Where Did All Your Customers Go?
For many companies, it seems like customers have vanished almost overnight. Business growth has come to a halt. Credit is scarce and cash even scarcer. For anyone in business, times have been tough for the past few years. But for heads of sales, things have been an absolute nightmare. Imagine having to get up every morning, rally your troops, and send them into a battle they can’t possibly win. I am sure they must feel like William Wallace from the movie Braveheart, inspiring his troops for what is in reality imminent death. That is what most sales leaders have been facing every day over the past few years. To find business where none seemingly can be found. True, most sales people love to play the hero, but this is different. It’s one thing to sell to reluctant, even nervous customers. It’s another thing altogether to sell to no one at all. So where did they go?
In reality, it’s not that your customers have disappeared - there has been a shift in how you are able to engage your customers in their buying process. Internet access and vast technological advances over the past decade have greatly changed how your customers buy. Customers can now easily find and access information about their industry, the competition, your product/solution, and your competitors’ products/solutions without spending a lot of time or money.
In fact, research by The Corporate Executive Board shows that customers aren’t even contacting suppliers until they are, on average, 57% of the way through their buying process. This means customers have already determined their needs, completed due diligence, and have even begun to do some comparison-shopping before contacting your sales representatives. As a result, your opportunity to influence your customer’s decision is greatly decreased. In fact, customers are pretty much only leaving sellers the ability to compete on price.
Consider the difference where marketing hands leads off to sales between the past and future. Notice that the handoff from marketing to sales is now much further down the customer’s buying process. This shift moves sales activities to later in the buying process and yet most marketing team’s inability to adjust to the greater need for engagement has created a virtual “No-Man’s Land” where your prospects are essentially free from engagement with your company. You are, in essence, enabling your prospects to make purchase decisions without any influence from you, or even worse, with influence from your competitors. It’s at this stage that your customers are at their most vulnerable and you have the greatest ability to shape customer demand.
Marketing now needs to create extended engagement with prospects and nurture them to a stage of sales readiness. This means that instead of creating content that focuses on who you are and why you are different, you need to create content that helps educate your prospects. Prospects search for different information at each stage in their buying process. Marketing needs to define the interest and needs of your prospect at each stage and generate content that helps address these needs.
The customer buying process has evolved much more rapidly than the way most companies sell. Economic pressures have forced many buyers to become increasingly risk averse and focused on cost. This combined with increased access to information has led to a customer-led sales environment that is being pushed in a much more transactional direction. While most customers are not really “hiding,” they are using the internet in ways such that they change the point where they engage with salespeople. It’s the companies that understand this and address the issue of “No-Man’s Land” that will bring their prospects out of hiding.
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