thousands of customer examples, produced a number of
unnerving stats:
•
57 percent. At least 57 percent of customers are
through their buyer journey before they engage a ven-
dor due to being so empowered and connected. As a
result, conversations typically go very quickly to price,
with the opportunity for vendors to differentiate their
products or services (or even to re-frame their custom-
er’s needs) long vanished.
•
6.8. On average, there are 6.8 people involved
in the B2B decision making process. Each of these
individuals have different needs, cares about different
things, and requires different content and messaging
from marketing and sales representatives.
• 39 percent. 39 percent of customers in the study
described the purchasing experience as “overwhelm-
ing.” With a myriad of vendor choices, large diverse
buying groups, and multi-month buying cycles, it
seems that buying has become much tougher in today’s
environment. Which in turn makes marketing and
selling more difficult.
There have been significant advances in online data ana-
lytics to help marketers understand their own versions of the
57 percent, 6.8, and 39 percent mentioned above. At SMART
Technologies, we’ve embraced left-brain thinking and lever-
aged analytics to crawl inside the search engines, social media,
forums, news feeds and discussion groups, and received
amazing insights into our customers. This data mining allows
us to answer critical questions:
32 July 2017
1. Where do our customers learn? (so we can be there
when they learn)
2. What solutions are our customers looking for and
talking about the most? (so we can prioritize which
solutions we should focus on)
3. How do they speak and search? What language do
they use? (so we can ensure we are speaking in the
same language)
4. Where, geographically, are they located? (so we can
geo-target our advertising)
5. Which online properties are the most popular?
Which social media channels? Which search en-
gines? (so we can direct our advertising spend)
6. Who are the most influential people? (so we can
reach out and forge relationships with them)
Another left-brain endeavor we’ve undertaken is a very
structured look at the buyer journey and how to deliver
targeted content at the right place and time. In almost all
education technology purchases, there are approximately six
steps a customer follows (see The Buyer Journey graphic). This
approach is different from the typical “Awareness/Interest/
Conversion/Repurchase” steps that many marketers use.
When was the last time a customer said something like “I’m
looking for some software for my organization. I’m in the con-
sideration phase, but I think I’m about to convert to close.”
Next, we mapped these six steps against our buyer groups
or audiences. We looked closely at our “6.8” people involved
in the purchase process and, finding our number to be signifi-
cantly larger, landed on four aggregated buyer roles. Through
this process, SMART outlined key questions for each of our
audiences throughout the buyer journey and are arming our
sales teams with relevant content (video, infographic,
brochure, etc) that can be served up at the right
place and right
time for the
right