Every purchase starts with a desire, but the path from Desire to BUY will depend on how complex the purchase is. A complex sale might be described as one where there is a need for a lot of information.

For example, imagine you manage a company that manufactures vinyl windows, and the company is in the happy position that business is booming and they need to expand their manufacturing capacity. Let’s say that expanding production at the current location is not feasible, so you need to find a bigger location to move into, or build a new factory.

The new location will have to meet all kinds of criteria: it has to be in a convenient location for shipping and receiving, it has to be accessible for the workforce, it has to be large enough, it might have to include room for future expansion, it has to be affordable, and so on. Clearly, this is not a one-phone-call-does-it-all kind of purchase. You will have to consider leasing an existing building or buying a lot and building something new, plus issues like timing and transitioning from the old facility without disrupting business. It quickly gets complex.

To get a new factory up and running, you will start to do some research. Let’s call this the second stepping stone on your path to a purchase, “Inquire”. You might start out talking to colleagues, contacting associations you belong to, talking to friends and family, reading books and industry publications, and searching online for information on anything from negotiating land purchases to moving manufacturing equipment from one location to another.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, then you might call on people you know who have helped you successfully navigate all the ins and outs of a major manufacturing facility move. In this example, there’s probably no single top-of-mind vendor that can fulfill your desire to increase manufacturing capacity.

As a customer steps from Desire to Inquire, we know from many studies that the initial inquiries will include an online search component. The search terms at this early stage will mostly be general in nature. This is the point where a customer, to use the vinyl window factory example, might be searching for general information on the pros and cons of leasing versus buying property or equipment. Later on in the process, they might start looking at lots of details, like lighting fixtures, but in the early Inquire stage, they’re at the wide end of the information funnel.

The many faces of your customer
The path to the same end purchase can be different for different people in an organization. Let’s take a look at three personas: the “doer”, the “buyer”, and the “boss”.

A doer refers to the person who is going to be directly affected by the challenge/opportunity and interacting with the purchased solution; in a B2B purchase, the initial impetus for a purchase may start here, when a need is first realized and a desire for a solution is expressed. It could be the doer in an organization who first recognizes that their own efficiency and productivity could be increased with, say, a particular kind of software solution. In some purchase scenarios, a doer may touch all 7 stepping stones, or they may have dropped out much earlier on the path. They may also move back and forth as the sales process proceeds (or recedes, as the case may be).

The doer who initiated the sales process (i.e. recognized the desire) may drop out after the Shortlist step. Notice, too, that a sales person from a vendor may not have even touched the process at all until they suddenly find themselves at the Negotiate step; it may have been all Marketing up to this point. There are also a couple of different stones where the vendor’s process may move from Marketing to Sales, so it’s vital to get the process right for handing it from one team to the other.

The “buyer”, on the other hand, may not even enter the path until the Negotiate step. The buyer will be judging a purchase decision by very different criteria than the people who may be more directly involved in implementing the purchased solution (the doers).

Depending on a company’s purchasing process, a buyer may be able to assume that other managers have vetted the purchase up to that point to make sure it’s a viable solution to a recognized challenge or opportunity, and their job now is financing the purchase, getting the best deal and terms, and checking the vendor’s reputation to ensure long term support for the purchase.

Job #1 – Be There
Marketers need to be aware of the customer’s path to purchase, but also who, exactly, is on that path. Using the stepping stone metaphor, imagine you and the potential customer are standing together on the “Inquire” stepping stone. Look around and you’ll probably see any number of competitors standing there with you, and when you look at the customer you may be looking at one person or a collection of doers, buyers and/or bosses. In this potentially crowded space, a Marketer needs to stand out and be noticed.

For the customer, the Inquire step may include actions like conversations with people in their industry, reading industry publications, paying attention to advertising, surfing vendor web sites, and searching online. As a vendor, if you can picture yourself with a bunch of competitors, all precariously standing on a crowded “Inquire” stepping stone, you know that if you’re standing at the back of the pack the customer may not even know you are there.

As the customer’s journey down the path to a purchase progresses, will they find you later if they missed you at the “Inquire” step? Maybe, because at the early stage the customer’s initial line of inquiry may be so off base that they end up retreating to the first step, and reassessing the circumstances that triggered the process in the first place, or there may be such limited options for the solution they need, that your solution becomes more visible as they move from “Inquire” to “Refine”.

However, if they don’t see you at the Inquire step, you could be missing a chance to frame the conversation advantageously and influence the rest of their journey. That’s one reason why it’s so important to have a good search marketing strategy, to get exposure to customers early in their purchase process.

It may take months and months to get from the initial inquiry phase all the way to a final purchase, depending on the business you’re in and the perceived risks associated with the purchase. We’ve also seen six-figure purchases that went from inquiry to purchase in a week, but the point is that marketers need to make sure the right message is in front of the right person, at the right time in their purchasing process.

Job #2 – Stay on the Path
As we can see, there are two factors that can drop a vendor off the customer’s path to a purchase. The first is if the vendor fails to recognize who they’re dealing with at each step on the path to purchase. What is the customer’s approach to making the kind of purchase they’re considering? The vendor needs to be sensitive to the different needs of the audience – the doers, buyers and bosses. They have different ideas about the risk associated with making or not making the purchase, and different needs in terms of the kind of information they need to help them decide.

Secondly, if the vendor is clumsy in moving their sales process along from Marketing to Sales, the risk is that the customer moves on along the path but the vendor is stuck in one place. The Marketing team may have nurtured a sale along to the Shortlist step, only to hand off a qualified sales prospect to Sales and then not have them follow up in a timely manner, and ultimately losing the sale.

About the author
Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. This is the second article on the Seven Stepping Stones on the Path to Purchase. You can read part one on this blog, and view a slide deck at Slideshare.