The customer journey: Finding the buy signal

By Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research Group

Identifying customer moments of truth and building journey maps are effective strategies for keeping customers. Understanding moments of truth and ensuring they’re linked in processes that assure customers are treated well foster bonding and advocacy. But all of this assumes that the customer is a customer and not a prospect. Analytics can play an important part in helping to capture that first order.

Most sales and marketing organizations have processes that are designed to take prospects from a basic level of understanding and commitment all the way to closure. But those processes are rote; they’re designed to take a typical prospect down a learning curve to a purchase – often prospects have their own ideas of what the process should be.

When is a customer not a customer?

Of course, many prospects never become customers and you can spot them fairly easily. At one point or another in the customer journey they lose interest, it becomes hard to reach them on the phone, they don’t answer emails. There’s a long list of things that failed prospects do or don’t do. Sooner or later you weed these prospects out of the pipeline.

Fortunately, customers also show buy signals.

A buy signal might be subtle and it might not be exactly aimed at your company. A buy signal is just what it sounds like. It’s an intention to make a purchase but not a promise to do so. It’s what makes your sales and marketing processes valuable. Depending on what you sell, a buy signal could be as simple as a C-level officer spending time on your site, an increase of activity on your site from people at the same company, or the number of times a piece of content was shared throughout an organization. It could also be something said or implied in a press release or an executive’s speech.

Looking for the buy signal

We spend a lot of effort on analyzing markets and territories. We build target lists of prospects that should be interested in our solutions because they resemble our existing customers. They have the right number of employees, have a specific SIC code, or have other products that yours work well with, and so forth. If you collect all the obvious data and analyze it, you might be struck by the realization that all of those attributes are the same whether a company is in the market for a product like yours or if it has just bought from your competition. The critical difference is the buy signal.

All of the data you collect is valuable of course, but it becomes actionable information when coupled with a buy signal. So the less obvious data trail that prospects leave behind is very important and it should not be forgotten.

Identifying the buy signals specific to your business can be as easy as analyzing how your existing customers bought previously. Retrospective analysis makes it easy to identify buy signals and to build them into your marketing and sales processes. You might find that a particular program or set of content or channel is successful at eliciting buy signals from the customers you care most about reaching. That’s great, but remember this is just a starting point – simply because one approach worked before it might not work forever.

Analytics' role

So it’s important to capture and analyze data from websites and to optimize web pages and content. To ensure your messages remain on target continue A/B testing and if possible don’t stop with B. The more you learn about your prospects the more you should be able to segment the market and each segment might have its own hot buttons.

Micro-segmenting was once impossible both because it was too difficult to capture enough data about customers and because analysis was slow. Today, we have the compute cycles and very good analytics software so it’s easier than ever to segment and analyze to look for those critical buy signals.