What triggers someone to buy?

A Trigger is an event that causes a buyer to have a clear need, which usually converts into a sense of purpose and urgency in their buying process. As an example in your own personal life, you might have had a vague interest in getting a new camera. This might have caused you to browse the web, reading various reviews.

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This article looks at why customers expect different interactions with you depending on where they are in the buying cycle. It also examines how specific events trigger them into a buying mode. It then explains how you can use this information to make your marketing more effective.

The Customer Buying Cycle

A simple way to look at the buying cycle is to break into three stages: Awareness – when a customer first becomes aware of your product. Or could also refer to the point where a customer first becomes aware of a need that they want to fulfill. Consideration – when a customer starts evaluating solutions to their need Purchase

How Buying Cycle impacts the sales approach needed

Imagine that you wandered in to a clothing store while walking around the neighborhood. You didn’t have a particular idea of anything you want to buy. You are approached by a hungry salesperson who is convinced they can get you to buy something. You are are annoyed by too much attention, and feel that they are ruining the peaceful browsing experience that you hoped to have. Now imagine that you have gone into the same store. However In this situation, you have a urgent need to purchase a black sweater, and don’t have much time to waste. You want a salesperson to help you immediately, so you don’t waste your time looking for the item. However you can’t seem to get the attention of any of the salespeople. You are highly irritated by the lack of attention.

What’s the difference?

The difference between these two examples is where you are in the buying cycle. In the first situation, you are early in the Awareness stage, and in the second example, you are right at the end of the purchase cycle. Depending on where you are in your buying cycle, your expectations for how the sales people in the shop should treat you are different. If you are early in the cycle, you want to be largely left alone to browse around and get educated. If you are later in the cycle, you want highly responsive help to complete the purchase. Using the wrong sales approach leads to buyer frustration.

How do you adapt Marketing to a buyer’s stage in the cycle?

In the online world, we need to provide different paths through the website that are appropriate for each stage. It turns out that visitors will self-identify where they are in the buying cycle by the paths they take, provided you give them the option. What to do with visitors that are not ready to buy? (Lead Nurturing) Since visitors who are early in their buying cycle are NOT likely to buy on their first visit to your web site, we need to know how to best handle them in case they do turn into buyers later on. This is a path that I am surprised to see is often not given the right level of attention and results in leads leaking from the funnel and lost marketing investment. The key is to do a great job of staying in touch with them over a period of time, and building a trusted relationship (Lead Nurturing). Then if they do hit an event that triggers a buying cycle, your product is likely to be the top of their shopping list. To allow us to do this, we need their email address. Since website visitors are initially reluctant to provide that, we need to entice them with something of value to them. How to do this has been covered in other articles in this blog (When selling is the worst way to win customers & Optimizing your customer acquisition funnel). Once we have their email address, we can nurture them through the buying cycle using a customer success stories, a blog, newsletters, webinars, etc. Lead nurturing is best done with marketing automation software like that provided by HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc. Those products allow you to segment your customers to make the messages you send most directly relevant to them, and therefore most likely to be read. They also allow you to track who is advancing in their buying process by observing whether they come back to visit pages, such as the pricing page, that indicate buying intent. You can then apply more expensive sale resources to those leads, knowing that they are qualified enough to warrant the additional cost. Effective lead nurturing is all about accelerating leads through the consideration process. Customer success stories, product comparisons, etc. all help to provide the data and info that a prospect looks for in their own research. If you provide it for them you make it easy for them to consume that info and move to the step in the process.

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How on-line lead sources relate to the Customer Buying Cycle

Different lead sources produce buyers at different stages of the customer buying cycle: People that are later in the buying cycle are most likely to be using tools like Google, and review sites to search for vendors and products to solve a problem. Those leads are highly valued because there is a high level of buyer intent. They are usually in the Consideration or Purchase stages of the buying cycle. Many other lead sources (e.g. social referrals, Twitter, Facebook ads, banner ads, pr stories, educational presentations at conferences, etc.) produce buyers that are earlier in their cycle, and frequently just becoming aware that there is a potentially interesting product now available. Market maturity also plays an important role in the stage that your leads. For early stage markets where there is still a lot of education required, most leads will be very early in their buying cycles.

Understanding Buying Triggers

Other examples of triggers:

You hard disk fails, and you realize you need a better backup system You have a burglary, and realize you want a far better video security system Your company grows beyond a certain size, and your old manual HR systems can no longer cope

etc.

The specific trigger that gets their buyers going is not only different from startup to startup, but also different depending on their role in the organization. Having a very clear understanding of these triggers helps you:

Recognize who to target

Improve your messaging to those target prospects

Do a better job of qualifying who is really ready to buy

Gives you the ability to help a customer recognize when a trigger has happened.

