Buyers step from Desire to Inquire in a complex sale

Every purchase starts with a desire, but the path from Desire to BUY will depend on how complex the purchase is. A complex sale might be described as one where there is a need for a lot of information.

For example, imagine you manage a company that manufactures vinyl windows, and the company is in the happy position that business is booming and they need to expand their manufacturing capacity. Let’s say that expanding production at the current location is not feasible, so you need to find a bigger location to move into, or build a new factory.

The new location will have to meet all kinds of criteria: it has to be in a convenient location for shipping and receiving, it has to be accessible for the workforce, it has to be large enough, it might have to include room for future expansion, it has to be affordable, and so on. Clearly, this is not a one-phone-call-does-it-all kind of purchase. You will have to consider leasing an existing building or buying a lot and building something new, plus issues like timing and transitioning from the old facility without disrupting business. It quickly gets complex.

To get a new factory up and running, you will start to do some research. Let’s call this the second stepping stone on your path to a purchase, “Inquire”. You might start out talking to colleagues, contacting associations you belong to, talking to friends and family, reading books and industry publications, and searching online for information on anything from negotiating land purchases to moving manufacturing equipment from one location to another.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, then you might call on people you know who have helped you successfully navigate all the ins and outs of a major manufacturing facility move. In this example, there’s probably no single top-of-mind vendor that can fulfill your desire to increase manufacturing capacity.

As a customer steps from Desire to Inquire, we know from many studies that the initial inquiries will include an online search component. The search terms at this early stage will mostly be general in nature. This is the point where a customer, to use the vinyl window factory example, might be searching for general information on the pros and cons of leasing versus buying property or equipment. Later on in the process, they might start looking at lots of details, like lighting fixtures, but in the early Inquire stage, they’re at the wide end of the information funnel.

The many faces of your customer
The path to the same end purchase can be different for different people in an organization. Let’s take a look at three personas: the “doer”, the “buyer”, and the “boss”.

A doer refers to the person who is going to be directly affected by the challenge/opportunity and interacting with the purchased solution; in a B2B purchase, the initial impetus for a purchase may start here, when a need is first realized and a desire for a solution is expressed. It could be the doer in an organization who first recognizes that their own efficiency and productivity could be increased with, say, a particular kind of software solution. In some purchase scenarios, a doer may touch all 7 stepping stones, or they may have dropped out much earlier on the path. They may also move back and forth as the sales process proceeds (or recedes, as the case may be).

Seven Stepping Stones on the Path to Purchase

The doer who initiated the sales process (i.e. recognized the desire) may drop out after the Shortlist step. Notice, too, that a sales person from a vendor may not have even touched the process at all until they suddenly find themselves at the Negotiate step; it may have been all Marketing up to this point. There are also a couple of different stones where the vendor’s process may move from Marketing to Sales, so it’s vital to get the process right for handing it from one team to the other.

The “buyer”, on the other hand, may not even enter the path until the Negotiate step. The buyer will be judging a purchase decision by very different criteria than the people who may be more directly involved in implementing the purchased solution (the doers).

Depending on a company’s purchasing process, a buyer may be able to assume that other managers have vetted the purchase up to that point to make sure it’s a viable solution to a recognized challenge or opportunity, and their job now is financing the purchase, getting the best deal and terms, and checking the vendor’s reputation to ensure long term support for the purchase.

Job #1 – Be There
Marketers need to be aware of the customer’s path to purchase, but also who, exactly, is on that path. Using the stepping stone metaphor, imagine you and the potential customer are standing together on the “Inquire” stepping stone. Look around and you’ll probably see any number of competitors standing there with you, and when you look at the customer you may be looking at one person or a collection of doers, buyers and/or bosses. In this potentially crowded space, a Marketer needs to stand out and be noticed.

For the customer, the Inquire step may include actions like conversations with people in their industry, reading industry publications, paying attention to advertising, surfing vendor web sites, and searching online. As a vendor, if you can picture yourself with a bunch of competitors, all precariously standing on a crowded “Inquire” stepping stone, you know that if you’re standing at the back of the pack the customer may not even know you are there.

