Podcast Episode #15: Buying Decisions

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an Irreplaceable Advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide.

Your journey starts here. Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and we're in the Keep Customer Growth podcast, episode number 15, and we're going to be speaking today about buying decisions, particularly of your most important customers, and how that will reshape and completely reinvigorate the way in which you structure every conversation. So let's get started. Now, a big question for you. Have you ever been surprised by a customer decision when you've known wholeheartedly in the depths of your soul that you should have won that opportunity? And suddenly the customer comes back with, were either doing nothing or they've gone with a competitor. Now, tell the truth, I bet you could probably raise your hand and you've had one of those experiences either early in your career, middle of your career, late in your career. It may have happened right across in situations you thought you have nailed. You've had made all the right steps, you've controlled the process, you've given and ticked all the the right boxes, but yet it didn't come through. And that's been my story, it's been a story of many people, successful or unsuccessful. We've had that particular story. But why? Why is that the case? Why, after doing all that we possibly could and can, should we still experience these kinds of decisions with customers we know and have served for a very long time? So here's what I've understood. I now understand that there are these unspoken areas most professionals miss with our existing customers. We believe that when we acquire a customer, we kind of no longer need to follow a process of helping our customers make decisions, you know, in their best interests. The decisions that, you know, if really considered properly and if considered in a way that helps them to see our core expertise and how we'll be the best possible solution, we haven't really thought about that very well. So what I'm going to share with you, you may say, Jermaine Edwards, I've heard this before. And here's the truth. You may have, but not like I'm about to share it with you. And once you understand this and some of the application of this buying process to your customers, it will. Definitely, like I've mentioned at the top, redefine, reshape every approach you take to your current and future opportunities. So let's start with just buying decisions all by itself. And I'll kind of caveat this to say that a lot of this content I'm gonna cover is in a lot more detail inside the blog, and there will be a link to that in the show notes as well. But believe it or not, there are hundreds of millions of pieces of content on buyer decision-making. And you'll hear a lot about logic over emotions and the reality that we do and will weigh our decisions through an emotional lens over a logical one. And that, to a large degree, is very true. And we'll read a range of different, you know, incumbent research from institutions like Harvard and so forth who will argue that we're less logical than we think and 95% of our decisions are emotionally driven. Now, here's the truth. We've been reviewing customer trends and consumption habits since the early 1900s, probably earlier than that, and no one really knows the real percentage or impact specifically influencing triggers on customer decisions. It's actually different depending on the product, where somebody is culturally, and how they interact with other people. It really does shift. Now, it doesn't mean we can't look at specific patterns and learn from certain things and understand where things happen or more likely to happen. But I don't want you to get confused here. We just don't know yet how much of what is what. But we do know that there is a larger percentage that is emotional versus logical. However, we don't know the exact percentage. So I'll give you an example here. This is pretty random, but I'll give it to you anyway. So if you look at some of the historical archives, generally around studies, you can go to places like Taylor Francis, which is a, a simply a repository of range of different data sources that you can look at. There's a number of different established economic texts going back as far as the 1800s, and if, if you look at those things carefully, what you'll see these different kinds of industry-based studies, and they indicate wildly different examples of consumer behavior over the years. Why? Because consumer behaviour have different influencing points: technology, proximity, information, accessibility. All these things make a difference to how consumers behave. So if we look at the ceramics industry, as random as that might be, in the 1980s it was significantly influenced by specific magazine purchases and geographical distinctions, particularly in the US and Europe. So if it was different for your neighbor in another state or country, if they purchased something specific and you were looking at that and it had been purchased by them, you actually didn't want to make the same purchase. However, you wanted something different and you wanted to be able to purchase it within that same period and get it delivered within the week, ideally. So even in the 1800s, the 1900s, people were looking for Amazon-style delivery. But what this is telling us is that consumer behavior changes, it is iterative, and there are many different influencing points that are industry-specific, that are case-specific, depending on the products and the things that we're purchasing. So how can we learn from that directly? If we know that generally speaking, there is a buying cycle, there is, and we notice from the marketing industry that's done extensive research around this, that there is a general awareness there's generally an assessment of needs, there's a looking at the risk of decision-making, there's some sort of fulfillment that takes place. However, when it comes to our existing customers, I want to illuminate a different way to think about the buying process and think about the buying decisions being made in that area. So there are 5 buying decisions every customer needs to make before they really commit to and embrace a decision. And this process can happen pretty quickly, in B2C. For example, if you're buying cleaning detergent, chocolate, socks. But in modern B2B environments, this process is slowed down considerably, particularly if it covers any one of these four areas: if there's any increase in the number of people in that buying process, if there's complexity or newness to the product or service, that might slow down decision-making. If the resource or capabilities and the expertise of the customer isn't very high, that will also slow down decision-making. The demonstration and clarity of the business benefits to the partner by the incumbent provider, if that isn't clear, that will slow down decision-making. But also something unspoken about typically is that if there's consistent bombardment of new and unfiltered information from the marketplace to that customer at the same time you're helping them to buy, that can also slow down decision-making, cause confusion, and sometimes sabotage the buyer conversation. So we need to get a real sense of the ecosystem. How is our customer, not necessarily just assessing the way in which they think about a particular solution, But how are they being influenced by it? Meaning not just asking, hey, how are you making this particular decision? What criteria is there? We might say, what has been the biggest influencing factor to you making your largest purchase in the last 12 months? Ask questions like that. Get a view of the patterns that they see themselves so that we can begin to either eliminate, reduce the risk to those things, becoming blocks to us or increase the likelihood of us being able to leverage that ourselves. So we can use this to our advantage. So in order to really effectively navigate these