This post was authored by Julie Fraser, President & Principal Industry Analyst, Cambashi Inc.
While most people talk about the sales cycle and stages of marketing, these must directly reflect the buying cycle. While the main stages of the buying cycle have not changed since I participated in the course “The Business of Selling and Marketing” with TRB Consulting over 15 years ago, some of the approaches buyers use to move through the cycle have. Let’s walk through the buying cycle as TRB lays it out in the book The Buck Starts Here:
Become Aware: This is typically where the customer recognizes a need or an opportunity. Addressing this can be a marketing activity leveraging thought leadership and educational approaches in either traditional or on-line formats, and sales teams can also help current customers understand new products and their capabilities.
Gain Initial Info: In this area in particularly, buyers leverage the Internet, Social Media and other avenues that are both outside traditional marketing approaches and not entirely in your company’s control. Every aspect of marketing can be very important – on-line and traditional.
Gain In-Depth Info: At this stage, buyers generally are comparing options in terms of functions, features, pricing, and terms. Answering these questions must be a foundation of
Justify Internally: While each customer must do this step themselves, marketing and sales teams can support buyers with detailed results from other customers and/or performance data compared to current approaches.
Buy: For most purchases, the customers want to buy face-to-face with a salesperson or a customer service call desk. Still, providing on-line ordering and customer service opportunities are increasingly important too.
Have Ongoing Relationship: While the account managers and sales teams continue to have a strong hand in these, many companies are doing a great job of keeping customers loyal and keeping them informed to get back in the buying cycle for other products.
This is the first element of being customer focused – looking at the buying cycle as the foundation for marketing and sales activities. At each of these stages, you must be aware of who you want to act and what action you want them to take – that guides what activities to plan. The tricky part now is to also incorporate into the plan actions to manage the impression you make even for parts of the marketing and sales cycle you do not control completely. Customer 2.0 looks there with a keen eye.
Looking forward to sharing more with you at the event in September! Then I’ll focus on identifying and planning to satisfy all the aspects that a customer might value.