As the customer’s journey down the path to a purchase progresses, will they find you later if they missed you at the “Inquire” step? Maybe, because at the early stage the customer’s initial line of inquiry may be so off base that they end up retreating to the first step, and reassessing the circumstances that triggered the process in the first place, or there may be such limited options for the solution they need, that your solution becomes more visible as they move from “Inquire” to “Refine”.

However, if they don’t see you at the Inquire step, you could be missing a chance to frame the conversation advantageously and influence the rest of their journey. That’s one reason why it’s so important to have a good search marketing strategy, to get exposure to customers early in their purchase process.

It may take months and months to get from the initial inquiry phase all the way to a final purchase, depending on the business you’re in and the perceived risks associated with the purchase. We’ve also seen six-figure purchases that went from inquiry to purchase in a week, but the point is that marketers need to make sure the right message is in front of the right person, at the right time in their purchasing process.

Job #2 – Stay on the Path
As we can see, there are two factors that can drop a vendor off the customer’s path to a purchase. The first is if the vendor fails to recognize who they’re dealing with at each step on the path to purchase. What is the customer’s approach to making the kind of purchase they’re considering? The vendor needs to be sensitive to the different needs of the audience – the doers, buyers and bosses. They have different ideas about the risk associated with making or not making the purchase, and different needs in terms of the kind of information they need to help them decide.

Secondly, if the vendor is clumsy in moving their sales process along from Marketing to Sales, the risk is that the customer moves on along the path but the vendor is stuck in one place. The Marketing team may have nurtured a sale along to the Shortlist step, only to hand off a qualified sales prospect to Sales and then not have them follow up in a timely manner, and ultimately losing the sale.

About the author
Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. This is the second article on the Seven Stepping Stones on the Path to Purchase. You can read part one on this blog, and view a slide deck at Slideshare.

Red shirt, no real purpose = death.

Granted, in Star Trek, including an alien battle makes the episode more exciting. But the story line is developed by the main characters, not that ensign you see for 6 seconds before he gets killed. The aliens didn’t have time to deal with insignificant, pointless Away Team members.

Think about sinking resources and screen real estate into a part of your site that’s got no real purpose. Your visitors don’t need distractions like that flashy red button over there that doesn’t have any impact on the story you’re trying to tell.

Data and human emotions just do not mesh.

Data always struggled trying to understand human emotions. Even with an emotion chip, he still couldn’t quite grasp them properly.

Analytics are great – they tell you what visitors did on your site, how long they did it for, where they came from, where they went, how much money they spent… but they don’t tell you why visitors did something. There is no substitute (emotion chip, etc.) for true human emotions. You need to talk to real people to find out what they’re experiencing on your site.

I’m a doctor, Jim, not a…

Poor Bones. Kirk just kept throwing stuff at him that he wasn’t familiar with. You need to take the time to understand your visitors, so that you’re presenting them with information and tasks that they can understand and complete without getting frustrated with you.

Our neural pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns.

Ok, I’m taking this one out of context a bit (in case you’re wondering, this is Riker commenting on the crew’s friendship with Data), but the point here is that there are lots of tools out there now that let you monitor one specific visitor’s behaviors, and then present them with content that is uniquely applicable to them. By building up that database of their inputs, you can effectively target your message to them.

In that particular moment, I was reconfiguring the warp field parameters, analyzing the collected works of Charles Dickens, calculating the maximum pressure I could safely apply to your lips, considering a new food supplement for Spot…

Data was extremely good at multitasking, even when “romantically” engaged with Jenna. Understanding what else is going on while your visitors are engaged with you through ethnography or similar types of research can give you an idea of how much attention visitors are really giving to you.

Believing oneself to be perfect is often the sign of a delusional mind.

No matter what you think, there is always room for improvement. Getting into A/B and multivariate testing is pretty easy these days, so I suggest you give it a try. Take all of the work you’ve now done to understand your visitors and use it to start tweaking your designs to optimize conversions. If you need some ideas on what to test or how to optimize parts of your site, check out user experience best practices, form best practices, landing page testing ideas, call to action best practices, and some of our other online experience articles.

Act, and you shall have dinner; wait, and you shall be dinner.