potential blocks, we have to understand the buying journey and the commitments needed underneath this. Now, I want to give kind of a good shot at visually trying to really kind of illuminate this to you, but I definitely suggest looking at the blog in more detail. So let's look at the buyer journey. So there are 5 pieces to the buyer journey I'm going to share with you from a customer, existing customer perspective. So we got unaware. That's number 1. We're unaware of there being a specific challenge. So this is the moment where it begins. You're unaware of the problem until the pain is uncomfortable or you're made aware of a particular pain in your organization. Then you become problem aware. So you're problem aware, that's number 2. And now your customer is aware of the problem and has a choice to do something about it. That's a yay or nay. Is it big enough problem for me to solve right now? Do we need to solve it internally? What does that look like? Then we have a solution evaluation. So a customer begins to explore the need and investigate what's out there to solve the problem. If they recognize, okay, well, this may be an internal need, but we need extra resource, or this may be something that somebody else may need to look at. That's when they start to make that evaluation. Then you look at options, that's number 4. So the customer has evaluated all the potential solutions and now is filtering down to the most viable options based on really specific criteria. So they're looking at those options and thinking, hmm, okay, here's what's out in the marketplace here, what's on offer, here's what our supplier partner is saying, Here's what they could potentially do. Then they go to number 5, which is a decision. The customer makes a decision based on their organization that it's met their technical and emotional criteria. I'm not going to go any further than that. Clearly, there is a 6th piece, which is your delivering. I just want to focus just up to the point of decision-making, which is 5 unique areas, 5 unique areas, specific journey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Unaware, problem aware, solution evaluation, options, and decision. So that's the practical level. Now, at a neurological emotional level, underneath those 5 different decisions, they're looking at these specific areas also, looking at the future result, the investment, the relationship, and the action. So there's a practical level, which is the unaware, problem aware, Solution evaluation, that's the practical stuff we see at the top. Underneath that, they're assessing and wanting to experience a future result. They're evaluating the investment. They're understanding the kind of relationship they need from somebody else to achieve it and the specific actions that's needed to take in order to achieve that goal. It's really important, the practical and neurological emotional piece in the buyer journey. Okay, so we've got that piece. Now, the next area is something I very rarely hear spoken about in any sales or customer managing process. This is buying commitments. So there are buying commitments underneath every buying decision journey. And these are perhaps the most important undervalued areas in any complex B2B market where you're selling large solutions that impact multiple people, departments, and work environments. So here's what it looks like. So underneath this sequence of 5 decisions, that buying journey, there are these 4 buying commitments. The first is, do they want to own the problem? Is it urgent? Are they committed? And are they willing? So let's go through these one by one. So number 1, do they want to own the problem? So once a customer becomes aware, they now have to decide whether or not they want to do anything. So do they actually want to own the problem? So you may identify a range of potential problems, and they may be aware of that themselves, and they say, "Yep, okay, we see the problem, and we've identified it ourselves. Hey, you're right." But they may not want to own the problem right now. It may not be something they want to look at because they could be much bigger things they're trying to solve. Once you do identify as something that is important to them, the next piece is urgency. At this stage, they have to determine how urgent this problem is for the customer, for them to be solved. So we need to ask some really specific questions here to help us understand the urgency, the implications of this. If you're familiar with the SPIN-based questioning model, from Neil Rackham or any kind of model that supports you exploring urgency, this is the place to apply it. So own problem, is it urgent? How are they really looking at this specific problem today? Then committed. Now, this is a really important area. So we must evaluate how committed they are to solving the problem. What have they done already? What resources they are willing to allocate? Are they aware of what specific things need to be put in place already? So are they committed to the specific kind of result that they want, and what are they doing to ensure that they're set up for it? So based on some of the things that you may have recommended, what kind of action may have they taken already? That'll give you a good indication to knowing just how committed they are. Then lastly, are they willing? So is the customer willing to make the investment based on the known time, the known effort, the known capital and resource needed? If all buyers are not, they will stall. If all buyers are not fully committed and willing, it will stall every single time. It may not start necessarily at that beginning. Sometimes you can have more of a consensus-based vote, but if you do not have full buy-in from those people who will be invested into the long-term execution of that project, it will not go well. So it's worthwhile ensuring you spend some time making sure that that willingness piece is really articulated well and you understand where they are. So if we can get a big picture of how those parts integrate, that whole buyer journey of unaware, problem aware, solution evaluation, options, decision-making, understanding that the, underneath the neurological or emotional journey underneath that, is they're invested in a future result. They're looking at the investment. The relationship, and the action. And the commitments that you need to make as they're looking at this is owning the problem, urgency, committed, and willing. If we're clear about those things, we'll have engineered questions that we can ask at each stage that will give us much more confidence in knowing, and with certainty, that a customer will make a positive decision with us in the end. So that's been really helpful for you. If you want to think about that, if you have any stalled customer projects right now, it's likely because one of these specific areas has not been fully addressed. We have no idea if the commitments have really been there, if they're willing to take the necessary action based on the effort, resource, capital, time that's needed. We need to go back and explore through the lens of this buyer journey and those buyer commitments, and you'll have much more success with each of your key customers. Now, for link, obviously, and just additional information, more detail, go to the show notes, have a look at the blog if you want more details. Other than that, there's one action I'll give to you right now. Simply look at the most important client you have today that has stalled on any particular area. Simply ask yourself this question: What specific risks are there right now in the relationship that, if removed, would help me move this opportunity forward? What specific risks in the relationship right now, if removed, would help me move the opportunity forward? Document those particular things, look at them with your colleagues, see if that might help you move something forward. But other than that, I want to wish you success, and I'll see you in episode 16.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.