Photo by Matt Foxx via Unsplash
Are you familiar with the concept of the “buyer’s journey”?
Of course you are!
It’s the process a customer goes through to purchase a product or service, from identifying a problem to making a purchase decision. And I’ll wager that you–or someone on your team–refer to it daily in the work you do for your clients.
But how frequently do you apply the framework of a “buyer’s journey” to your own agency’s business development process?
THE AGENCY NEW BUSINESS CYCLE IS LONG
We all know from our direct experience that it takes months, sometimes years, to convert a promising lead into a paying client. A 2022 study from 6Sense (a platform that uses AI to analyze buyer intent data) says the average B2B buying cycle is eleven months and the study was quick to point out this number was dependent on complexity and bespoke nature of the sale, how many suppliers were being considered, and how many people on the buyer’s side were involved (hm, sounds like the agency review process!).
Interestingly, the study also found that buyers typically make direct contact with vendors eight months into the buying process.
The study goes on to say:
“84% of deals are won or lost before providers know they even exist. Either way, buyers clearly indicated that they conduct most of their buying journey before engaging directly with providers, and that when they do, they do it on their own terms. They have already established their requirements and chosen favorites in the race for their business.”
In other words, B2B buyers shop anonymously. They do their research with at best small crumbs left behind. They choose which content to interact with and form their own opinions based on what they see and hear.
This has significant implications for your agency’s new business process! But you can also manage your end of the buyer’s journey to make the most of every interaction with a prospective buyer until they’re ready to hire you.
IT IS A JOURNEY AFTER ALL
The selling process is a journey, but most agency leaders don’t think through a good strategy to make it from beginning to end. They don’t optimize their online presence (website, LinkedIn page, Instagram feed, random speech they gave eight years ago that still pops up in search results, etc.) for creating a positive, consistent impression during the anonymous shopping phase and then, once a person-to-person connection is made, they aren’t always prepared to advance the sale from one conversation to the next until a deal is sealed.
At each stage, your buyers have an objective– they want certain types of information delivered in certain ways so that they can make the right decision with the least amount of effort and risk. And at each stage, you want to have a clear objective too for what you want the prospects to think or do.
STAGE 1: UNKNOWN → AWARENESS
Desired reaction: “This agency gets us.”
It’s early in the journey, your prospect doesn’t know you or maybe they’ve heard enough about you to be curious. Maybe they’re plowing their way through a list of a dozen websites their agency search consultant gave them, or maybe your cold email caught their attention and they decided to check you out. In all these cases, you’re working against time because their objective at this stage is to qualify you as quickly as possible as an agency that gets them.
And if their objective isn’t fulfilled right away, they won’t be willing to watch the 2.5 minute agency showreel or navigate their way to the “work” page to scroll through a few case studies, much less respond to your cold email.
Don’t let the journey end before it begins. Give them:
Brevity – Hook them with one brief message that allows them to decide whether or not they want to keep going on the journey.
Clarity – Don’t confuse them with agency jargon or overused, ineffective language about passion, relentlessness or fierce independence. Be clear about what you do and who you serve.
Relevance – Does your agency get them?
Curiosity – Less about teasing them with cleverness (thought that might work for some) and more about dangling a promise that you are indeed qualified to deliver
STAGE 2: AWARENESS → FAMILIARITY
Desired reaction: “We might hire them one day.”
The journey from Awareness to Familiarity may take minutes or it may take years depending on how acute their problem is and how quickly they want to solve it. For instance, in the case of nurturing a relationship through outreach, your objective is to reinforce and deepen your message. This will likely take a long time, multiple efforts, the use of different tactics and platforms, and it will benefit from a complementary marketing strategy.
As you anticipate how you want to reinforce your message, help the buyers fulfill their objectives:
Verify – Assuming they’ve been hooked by your clear, relevant intro message promising better outcomes, provide them with a means to verify that promise through case studies, content that demonstrates authority, or the process you use to get reliably repeatable results for your clients.
Social proof – This might be through testimonials or, if appropriate, direct endorsement by an existing client.
Intelligent persistence – Unless they specifically state they want you to leave them alone, follow a reasonable cadence for putting valuable information or insights in front of them.
Consistent narrative – As they start to engage, every piece of information you provide, directly or indirectly, is shaping a narrative in their heads. You can’t control it but you can influence and you certainly don’t want to undermine it.