This Klingon proverb summarizes the current digital marketing landscape pretty well. It’s not enough to throw up any old website any more – you have to understand your customers and what their needs and pains are, and act on giving them what they need to solve their problems. And you have to be constantly monitoring this and adapting to their changing needs. Sit still, and you risk giving up business to your competitors who aren’t sitting still.

Make it so.

So get out there, boldly go where none of your competitors have gone before, and start getting to know your buyer better. It’ll pay off.

Engage.

Still not sure what you should to understand your buyers or to optimize your website? We can help.

Every purchase starts with a desire, or need

There are different kinds of purchases, of course, from very simple to very complex. A complex sale will touch all seven stepping stones, whereas a very simple purchase may only touch two or three. As marketers, we can be more effective if we can recognize the journey a buyer is on and understand what they need to move them along the path to purchase – a path that we hope culminates in the selection of our product or service as the ultimate answer to their quest.

The First Stepping Stone: Desire (aka The Need)

The path that leads to making a purchase starts with a desire. In the case of a business purchase, we may want to put a more rational face on it, and call that desire a need. That need may be real or imagined. It may be substantial, rational, considered, whimsical or impulsive. It may be big or small, important or trivial. It doesn’t matter. Once our brains recognize that need, we begin a process that may ultimately lead to a purchase.

Imagine you work in a small office, with one shared printer, and then the printer breaks. You “need” a new printer for the office because the old one is broken and it’s vital that you have a functioning printer. Alright then, call it a need, but just recognize that it’s also a desire. A new printer will mean less hassle, maybe reduced costs, and it can quickly be brought online with a minimum of disruption to the business. If it’s like the old printer you were already familiar with, the learning curve will be shallow.

There is a risk involved in not replacing the broken printer, too. You risk being less efficient, or having to get all your printing done off-site which is going to be less secure and probably more expensive, and it will take more time to get the printing done. The desire to avoid risk, extra work, extra time and extra expense means you’re going to want to replace that printer. The process for replacing it starts with recognizing a desire, or need, for a solution to the problem of not being able to print anything in the office as before, because the printer is broken.

Imagine another scenario: you’re waiting in line at a drugstore checkout. You’ve got your items in a little basket, ready to checkout, and while you’re standing in line you notice the magazine rack by the checkout stand. One magazine cover jumps out at you, featuring a celebrity you’re interested in, and on an impulse you pick the magazine off the rack and toss it into your shopping basket. You didn’t “need” that magazine, but it created a desire and you acted on the impulse. You can rationalize it later if you must, but you decided on the spot that you’d add it to your purchase.

That’s a pretty simple example of a purchase decision. Consider the risk involved in making that magazine purchase. It’s probably pretty low. The cost of the magazine was a few dollars, and if the contents don’t live up to the cover, well, you’ve wasted a few dollars and a few minutes discovering the magazine was a dud. Now go back to thinking about that office with the single printer. In that scenario, you want to make sure you’re purchasing a printer that will meet the needs of the office and provide reliable service for years to come. In other words, there is more risk involved in that purchase, and so the path you’ll take to that purchase will involve making a few more decisions along the way. Those decision points are what I’m referring to as the Stepping Stones on the path to a purchase. If you are a vendor, then it’s vital that you know the steps the buyer takes on their way to a purchase of your product or service, so you can provide the appropriate support at each stepping stone.

In terms of the first stepping stone, desire (or need), how does a vendor anticipate and participate at the beginning of the buyer’s journey? There are two basic marketing approaches at this stage:

1. market your brand to be top of mind when buyers’ desires match your product, or
2. create the desire for your product.

Marketing Strategy #1: Be Top of Mind

Being the top-of-mind brand when people are shopping is a great position to be in. It pays off huge dividends, even if what people associate your brand with isn’t accurate. For example, there was a time when the question “which company makes the safest cars?” would have provoked an answer in many people’s minds of “Volvo” or “Mercedes”, and maybe still does today for many people. Yet the reality is that companies like Hyundai or Volkswagen are picking up awards for vehicle safety just as much or even more than those brands. Despite this fact, Volvo is still reaping the rewards of being the first to really own mindshare for “safe car”.

