Sellers and buyers are on two separate tracks. As a sales professional moves a lead through the stages of the sales process, their prospects and customers are on their own path: the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is the process a potential customer goes through when becoming aware of, considering, and purchasing a product or service. It’s like the sales funnel, but from the perspective of a buyer.
Mapping your buyer’s journey is important because it helps you understand your customers and their decision process. You can use this information to improve your win rate by personalizing the experience, understanding motivation to buy, and identifying and overcoming objections.
3 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey typically consists of three stages:
Stage 1: Awareness
The buyer realizes there is a need, problem, or challenge.
Stage 2: Consideration
The buyer researches available options and gathers information about vendors.
Stage 3: Decision
The buyer decides whether to make a purchase and, if so, from which provider.
Knowing where a prospect is in the buying process helps sales professionals ask the right questions, understand customer problems, and move the prospect to the next step of the journey in the sales cycle.
Benefits of Understanding the B2B Buyer’s Journey
Being aware of your buyer’s journey and how it aligns with your sales process can help improve sales performance.
Once your sellers understand which stage of the process corresponds with which step of the journey, they can:
- Improve the buyer experience
- Build value for your product or service
- Move prospects through the sales funnel more quickly
- Increase win rates
Using a consistent, buyer-focused sales process allows your sales professionals to identify quickly where a prospect is on the buyer’s journey and meet them in the correct step of the selling process. It can even help them move a prospect backwards, if necessary.
3 Steps to Align Your Sales Process with the Customer Journey
To align your sales process with the buyer’s journey, you need to know what the prospect is doing at each stage. Sellers who use a consultative selling approach can become highly skilled at uncovering a buyer’s true needs.
Step 1: Begin with the Investigation Step
When a sales professional acquires a lead, their first step should be to investigate. Thorough research is the best way to begin any sales process. Sellers need to gather all available information on leads upfront to begin to qualify the prospect.
Once the investigation step is complete, your sellers will begin initial sales conversations, adapting their communication to match the prospect’s behavior style.
Step 2: Identify Where the Prospect Is in the Buying Journey
Using sales discovery questions, your sellers can determine where the prospect is in the decision-making process. Is this an initial call or a follow-up? Is the prospect actively seeking a solution or just curious? Are they comparing options or asking for pricing?
Sales leaders can coach their sales team to ask open-ended questions to uncover pain points and other relevant information. Conversations created by open-ended sales questions build rapport, define needs, identify motivators, and uncover budget. They can also lead the prospect toward the purchasing decision.
For example:
- What prompted you to call/take this meeting?
- What are your top business priorities right now?
- How would you describe the problem you’re trying to solve?
When a sales professional asks questions like this, they can identify where a prospect is on the buyer’s journey and identify any competitors the prospect may have experience with.
Step 3: Move the Buyer Forward or Backward
Most buyers today go through a large portion of the buyer’s journey before contacting a sales professional. This can make a seller’s job even harder, because often the prospect has self-diagnosed their issue.
In a perfect world, your prospect and sales professional would work together to define the issue. This makes it easier for your seller to present their solution as the best choice.
But if the prospect has already diagnosed what they see as their problem, your sellers need to move the buyer “backward.” They can do this by raising thought-provoking questions.
For example: Your sales professional is in a conversation with a prospect looking for dental equipment. The prospect has expressed his need for new hardware with the most up-to-date technology to keep up with the competition.
Your seller might ask, “Have you considered that the number one request from patients is to be in and out of the dentist office quickly? With that in mind, you may want to take a look at the efficiency of your current equipment.”
A question like this immediately positions the sales professional as a strategic advisor in the buyer’s eyes. It can also move the buyer back in their buyer’s journey to a place where the professional is more in control—and able to add value to your company’s product or service.
From this point, your sales professional and the prospect can make a collaborative diagnosis of the challenge. They can focus on selling value instead of responding to a request for a quote—giving the seller a greater chance of closing the business.
The Importance of Aligning Your Sales Process with the Buyer’s Journey
Aligning your sales process with the buyer’s journey helps your sellers connect with potential customers and establish trusting relationships.
If your sellers can align process and journey, they’ll understand how buyers make decisions and build collaborative relationships. They’ll also be able to qualify or disqualify prospects quickly—so they don’t waste time chasing the wrong type of business.
A flexible, buyer-focused sales process like IMPACT Selling® allows sellers to meet buyers where they are on their purchase journey and interact in a way that enhances their positioning and moves them closer toward the sale.
Learn how our sales team training programs can help your sellers achieve predictable results.
