Are you misreading what matters most for your buyers?

Dave Heywood (00:00)
The gap between what we think drives growth

what buyers actually experience and value.

It’s a lot bigger than we think. And some brand new research has just proved it. This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

a lot of marketing reporting out there still fixates on the last action someone took before taking a leap forward and filling out a website form or getting in touch with the sales rep.

And we often use that as the anchor to tie that back to whether that was sales led or marketing led growth.

But Force twenty four have just published a pretty weighty study surveying two thousand odd buyers and five hundred marketers.

And the story it tells is really interesting.

Over half of buyers surveyed, fifty four point six percent if we were to split hairs, report that their final purchase decision was entirely driven by their own independent research.

And only two point two percent say that brand messaging was a primary influence at that point of decision.

No, I wanna take that two point two percent with a little pinch of salt. Because I think you and I have all come across people left, right and centre, who often spout that marketing doesn’t work on me, yet they drive a particular car, they dress in particular clothes, go on holiday to certain destinations, so conscious or unconscious marketing and brands

do have a much larger impact.

But taking that bit to one side.

what we can’t get away from here is that while teams build long, complicated nurture funnels and programs and

lead scoring and various other pieces.

Over 63% of buyers are essentially ghosts in the system. They might come back to your website, they might hunt around some pricing, they might read some reviews a few times without ever clicking an email, dropping an inquiry, signing up to an event, or leaving any large tangible digital fingerprints

For your CRM or marketing automation system to track. They’re doing all that real heavy lifting and thinking long before they ever put their virtual hand up.

And so if we’re minded to only react when someone makes themselves known in quite an overt manner, then we’re already in that game of catch-up.

So if we dig a little bit deeper into that gap, it really has some quite sizable financial implications as well. Because we optimize and build our budgets around what’s easy to measure and what we can point at that is making purchasing decisions happen, rather than what might be actually shaping that outcome much further upstream. So if we look at some more about channel mismatch data.

The report really exposes. 57% of marketers surveyed leaned really heavily on social media as one of the most, important research phase channels. But when the actual buyers were asked, only 12% really cared about social media when it came to doing some of that research and

In comparison.

So where are they actually going? Well, 47% still rely on search engines, and similar levels are still looking at and valuing independent review sites. So while the Doom Mongers on LinkedIn have been telling you those things are dead, I’m afraid they’re alive and well.

And I had to check this one twice. But 90% of marketers stated that they are really confident that their messaging matches and is appropriate and valuable to the exact stage a buyer is in. So if you think about somebody coming through, awareness consideration right the way down through to purchase that

Content is perfectly matched and applicable to each of those stages. But when buyers were surveyed, only seven percent agreed. And actually well over a third of buyers said that brand communications just missed the mark entirely.

What a waste.

We’re screaming book a call, get in touch, find out more at people who aren’t ready at all. And we get so fixated on speed of response and speed of reaching out that while that’s very important in certain scenarios, if we’re reaching a buyer faster with the wrong message, then we just get quicker at

Pushing them away.

And commercial leaders who were who were surveyed too. Yeah, very re

They stated that between six to ten percent, or in some more extreme cases, up to twenty five percent of their top line revenue was being bled out every single year, as a result of these mismatches and inefficiencies.

So we know there’s a massive gap, right? How do you start to get a sense of what’s really happening

without dropping tens of thousands of pounds on new software or data scientists and various other sort of overengineered approaches.

Well what we can sit alongside a lot of these digital analytics tools, which have their place but have some major flaws too, we can actually ask the people involved in the buying process, the buyers. So if there’s two really basic, quite unsexy.

But effective things you can do with that right now. They’ll cost you next to nothing,

But they will give you a real solid read on what actually matters.

First one

On any of your contact forms on your website, pop in an open text how did you hear about us? So instead of rigid drop downs where people just pull from the last thing that feels applicable.

We give the opportunity.

Someone to give us a little more colour. So instead of writing Google, they might well put on I’ve seen this and I’ve seen this play out as well. You might see, well, I watched a case study video a few months or so ago. I’ve been following your founder on LinkedIn. I saw a post about a recent event, had a look on your website, downloaded a report.

and felt like having a deeper conversation. You get a lot more richness and colour into some of those moments that exist outside digital tracking tools.

Second thing you can do is is a post-closed micro survey. So the moment you close a sales opportunity with clients, you’ve got somebody who is in a highly positive state. So make the most of that window before they start getting bogged down in onboarding and various other bits and pieces.

Have a real human being send a short, direct, highly personal email or text.

Don’t automate it through a generic system, or at least don’t present it in a way that looks like just something automated has been spat out. But ask them three really simple but powerful questions. How did you first find us? So, what was that true initial moment? Number two, why did you ultimately pick us over the all the other options that you looked at? And so what

What was the real competitive advantage? What stuck out for them and in their minds? and the third question you can ask is what did you look at along the way that actually helped you make that decision? So we get a real solid read on for any particular publications, pages, pieces of content.

anything out there which actually built and cemented that confidence that that resulted in you being the choice.

Because really we we know we know that the buying journey doesn’t start when somebody decides to fill out a form on your website, download a piece of content or get in touch. We know it starts much, much earlier, but actually even earlier than we think, completely out of view. Where

Where options are ruled out and decisions are already taking shape and taking hold, without you being anywhere near the conversation?

So if you do those couple of things, I guarantee you’ll have a much much more solid read on what actually matters to someone.

And you can fuel more growth as a result. I hope you found that useful. This is Scale and OX7 Partners podcast. I’m Dave Heywood and I’ll see you next time.