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Understanding the Customer Journey for B2B Businesses

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Understanding the Customer Journey for B2B Businesses :

Are you struggling to generate leads for your B2B business?

If your business is experiencing such a situation, then getting familiarised with the B2B customer journey is very important. The B2B customer journey is the collection of touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a B2B company, from their very first encounter, all the way through to post-purchase.

B2B Customer journey has a series of steps to go through before committing to a purchase.

There are distinct phases in which your potential customer passes through and should be guided accordingly, to be introduced to and “buy into” your product/service. The four phases are Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Advocacy.

Incredibly, throughout this whole journey, according to Gartner’s Future of B2B Buying Journey Report, most B2B buyers spend only 17 percent of their time actually talking to you. The rest of the journey happens “behind your back” — mostly researching and discussing with their team. That means quality content is of paramount importance to help the buyer move through the phases.

According to Gartner’s report, 77 percent of B2B buyers feel that making a purchase is very complicated and time-consuming. And, ultimately, that is bad for any business. To minimize complications, one has to optimize their B2B customer journey the right way and here are some ideas to get going:

Create buyer personas. A good place to start is to create a list of your customer’s demographics, psychographics, trends and influences. It is important to understand their business needs, and pain points, and offer them effective solutions.
Stay focused on the content creation. More than half of all B2B buyers view at least 8 pieces of content (a.k.a. 8 touchpoints) before making a purchase. Make sure each piece of content takes the buyers to move through different phases along the customer journey.
Identify and remove roadblocks. Make targeted interventions to remove friction and improve results by working backwards to pick out anything from your customer journey that could get in the way of a sale. Factors nearest to the purchase point are often the lowest hanging fruit.
Qualify the leads properly. Not all the leads that come in will be ideal customers. It is important to qualify them. Because, at the end of the day, pushing a lead through the process when they’re not ready is going to be damaging for everyone, your business included.
Get onboarding right. Make sure your onboarding process is as smooth as possible. It will help you stand out from the crowd and lay the path for customer success.
Stay front of mind. Nurturing current customers is crucial. Keep in touch so they stay engaged, update them on how things are going, and give them access to useful reports. And when it comes to renewal dates, make sure you send out timely reminders.

How has knowing the B2B Customer Journey helped you in your business? Please comment below.

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B2B Marketing Case Studies: www.brandupwise.com/case-studies