When you think of an industry you work in or know well, what’s the first company that comes to mind? How did they get to the top of your mental list? Is it because they have been around the longest, have the biggest market share, seem to be everywhere, are in the news a lot, or is it because they’ve differentiated themselves in a striking way, such as way better customer service, pricing, locations, or quality? As marketers, these are good questions to answer.

To be really successful, a brand needs to be #1 or #2, so if you can’t be #1 in your category, you’ve either got to figure out how to be #1, or it might time to invent a new category (seriously!). When the Ford Windstar could no longer claim to be the only minivan with a 5-star crash rating, the Ford marketers switched the message to the only minivan to earn a 5-star crash rating X years in a row – a claim no other manufacturer could make, thereby making them #1 in the category of minivans that have earned 5-stars for X years in a row.

There are lots of authors who have tackled the subject of getting a brand to be top of mind, so I won’t spend too many words on it here; but in terms of being present at the first stepping stone on the path to a purchase when the desire is recognized by the buyer, it’s the marketer’s job to get their attention. The marketer’s toolkit at this point in the journey includes tradeshows, business cards, advertising, publications, online marketing, and on and on.

If you’re not there at the start of the journey, can you still join the path later on?

Marketing Strategy # 2: Create a Desire

In terms of creating desire for a product, some marketers (and salespeople) use this approach with tremendous success. You thought you needed toothpaste, but you were sold a better social life (code for “more sex”) through whiter teeth as result of using one, and only one, particular brand of toothpaste. They created a desire for you to be more popular, more attractive, more socially adept – and who could resist an offer like that, especially when the answer to your desire to be more popular (i.e. have more sex!) was right there in a tube of toothpaste. Why would you buy any other brand?

They created a risk factor, too. If you don’t buy our toothpaste, you risk being ordinary, the same as you are now, and you will never attain the status of someone with a magnetic personality beaming from your movie-star, glistening white smile. Just make this simple, painless switch and watch your life improve. You didn’t know you needed a more expensive tube of toothpaste. You probably didn’t think there was anything wrong with your smile, or your social life either, until they told you it was lacking. Use our product, be a winner. Don’t use our product, and well…

The create-a-desire approach doesn’t always work and it is not always appropriate for every product, service, or market. It can be a very successful B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing approach however, and many of us have ended up at a till, credit card in hand, purchasing something that we know we don’t really need, but we somehow wanted it badly enough that we justify it in our minds as a treat or something we deserve. For marketers to make this approach work, it’s about emotions. Customers might want the facts and specifications later, to justify their decision to buy, but up to the point where the money changes hands, it’s the emotions that are driving the process.

Can we create a desire in a B2B environment? Sure, it can work there too, but the emotional triggers can vary, depending on who you’re selling to. You might think that emotions don’t come into play in a business-to-business purchase, but they do. Buying a new software solution for your business may not produce quite the same emotional rush as getting that set of golf clubs you’ve been dreaming about, but even when you get past a business’s supposedly rigorous purchasing process, there are still human beings involved in the decision to purchase, and those people have feelings.

Risky Business

In a company purchase, the desire can start at any level, from the factory floor to the C-Suite. Before the final purchase is made, a business purchase may involve several people. We can loosely categorize the people doers, buyers, and bosses. The doers are those folks on the front line, delivering the product or service. The buyers are responsible for making sure company purchasing policies are followed, and have a different set of criteria for judging a vendor. The bosses have a different outlook again, and marketers need to know when each of these types of people is engaged in the purchasing process, and how to deliver the right message in the right way, and at the right time on the path to a purchase.

The desire can be lit by envy of other company’s equipment, processes and accomplishments. You might call it the “me too” syndrome. Sometimes it’s driven by an individual’s ego, but it can also be a genuine desire to compete and excel. Marketers and sales people play on this emotion with case studies, pictures of high-profile product placements, celebrity endorsements, and other techniques. There have been fascinating studies that demonstrate how we humans take social cues from people around us. A great fable that underlines this behaviour is the Emperor’s New Clothes; everybody went along with the herd, pretending to see his fine new robes, until a child pointed out the truth. If everybody else is doing it, many or us are reluctant in that context to be the first to go against the grain. I heard a saying that the nail that sticks out will be pounded down. It can be personally risky to be the nail that sticks out.

