When your customer journey looks like a bird’s nest
Folks selling professional services or complex goods know the pain of being unable to pin down a clear and consistent customer journey.
This is especially the case in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, where purchasing decisions are usually made by a group of people. Sometimes, these people even have diverging interests.
I’ll admit that in my time, I’ve defaulted to pure human sales hustle as the best way to deal with complex customer journeys. Are we really going to expect ourselves to create marketing materials that inspire one person to talk to another person, then for those people to escalate the purchasing decision to a superior, or (God help us) a committee, then for that superior to approve a purchase decision? Wouldn’t it just be easier to throw human capital at the issue and work to build relationships the old-fashioned way?
The short answer to this is yes. The kind of human hustle and trust-building you see in the traditional sales role is still what drive a lot of sales in the world of intangible goods.
Many have made the argument that sales has become a lot more like marketing in recent years, with sales people needing to have high-quality creative materials and marketing collateral to support their activities. But as Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer of UnMarketing have pointed out, marketing has also become a lot more like sales. Those unique, high-impact human connections that we make with people when we meet them face-to-face can absolutely scale to the realm of marketing. The challenge becomes one of how to get there.
Generate conversations
It’s always crucial to know what the actual goal of your marketing efforts are.
If you sell a complex good with an even more complex customer journey, then trying to generate immediate sales conversions from an online landing page (where the buyer pulls out a credit card and purchases your $5K product or service) probably isn’t going to happen.
It’s crucial to remember that the way you generate an inquiry is different from how you generate a conversion, and generating conversations among your audience members requires different techniques as well.
But if your goal is to get one person inside an organization to casually mention your company to another person at that organization, now we’re talking. Even if your goal is to generate an inquiry that allows you to have a high-quality conversation with someone interested in what you offer, marketing can help you do this as well. But it’s crucial to remember that the way you generate an inquiry is different from how you generate a conversion, and generating conversations among your audience members requires different techniques still.
In the world of 21st-century marketing, it’s always a good thing to get people talking to each other about your company, product, and/or service. But where people sometimes fall down is thinking that a single blunderbuss (you won’t be disappointed if you look this up) of messaging can generate maximum conversions, conversations, and inquiries all at the same time.
The kind of pure human hustle and trust-building you see in the traditional sales role is still what drive a lot of sales in the world of complex goods.
Having people chat with each other within their own enterprise about your company is even something you can fold into your call to action. What is crucial to accomplishing this, though, is making a clear choice about what outcome you want your marketing efforts to create.
Asking questions of your audience in order to generate water cooler conversations is absolutely something you can do with a call to action, and probably even preferrable to trying to generate online sales conversions in most instances. Or if you think you can get results, don’t hesitate to try and generate inquiries. Just know that if you come with too hard a sell in the inquiries, you’ll undermine the openness and trust that you want people to bring to these conversations.
