Buyer Roles, Buying Stages, and Perception Challenges

We looked earlier at the evaluation of existing content assets that can be done at each stage of the buying process, and for each buyer role involved.

A similar exercise needs to be done to assess where the need for content is greatest. For each stage in the buying process, and for each role, a list of the perception challenges we face in the market can be created. From here, we will know the ideal messages for buyers to absorb.

These "messages" can be facts that are actively or passively sought by buyers. Actively sought examples are messages that are searched for, such as the specifications for integrating with a specific third party system. Messages that need to be delivered passively, however, are not actively searched for - such as corrections to misconceptions such as the idea that your solution is not appropriate for larger organizations.

Evaluating Messages

To begin, much like the evaluation of current content assets, a matrix can be created that has buyer roles along the y-axis, and buyer stages along the x-axis. In each box, the messages, information, and perceptions that need to flow out to the market can be listed, along with an assessment (red/yellow/green) of whether you are currently being successful in getting those messages out to the market. The value of this exercise is in its ability to shine a light on areas where you may have a significant messaging gap.

Successful marketers are able to inject these messages, perceptions, and criteria throughout the overall education process of a buyer, slowly altering perceptions, guiding the way in which solutions are evaluated, and ensuring that needed information is discovered.

The need to get this broad variety of messages out to buyers, now that buyers are in control of their own buying processes, is what has led to the growth in nurture marketing, as well as the business use of social media as a publishing platform. At each stage, a failure to successfully get these messages out to prospective buyers can quickly lead to buyers failing to progress in their buying process - the three types of leaks in the funnel covered in an earlier post.

The Map is not the Terrain: Marketing Analysis and the Non-Linear Funnel

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases.

Marketing’s overall role is to facilitate the buying process, through which people progress from mildly interested to active buyers. Lead nurturing is the process that we use, and we think in terms of how that nurturing builds awareness, interest, and then purchase consideration. As such, the funnel forms a great representation of the situation, and acts as a very good map. However, as with any map, it is only a representation of the situation, and is not exact.

The biggest difference in the B2B marketing realm is in the linearity of the buying process. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. Buyers progress through a buying process as neatly as one can draw a funnel, moving through increasing levels of interest, and then ultimately purchasing. However, this is not a reflection of reality. Realistically, most buyers move up and down the funnel in a very non-linear manner.

For many months or years, a potential buyer might move in and out of being interested, occasionally showing a brief spurt of interest, and then falling back into being inactive for long periods. At certain points, a deep amount of research and a significant amount of activity may show that a buyer has moved much further along in their buying process, but then can be followed by a quiet period as internal business changes temporarily pause the project that had led to the heightened interest. This can lead to a perception of a leaky funnel as leads that may seem almost ready for sales shift back to an earlier phase in their buying process.

Overall, the funnel model works; generally buyers progress through increasing levels of interest towards purchase. However, at an individual buyer level, the movement is much less linear. This leads to the challenges with defining a “perfect path” as talked about earlier, each individual passes through a unique path towards purchase, making it impossible to define a single path that can push a buying decision.

Similarly, this non-linearity means that the most workable way of looking at marketing analysis looks at the marketing funnel from the top down. By analyzing a funnel from a top-down perspective, you can see high level trends in terms of how healthy your marketing funnel is, and whether buyers are moving in the right direction within it, but you are not constrained by the behaviors of individual buyers, which may be much less linear.

Much like a map providing an accurate description of terrain when viewed from a high level, but missing the details at a more micro level, a funnel is a great model of the marketing analysis terrain from a high level, but is not an exact view of individual buyers’ behavior. This is a concept worth keeping in mind in designing nurturing programs - one can't assume that buyers progress linearly down a funnel, so one can't sequence marketing content in that order. Instead, buyers at each stage should be nurtured in a way that is specific to that stage, but watched for signs that they are progressing to more advanced stages.