The desire can be lit by fear, as in what will happen if your competitors all automate a certain process and you don’t? Marketing technology solutions often uses this approach. There’s also a fear that perhaps an entire industry is going away. Today you have a large brick-and-mortar network of video rental shops, but will that be a viable business next year, or the year after that? In other words, is somebody trying right now to convince Blockbuster to invest in technology and resources to compete with threats from Netflix, PVRs, and the myriad online video distribution channels that are coming along?

Fear is the manifestation of recognized risk, and avoiding risk is a dominant theme in the buying process. There are two kinds of risk; one is personal and the other is corporate. With personal risk, the individual is considering the risk to their own reputation, job security, or pocketbook. With corporate risk, the consideration is about the impact on the company.

Fear can be used to trigger desire; think of the stereotypical good cop/bad cop interrogation: “we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way, it’s up to you.” Fear of the “hard way” creates a desire to avoid suffering, and motivates a more cooperative approach. In a business environment, there may be fear of change when things appear to be working well, and there’s a long history of doing the same thing over and over and getting acceptable results; then there’s fear of not changing, when it’s obvious that the market or industry is being transformed. As marketers, we need to have a keen sensitivity to understand the fear, or perceived risk, that buyers are facing. We also need to understand their tolerance for risk.

If a Sales Manager is recommending that her sales team all be given company-supplied mobile phones, emotionally she will be dealing with the personal risk to how she’s assessed as a manager in that company if the phone purchase turns out to be a waste of money or produces less than anticipated productivity gains. She could also be anxious about what will happen to the company’s performance if they choose the wrong phone and service provider. A purchase like this will probably involve a handful of people; there may be an IT person who is concerned about synchronizing everyone’s email with the new phones; the CFO may not care at all about the phone or the service, but is very keen to know what the justification is for the expense, where the money will come from to implement the purchase, and how the return on investment will be measured; the CEO could be focusing on revenue in and expenditures out, new customers acquired and overall growth, and having just enough information to satisfy a board of directors; the sales team members could be more interested in the phone’s capabilities and ease of use, the impact it will have on helping them increase sales, without much regard to the cost. These are all very different constituents, each looking at the same purchase, but from their own significantly different points of view.

Questions to ask yourself

Is your brand a leader in your space?

• If yes, then what are your competitors doing about it?
• How successful are they now?
• What could they do that would be a game changer?

If you’re not the brand leader, can you

• Be disruptive (i.e. change the game)?
• Change the conversation (same game, new focus)?
• Get some high-profile endorsement?
• Spend a fortune on publicity?
• Invent a new category or line of business?

About the author
Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist at Mediative

How people access content, and how relevant and current that content is, will be the constant factors in this evolution. But can we actually see into the future by learning from the past?

Teach Me, Mr. TV Executive
According to the viewership numbers from Nielsen, U.S. Television grew both in numbers of viewers and time spent per viewer over the past few years. This growth occurred in spite of the fact that time-shifted television viewing, Internet video viewing and mobile video viewing all grew as well.

But the historical leaders in viewership, the old guard of TV networks, have seen a decline in viewership. How can the leaders be failing but the industry thriving?
Television’s audience problem is one of fragmentation. More people may be watching more TV, but they are watching many, many more channels and more vertically specialized programs than they used to. The pie may be bigger, but the slices of that pie are much smaller.

The Fragmentation of Search
The way we consume media and content has changed, and continues to change. Some of the old business models for how content is distributed are failing and failing fast.

What Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft were able to initially provide was the organization of the world’s content. This created the formation of the major network providers of search. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are now the ABC, CBS, and NBC of the 1970’s Television era.

I believe it was not the technology platform that changed people’s behavior to want more specialized TV, but it was their natural intent. Those specialty providers (Food Network, OWN) that rose to provide a portal to better match intent with content succeeded.

But will people always go to Google or Bing to find this content? Or will the development of more direct access points, and quicker paths to content, fragment the search landscape? Will specialty App’s, vertical search engines and social portals each take a slice of the pie? And if so, what will this do to your lead gen, online revenue and marketing strategies?

In Part 2, we will look at what a marketer can do to position themselves to keep pace with search’s evolution.