At align.me, we love a good statistic, and our Referrer’s Lunch on the changing face of marketing featured four of them. They were:
In 2018, a customer had completed 60% of the Buyer’s
Journey before they engaged with a sales force. In other words, customers wanted to do the work of researching and finding a suitable seller by themselves. This is a massive shift in how things have traditionally been done.
In only four years to 2022, this number had increased to 80%. Why? It’s hard to go past the ubiquity of the internet and how it’s allowed customers to shape their buying journey by doing their own research. Simply put, they can become an expert australia whatsapp number data in the field without speaking to a salesperson.
95% of your target market is not in-market at any given time. This means a paltry 5% of your target market is actively looking for a solution. But despite this, much of the effort of demand generation is focused on this small piece of the market. A quick caveat on the numbers: they will differ for every business. For example, align.me’s split is probably more like 99/1. But the core point – that most of your target market is not in-market at any given time – holds true.
It’s the last statistic that might be the the evolution of the traditional b2b marketing (and sales) playbook most surprising: 96% of B2B businesses expected the majority of the benefits of their ads to be enjoyed within two weeks. Talk about impatience!
Connecting these figures to the Buyer’s Journey
If you’ve spent any time in the B2B space, you’ll probably yeezy 350 boost v2s be familiar with the Buyer’s Journey. A term that Hugh coined and ratified in his book The Leaky Funnel, it’s the unassailable idea that there’s a journey every buyer goes through before making a purchase.
For a buyer to choose your product or service, they need to know what you’re offering and prefer it over the competition.
Before that, there’s the recognition of a need. The buyer understands that they require the solution that you offer.
And before that, there’s a why: why does the buyer need the product or service? What problem does the buyer have for which they need a solution?
Before that, they’re interested, but they don’t know there’s a problem that needs to be solved.
Before that, they don’t know what you do, nor do they particularly care. And unfortunately – particularly if you’re too focused on demand generation – this is where 95% of your focus is at any given time. To use Hugh’s colloquial – but entirely accurate – term, they simply don’t give a rat’s about your business.
So, how do we get these people to become aware of your brand? It’s a difficult proposition. After all, if they’re unaware they have a problem, how can you be expected to market a solution to them? The way.
to solve that is something called the corkscrew.
The corkscrew method
The corkscrew is all about how to approach branding and positioning.