STAGE 3: FAMILIARITY → INTEREST/NEED
Desired reaction: “Let’s put them in our consideration set.”
If the prospect has made it this far, then they like what they’re seeing and hearing from you. And, if they’ve been shopping anonymously so far, this is when they might make themselves known and start some kind of exchange. Their objective is to validate their early conclusions that you’re a potential match so that they can safely put you in their consideration set.
Your objective: engender trust through –
Listening and responding (v reacting) – Now that you’re in a two-way dialogue, don’t let people-pleasing enthusiasm get the better of you. In fact, this is your opportunity as much as theirs to vet them. Allow yourself room to listen to what they’re asking for and to thoughtfully respond.
Tribe-building – How might you tactfully and respectfully demonstrate that you run in the same circles? A friend who runs a small PR firm in the Pacific Northwest firm that does a lot of community engagement on land use development was nurturing a relationship with a San Francisco-based real estate company with a big project in his backyard. One of the tactics he used to keep the interest alive after their initial meeting was to make proactive connections to other professionals and community leaders she’d benefit from knowing. He was not only being helpful but also demonstrating that he understood the players as well as the process. This helped reduce any perceived risk on the prospect’s end that she’d be hiring the wrong agency or of having to invest too much time to train them on her business.
Demonstrating value – Besides connecting the prospect to people who could be helpful to her, my PR agency friend also focused on continually delivering value. He had his team scan the local news for updates on things like city council decisions on land use policies that would impact his prospect’s project. When his agency won the assignment, the client told him a big reason she chose them was the information and intelligence they continually provided during that time.
Ubiquity – Have you ever noticed when you learn about, say, a restaurant or an author for the first time, you start to see their name or hear about them in conversation everywhere? It’s called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The best way to put it to work for you is by creating, publishing, and distributing authority-building content where your ideal prospects are likely to see it .
STAGE 4: INTEREST/NEED → PREFERENCE/INCLINATION
Desired reaction: “Why should we hire you today?”
You and your buyer have made it to the point at which there’s a real assignment to be discussed with a budget and a timeline. In my experience, it’s not that unusual for the prospect to experience a moment of reversal. They want to make sure if they extend an invitation to pitch, that you’re really as equipped to take on the challenge as they’ve been led to believe so far.
You might think that your objective is to reassure, but that’s likely to throw you back into people-pleasing mode, which erodes your authority when you should be gently asserting it. Your objective at this stage is to probe and guide:
Are you and the prospect talking about the right problem to be solved?
Is the budget or timeline misaligned to achieve what they want to achieve?
What’s at stake if they don’t move forward quickly?
This is often when an agency is willing to relinquish all control to a process dictated by the client, even if that process is deeply flawed. Try to retain some control through smart, insightful leadership as you define and price a scope of work, handle objections, and maintain momentum.
STAGE 5: PREFERENCE/INCLINATION → CONVERSION
Desired reaction: “You’re the favorite.”
You’re almost there. You’ve been told you’re the preferred choice. It’s the last chance for your prospective buyer to poke holes before making a decision. And if it’s not your direct buyer, it might be other stakeholders that haven’t been very involved in the process so far but are nonetheless wondering why, exactly, you should be hired over someone else.
Your objectives are to –
Manage objections – The probing and guiding continues along with asking the right questions to weed out objections so that you can address them.
Offsetting inertia – Ghosting has grown into a big problem in our business. The better you were able to probe/guide in the earlier phase, the better equipped you are to use the buyer’s own statements to challenge the lack of communication and spur reengagement.
Onboarding – You haven’t won the business yet, but you might want to start acting that way. Be proactive about sharing how you will welcome this new client into your agency and get to work with little disruption to their business.
EACH BUYER’S JOURNEY IS UNIQUE
I offer you this road map as a tool to make good decisions about what to communicate to your buyer and when as you prepare yourself for what is typically a lengthy journey. While I believe that every one of these stages occurs, they may occur sooner or later than expected. It may take months to get through a stage or it could pass through it over the course of one conversation.
It depends on many factors, of course. Some of them are under the control of your buyer, such as timing for budget approvals or product launches, but some are in your control. For instance, a strong elevator pitch—that is, one based on a well defined ideal client profile and a clear value proposition—made to the right person has the potential of opening a door much sooner than a vague promise of award-winning creativity, passionate teamwork, or fierce independence.