Whether it’s golf, basketball, skiing, or selling, visualizing the process creates muscle memory that enables you to perform flawlessly. You can see Phil Mickelson visualize his approach to a hole or a course before he lines up to take a swing. In the Olympics, cameras zoom in on the athletes mentally mapping their strategy to being first to cross the
finish line. They see and experience it in their minds eye. In sales, the power of visualization is equally profound.
The best salespeople understand that selling is a process that requires training, practice, and execution. It is a combination of skills, psychology, and neuroscience that enables us to connect with someone at an emotional level, earn their trust, and win their business. Understanding the buying process from the customer’s perspective is critical in designing your sales strategy and defining the process. So the question is… how do you visualize an experience?
Understanding your customers and your employees doesn’t have to be complex. It’s about asking the right questions and translating the answers into a visual roadmap that quantifies the impact, cost, and ROI of their experience. The visual roadmap enables you to make fact based decisions about structure, strategy, and process improvements by analyzing the knowledge gained from customers and employees about their experience.
Many companies are challenged with growth issues as a result of new competitors, changing business models, disruptive technologies, and the way buyers’ are using tools to do their own research before reaching out to a supplier. Forrester states that over 65% of the buying journey is done BEFORE a salesperson is involved, and 75% of B2B buyers now use social media to research vendors. In order for sellers to be effective, they need to understand what is happening behind the curtain, before they get involved, in order to be more successful once they are. In order to stay ahead of the curve, we need to understand they buyers journey. The great news is that there are tools and experts to do this.
With Journey Mapping you can:
- Objectively audit and measure the effectiveness and value of every customer interaction, and monitor operational consistency
- Identify what’s most important to your customers, and understand what creates or detracts from value and drives loyalty
- See exactly where and when customers experience satisfaction or pain, who is most impacted and how it affects your bottom line
- Access emotional and rational experience detail at a click
- Visualize how activities and processes in one area affect the entire organization, and get everyone on the same page about priorities
- Gain actionable customer insight and business intelligence
- Improve data quality and governance
- Streamline the identification and implementation of technology enhancements
The benefits are numerous. As a result of Journey Mapping their experience, you will be able to:
- Drive sustainable strategic opportunities to enhance profitability & optimize ROI
- Evolve and deepen the science of the customer experience through evidence based methods to drive retention and referrals
- Develop a 360o customer view, including both rational and emotional perspectives, to generate actionable insights and tactics for competitive advantage
- Maximize effectiveness of media, content and technology investments
With this insight, you can plan Demand Generation/Lead Nurturing programs by flow, content and lifecycle stage driven by your understanding of the flow of content and content consumption patterns. Mapping the Path to Purchase with accelerators, moments of truth and pain points, will eliminate wasted touches and shorten the path to marketing qualified and sales qualified leads. Plus, provide you the knowledge you need to support your strategy and tactics for ongoing nurturing campaigns, e.g. welcome programs, ongoing upsell/cross sell nurture programs, referrals, and more.
It’s your choice and opportunity to have a clear picture of your buyers’ experience. Having a roadmap enables you and your teams to design a structure, strategy, process, and platform to cross the finish line ahead of your competition. That is a visual that is worth the investment to create a new operating system based on quantifiable information that will elevate the buyers experience and your bottom-line.
The world has changed. Remember the pioneers who bravely embarked on expeditions to conquer new worlds without a roadmap? Many perished in the process, wasted enormous amounts of time and money, or didn’t have the resources or skills they needed to be successful. They didn’t have the ability to see beyond their line of sight. Lucky for us, we do!
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