Last time we expounded on the importance of mapping out a Buyer’s Journey and sticking to it. Now we’d like to talk about what we mean by “Buyer” because it doesn’t always refer to someone who takes out their wallet to purchase a product or service.
Much like User Experience design (UX), a Buyer’s Journey is a customized tool. And that customization means you sometimes need to expand your definition of what a buyer is. Often, it’s a person from whom you want buy-in, not bucks. Here are some examples of how a Buyer’s Journey can provide the framework for a variety of goals.
Internal change management
Updated company values. New policies or initiatives. Company restructuring. HR concerns. All of these require moving people from the old mindset to the new one. Mahalo recently did this with the revamped Talent Acquisition program at VMware. And we developed a campaign to help VMware’s HR department inform thousands of employees of new benefits for 2019.
Event attendance
Global events are critically important to the sales goals of any enterprise, and an engaging pre/during/post-event campaign is key to boosting attendance. Of course, customers and prospects who come to the event should be considered buyers. But they mustfirst be attendees, and that means you have to be strategic about getting them to go in the first place. A journey of this type moves your audience from not considering attendance to booking their flight.
Training
Teaching old dogs new tricks doesn’t necessarily come easy. A journey-type approach to what you want people to take away from whatever it is you’re teaching them can help awareness and retention.
Reframing products
Solution-based selling is an effective approach to sales. When mapping your products and services to solutions, it may mean a new structure to how you position them. With a Buyer’s Journey, you can start buyers from a common starting point and point them down several different paths from there, depending on their needs. This lets you start a conversation where the customer is and gives you a common foundation from which everyone can operate.
Product launches
From teasers that generate buzz to full-on deep-dives that go into juicy product details, this more focused type of journey can play out within the larger context of product suites or greater product families, reinforcing them all in the process.
