generalized view will limit effectiveness in creating buyer experiences that result in revenue growth.

Processes within Processes

Process mapping thinking is applied to not only the overall view but to that of the processes that exist in each important step of the journey.  Of criticality is reaching an understanding of the buyer’s processes that he or she must implement to meet corporate buying strategies and policies.

Design Commitment

CEO’s and executives will need to commit to the context of design for such an initiative.  Buyer Experience Design is just that – a commitment to design thinking and to accept that redesign will be an outcome.  Executives will need to lead in establishing that purposeful redesigning around buyer experience is intentional. 

B2B is also B2P

While B2B is vastly different than B2C in many ways, it is still a business to people environment.  Analysis in B2B is often devoid of the emotions, attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, and mental models that exists and play out prominently in the buyer experience journey.  Uncovered in the buyer insight and buyer persona development stages of Buyer Experience Innovation, a portrayal of how they affect the buyer experience journey brings context to the entire mapping effort.

Goal Orientation

Throughout the buyer experience journey, there are a myriad of goals that serve as the platform for the journey.  When referring to goal orientation, I do not refer to the goals of the seller.   Buyers make choices that are goal-based and it is important to gain an understanding of the goal-based choices buyers make throughout the journey.  Reiterating on the first principle mentioned this can only be attained through sound qualitative insight gathering. 

Integrated Buyer Experiences

One key degree of separation from consumer journey mapping is that buyer jounreys usually represent a multiple set of buyer experiences throughout and most likely by different stakeholders.  Buyer Experience Journey Mapping is purposeful in building in the multiple experience scenarios and providing an integrated view of buyer experiences.

The inherent complexity of B2B experiences calls for a new way of thinking as well as approach to mapping the buyer experience journey.  As Dan Henson stated prophetically a few years ago, attaining an understanding of how and why buyers buy has never been more important.  Mapping the buyer experience journey contextually to the realities and complexities of B2B offers organizations the insights and views needed to make informed decisions that shape customer and growth strategies in the modern era. 

The Four Elements of Buyer Experience Ecosystem Thinking

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B2B market CEO’s must feel a little like the great explorer’s of our time.  Embracing buyer experience strategies and experience design in the B2B world is like discovering a new frontier.  While B2C successes in customer experience offer a guide, the translation to the complex world of B2B is not that easy.  There are no definitive maps to get you there per se’.  Buyer Experience Innovation pays particular attention to the customer acquisition aspects of the B2B buyer experience cycles and how companies can embrace design thinking to create innovative buyer experiences.  A focus that can provide the rudimentary map that can guide leaders through the frontier of buyer experience strategies and design.

When rallying the organization to transform around buyer experience, it must be extremely difficult, even exasperating, to talk about the repeated examples of Zappos, Apple, Nordstroms, and etc. for it leaves employees with the good feel of providing extraordinary experiences but presents an empty binder on how to get there in the B2B landscape. 

An important attribute that B2B CEO’s will need to possess to lead organizations in Buyer Experience Innovation is ecosystem thinking.  Ecosystem thinking can be characterized as a combination of integrated thinking and big picture analysis.  It is an attempt to understand the relationships and interdependencies amongst important elements.  The complexities presented by B2B markets and environments make this type of thinking all the more necessary.  It also provides a platform for communicating to the organization just how to think in terms of providing loyalty creating B2B buyer experiences.

There are four broad elements that lend itself to an integrated view of the Buyer Experience Ecosystem:

Relationship:

In the broader context, B2B offers the most complex network of relationships.  Not only must the entirety of the Buyer Experience Ecosystem be considered but gaining insight into the Buyer Ecosystem of your own buyer persona base becomes critical.  The challenge for most B2B CEO’s is that they will discover a significant shortcoming in the organization’s “inside-out” understanding of the many relationships that can exists in their buyer persona’s ecosystem.  Acquiring the “outside-in” view of the web of B2B complex relationships becomes an essential ingredient to Buyer Experience Strategy.  This quote from David Meerman Scott is relevant because with all the shiny new objects that have been introduced the past few years, we can forget it is still about relationships:

"It’s fascinating how the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago.  It’s still about relationships although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal."

Engagement:

Understanding buyer engagement pitfalls as well as opportunities is like playing a game of chess.  B2B CEO”s will need to anticipate continuously the types of engagements that buyers will respond to most favorably.  Here’s the bad news for B2B CEO’s.  Most buyers will have a hard time articulating exactly and precisely how they wish to be engaged.  Thus, the ability to anticipate and read the unarticulated through qualitative buyer insight becomes a core requirement.  In the modern B2B world, discovering the right mix of outbound and inbound engagement can be an ongoing design challenge to get the right recipe of engagement channels that buyers will select.  The advent and rise of engagement channels related to digital marketing and social media has made this undoubtedly a perplexing issue for many B2B leaders.  The roles of sales and marketing with respect to engagement are best defined when shaped by how they contribute to the overall buyer experience.  B2B leaders will be faced with the challenge of no longer holding a provincial view of the conventional roles of sales and marketing.  A focus on a Buyer Experience Strategy recasts the sales and marketing alignment issue from being that of how marketing will enable sales or how sales will align with marketing messaging to that of how each contributes to enabling the overall buyer experience.

Brand:

Over the past several decades, the concept of brand in B2B has essentially been one of identity, positioning, and messaging.  Today, B2B buyers look to branding as an embodiment of an overall experience.  A new way of thinking for many B2B outfits.  B2B leaders will need to ponder how the branding experience is integrated and interwoven into every aspect of the buyer’s engagement and experience with their organization.  Extending the brand experience values to every employee is a considerable undertaken.  While this is of the utmost importance, what is often forgotten is addressing organizational systems and structure that can either impede or enable brand and buyer experiences.  It does no good to arrive at brand and buyer experience values yet leave organizational systems and structure in place as potential obstacles.  Marketing messaging and branding identity alone will not create a buyer experience that engages buyers.   In fact, irreparable damage can occur when buyer’s respond well to branding identity and messaging but then encounter systemic and structural obstacles resulting in the mindset that the organization fails to deliver on its’ promises.  This in turn, severely undermines customer acquisition and growth strategies.

Technology:

B2B leaders today will need to be mindful of how to assess and integrate sales enablement and marketing automation technology as well as the multi-varietal CRM applications that exists into enabling buyer experiences.  A significant risk in this area is that there can be an unconscious gravitational pull towards viewing sales and marketing automation as a panacea to challenges in meeting growth strategies.  Carefully assessing buyer insight and mapping a view of the buyer journey are necessary before determining which technologies are the appropriate enablers for implementing a Buyer Experience Strategy.  Taking a step back and evaluating via an insight-driven approach can lead to choosing the right mix of technologies that contributes to overall growth strategies. 

These four crucial elements can help B2B leaders to develop an ecosystem view of the Buyer Experience Strategy that will best make their organization the choice of buyers seeking goal-fulfilling experiences.  There is high pitch frenzy for B2B leaders today in terms of being confronted internally and externally with persuasive arguments for the latest and greatest new technology or services that promises high returns.  Undoubtedly feeling like one is at a carnival and becoming overwhelmed with the noise, lights, and continuous shouts of the barkers attempting to lure you to their attraction.  Incorporating ecosystem thinking into the crafting of a Buyer Experience Strategy can mitigate the confusion as well as the complexity while at the same time transforming the organization to a model of high regard in providing memorable buyer experiences.