Working with Triggers to improve marketing

Let’s look at this in four steps:

Identify the different buyer persona that buy your product Identify the trigger or triggers that typically get them into a serious buying mode Create messaging and content for each persona & trigger combination Look to see if you can create the trigger event, or help them recognize that one has occurred I will use one of my portfolio companies, CloudBees, as an example of how this might work. CloudBees provides a PaaS (Platform-as a-Service) that can be used by application developers to drastically cut time-to-market for development of new applications.

Identify the Persona that buy, and their specific triggers

In CloudBees case, there are four buyers:

The business unit owner who wants to solve a problem by developing a new application

The developers

The IT organization who are responsible for providing the development infrastructure

Systems integrators who are used to outsource projects for development

Taking just the business unit owner as our example, what might get them interested in CloudBees is the general notion that they can get applications built far faster than using the old internal IT processes. However they are unlikely to try to transition an existing development project onto a PaaS as they have already built the IT infrastructure required for it. That means that the trigger needed to actively start looking to purchase is a new project. To better understand what are the most common types of new projects, CloudBees talked to their customers. They found out that the top new application type that business owners want are mobile applications for smartphones and tablets. That made it even clearer how to build their messaging.

Build trigger-specific messaging and content

Understanding this trigger helps us to create messaging for this persona on the front page of the web site. i.e. below your standard intro video etc., you could place messaging for each persona. In this case, that might read: “Business owner looking to get a mobile application built in a fraction of the usual time?”. This would lead to a landing page that contains content specially tailored for that use case. The content should be designed to help move that persona through the buying cycle. Look to see if you can create the trigger, or help a customer realize a trigger has happened

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If you are nurturing a bunch of leads that came to your website early in their buying cycle, your goal with lead nurturing is usually to wait until some external event occurs that triggers them into active buying mode. However the more you understand about these triggers, the higher the chance that you can actually help create the trigger. One example of this is HubSpot’s Marketing Grader tool. This free tool provide a customer with a clear indication of where they have gaps in their marketing versus best practices. They also use a score, which is a powerful trigger to get a customer to act to try to improve their score. If we look at the CloudBees case above, we might help create the trigger by using our blog and newsletter to talk about how Mobile applications for customers have helped boost sales for other companies. Then discuss how quickly and cheaply they can be built. With some luck, this could plant the idea in the customer’s mind that they need to build a new mobile application. That is the trigger needed to have them seriously engage with CloudBees. The power of this message could be increased by leveraging highly respected analyst groups such as Gartner, Forrester, etc. quoting them on the need to interact with customers via mobile apps.

Encountering a customer too late in the buying cycle

Many of you have seen the situation where you encounter a buyer late in their buying cycle. They have already shaped their feature list around some other vendor’s product, and you are now forced to react. If you’re selling a simple product, where the features and price can be easily assessed to be superior, this isn’t too much of a problem. But if you’re selling a more sophisticated product where the customer needs to understand how your unique features can uniquely change their business and give them greater ROI, you’re likely to be at a disadvantage to the company that helped shape the buyers picture of what they need. So in more complex sales cycles, the ideal situation is to make sure you get to know customers earlier in the process and become the player that helps shape and define their shopping list (RFP). That means finding customers earlier in their buying cycle, and building a relationship with them over time.

Conclusions

This article discusses two concepts that are important to on-line marketers: the customer buying cycle, and triggers. Your own customer buying cycle may be more sophisticated than just the simple three steps that I have outlined here. To take full advantage of this information you might want to: Figure out where most your top-of-funnel website visitors and leads are in their buying cycle Make sure you have appropriate paths for them to follow to answer their questions, and move them forward in the cycle Recognize that a large portion of them won’t be ready to buy when they first encounter you. Instead, capture their email addresses, and develop a rich lead nurturing system to help move them through their buying cycle Develop rich content to support their persona and stage in the buying cycle Understand the different buying persona and what triggers them to make a purchase Look to see if you can’t help create the trigger event that moves them into the buying phase. Alternatively create messaging that helps them recognize when a trigger event has occurred. After this post had been up for a while, a reader kindly pointed out another valuable blog on the topic of triggers by Stanford professor, BJ Fogg. Fogg’s behavioral model is a great framework for analyzing what it takes to get users to take action. Click here to read more.

Thanks

Thanks to Andre Pino, VP of Marketing at CloudBees, and previously an analyst on Marketing Automation software at Forrester for his help reviewing this document.

forentrepreneurs.com - Do you know your Customer? Buying Cycle & Triggers - For Entrepreneurs

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