Consider the last SaaS app that was implemented at your company. How was the onboarding experience? The day-to-day usage? How well did it integrate with other technologies? Unfortunately, if it’s anything like so many SaaS apps, the software may have been clunky, hard to operate, required a lot of training, onboarding, and well … tested patience.
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Users aren’t buyers. Unfortunately, B2B companies typically skip over this essential fact.
It is also true that B2B companies tend to buy buyer persona projects quite frequently, and user persona research much less so. We believe this is a mistake. Both research efforts are equally important, and the failure to do either one can lead to a lost customer down the road.
One reason for this divide is that marketers typically purchase buyer persona projects, not product research. These marketers are rightly concerned about the buyer’s journey, how buyers influence each other in the buying committee, and the customer’s key buying criteria. Regrettably, with all of this emphasis on managers, directors, and VPs, minimal attention is placed on users. And users can make or break a product’s success. Read more
B2B sellers often think of their role in the customer buying journey as a numbers game. And organizations reinforce this notion. Promotions and pay bumps often hinge on how well the rep measures up to their KPIs. From the number of SQLs they convert to how much revenue they generate, these metrics are necessary for tracking and analyzing your sales team’s performance. However, these metrics don’t tell the full story but are chronically overemphasized.
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B2B leads don’t become customers overnight. B2B marketers need to master the art of lead nurturing to guide prospects in their buying journey. At this phase, your content has piqued their interest enough to fill out a contact form or download a whitepaper. Now your job is to keep their interest. You have to convince them that your solution is the best fit.
Knowing how and when to make contact with your marketing qualified lead (MQL) is the key to winning them over. But, there are a few things you need to consider before you make your move.
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First impressions matter, especially in the B2B buyer’s journey. Buyers identify the problem or need their company is experiencing and begin exploring their vendor options. They swipe left or right on potential matches based on nothing more than what they see on vendors’ websites.
The amount of time a prospect spends on all of that content you’ve produced is minuscule compared to the time you spent developing it. For example, Google Analytics data suggests that a reasonable target for average session duration on a B2B website is two minutes.
So much like a social media or dating profile, your site needs to be engaging right from the start.
Finally, buyers spend nearly half of their B2B buyer’s journey flying solo. A 2019 study from Gartner shows that buyers spend nearly half (45 percent) of their time in the journey doing independent research. Many potential leads are lost in this phase—without sales or marketing even realizing it. Why? Because something makes that prospect swipe left before they ever fill out a contact form, send an email or pick up the phone.
Let’s face it, most departments, in most organizations, aren’t super familiar with what their buyers perceive, expect, and want. Why? Because, other than sales, most teams aren’t in regular, direct contact with customers. Even sellers miss a big piece of the puzzle, because they aren’t hearing from would-be prospects that have never heard of them or were turned off early in the buyer’s journey before becoming a lead.
Well-executed B2B customer experience research provides a holistic understanding of the voice of the customer (VOC). That is, current, potential, and competitors’ customers. This understanding is necessary to dodge common pitfalls in sales, marketing, product, and business leadership.
If you’re a product person and you’re good at your job, you’re already listening to your customers. You might meet regularly with your sales team. Maybe you’ve even gotten a voice of the customer market research program implemented. But if you’re one of the 34% of product managers who frequently or always worries that you’re delivering features customers won’t use, you might need more granular customer input, like understanding customers’ jobs-to-be-done.
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The industry standard for B2B buyer personas is wanting. I frequently see buyer personas built by other vendors that read more like a dating profile than an exceptional piece of analysis and insight.
In these poorly amalgamated personas, significant time is spent on demographic details and personality traits of a buyer when other topics are far more critical.
