Working with my clients’ sales forces, I started to see repeating and quite frankly alarming patterns. Because for the most part, we were working with good salespeople from good organizations marketing good products, yet far too often the results suggested otherwise.
It was obvious that something was wrong, something needed fixing.
Now, I have always believed in the value of talking to actual customers, so I introduced a singular, and at the time somewhat radical element to our methodology. I insisted that we research our clients’ customers as comprehensively as we did our clients’ sales teams.
From talking to ever more customers about how they buy and why they don’t, we came to regard this process as a journey, the Customer Buying Journey.
We developed a model that enabled us to effectively decode and map the elements, the “DNA” as it were, of each buying journey. The DNA concept of an actual identifiable code meant that the Customer Buying Journey could now be mapped.
Here’s what we found.