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

Almost any of us in B2B marketing wrestle with the challenges of the leaky funnel. As we pass leads to sales that are not ready, perhaps due to them being a "future likely" rather than a current opportunity, we end up with a dead lead pile.

Re-engaging with this dead lead pile can be one of your easiest ways to generate more active opportunities without significant additional expenditure. Amy Marks from VFA took this approach, and I had the pleasure of chatting with her about it when I was writing Digital Body Language:

VFA: Nurturing to Re-Engage Dead Leads

VFA, a leading provider of end-to-end solutions for facilities capital planning and asset management, had many dormant leads in its marketing database. Amassed over a period of years, through tradeshows, lists and sales activities, these “dead” leads were stored in VFA’s CRM system, had never been converted to opportunities, and were no longer receiving communications from VFA.

To engage these leads, VFA implemented a 5-part nurturing program that provided unique content to each of the 6 verticals targeted by VFA. The initial communications were case study focused, and progressed to white paper and webinar downloads, then offers to request a demo or engage directly with sales.

At each step of the process VFA’s marketing team enabled the prospect to engage in a way that was governed by the prospect’s own buying process. Each email offer connected to a landing page that described how similar organizations were able to meet their business challenges.

Additional resources—articles, case studies, white papers—were offered, allowing prospects to select the information they needed depending on their stage in the buying process. At each step, the prospect had the ability to “short cut” the process and jump straight to a later stage; by either requesting a demo or engaging with the VFA sales team.

The campaign succeeded in bringing back a tremendous number of leads from the “dead”. Over 120 highly qualified leads were passed to sales, and over $1.6M in pipeline was created. In a typical example, a lead may have been disqualified at a much earlier date, but given changes in the prospect’s organization, they were now ready to purchase and a sales opportunity was discovered. Only through nurturing and observing the buyers’ digital body language were these opportunities rediscovered.

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

The merits of lead nurturing are hard to underestimate. Especially in challenging economic times, it is extremely wasteful to have a leaky funnel that you spend great effort and resources on getting potential buyers into the top of, only to have them leak out the side. More often than not, this is due to mismatches between buyer timing and the handoff to your sales team.

In writing Digital Body Language I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollis Chin and the team at Voxify who had one of the best examples I had seen of using lead nurturing to generate tremendous value from a set of leads that had been discarded as dead leads.

Enjoy the case study:

Voxify: Rejuvenating Dead Leads through Nurturing

Voxify is a provider of powerful speech applications for contact centers in retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment, financial services, and healthcare. Its complex sales cycle can often stretch 12-18 months, which makes it a challenge to align sales resources with leads. At one point, more than 3,000 leads sat idle – leads that could potentially buy Voxify’s software.

Without a structured follow-up system, Voxify was wasting opportunity. If a lead was not ready to buy at the time of initial contact, the lead was recycled; however there was not a process to ensure further communication. Given the length of the sales cycle, and the type of internal project that would drive the need for Voxify’s solutions, this meant that many valid – but early – leads were leaking out of the funnel.

The breadth of Voxify’s target markets, combined with the range of possible solutions, meant the company employed a broad matrix of messaging to ensure relevance with the prospect. A matrix of 26 separate industry and education topics was created with each topic adding value to each unique buyer type and stage in the buying process. An automated nurture campaign kept this messaging in front of the “cooler” leads to maintain their interest level and watch for signs of changes to buying behavior as the messaging evolved from “why speech applications” through to “why Voxify”.

Within six months, the so-called “cooler” leads became the largest source of conversion for new sales opportunities. The campaign created 1,500 responses and enabled more than 400 companies to re-engage with the sales force. The nurture campaign also allowed the sales team to better understand whether the prospect was more interested in a specific vertical application such as a flight check-in system, or in a horizontal application such as a generic routing agent, and cater their conversation accordingly. By keeping relevant, topical messaging in front of prospective buyers, without overtly selling, Voxify identified and acted on buying interest when it arose.