Buyer experience and customer experience aren’t the same. There’s a lot of overlap, but buyer experience comes down to the answer to this question: How does the buyer want to buy?
To get the answer to this question, we interviewed Josh O’Brien, Cofounder at RevShoppe, about best practices for creating a consistent buyer experience across the funnel.
We I discuss how buyer experience relates to channel, brand, and persona, how to create a sensitive and personalized buyer experience, the importance of the psychological profile, and technologies that contribute to best buyer experience practice.
Buyer Experience vs. Customer Experience
Too often, buyer experience and customer experience tend to be synonymous. People use the terms interchangeably, when in reality they’re typically impacting different stages of the sales funnel.
So what is the difference?
The buyer’s journey is all about their buying experience. How do you meet the buyer where they are? How do you engage with them on the channels THEY want? And most importantly, how do they want to interact with your brand?
How do we meet the buyer where they are? How do we engage with them on the channels that they want? And more importantly, how do they want to interact with your brand?
Josh O’Brien – Cofounder at RevShoppe
It can be as simple as forms on your site that ask the buyer how they want to be communicated with. A call? A text? An email? Those little things are so often overlooked and it makes a huge difference.
Whereas customer service is more about the post sales experience. You’ve already booked the revenue, now how do you take care of that customer who has already entrusted you with their purchase.
Ensuring a Great Buyer Experience
Once you understand the difference between buyer and customer experience, the question becomes, “How do I ensure that my company is delivering the experience the buyer actually wants?”
First of all, on the marketing side of the conversation, ask your customers how they want to be engaged with.
So many companies are so bad at this, assuming that every person wants endless phone calls, or loads of emails. It may seem simple, but talk to your customers about their preferences BEFORE you start on the sales journey.
In the beginning, you have to start small and think about the psychology of the demographic.
Josh O’Brien – Cofounder at RevShoppe
Secondly, you want to ask yourself how to incorporate that preference into a cadence or into a sequence. Then you have to take those cadences, and test them. Then you take that data and analyze it, and figure out what works.
But it all starts with just talking to your buyer.
Best Practices
How do you ensure that all of the departments align to provide that best in class buyer experience in any stage of the funnel?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘This is the process, and we need to fit our reps into this box, and make something that’s replicable and scalable.
Josh O’Brien – Cofounder at RevShoppe
It really is all about communication and breaking down the silos in the organization. Bringing everybody into the conversation and asking…
- What do they care about?
- How are they going to be comped?
- How do you make their lives easier?
Then you build the venn diagram of what it’s going to take to get everyone aligned. There will be outliers and you can deal with those later, but you come up with the core priority items that everybody cares about and move from there.
At the end of the day, knowing the difference between buyer and customer experience will ensure that you can deliver a best in class experience to both demographics, and isn’t that what we all want?
Get in touch with Josh on LinkedIn or at RevShoppe.
To hear this interview and many more like it, subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.
