Every B2B company has a selling process. It may be as simple as a 10-step guide to booking the sale or as sophisticated as the structure of SFA (Sales Force Automation) software can accommodate – prospecting, lead generation, lead qualification, sales opportunity identification, vision building, short listing, negotiation, closing: sale won or lost, etc. Tremendous resources are spent to enhance the efficiency of selling processes in order to be more effective. (Make more sales!) Yet the reason a seller sells is to get buyers to buy. Selling is only a means to an end: Buying. You won’t be able to sell effectively unless you know how your customers buy. The better you understand how they buy, the better your chances of closing deals and drawing repeat purchases. The question is this: “Is your selling process synchronized with your customers’ buying process?”

Ask any of your B2B customers to review your current selling process and they will tell you there are huge differences between how you sell and how they buy. For example, well before you start prospecting and qualifying leads, your B2B prospects may have already searched and qualified your company or solution through Google search, referrals or any form of social media 2.0. Your company may be short listed to or expelled from a customer’s ‘buying pipeline’ long before you are aware and able to influence them. That is, if you define your selling process with the conventional approach. With the availability of multiple channels, customers may ‘touch’ you via those touch-points that are not under the full jurisdiction of your sales function and spreading across the pre-, at-, and post-purchase stages. For instance, an unsatisfactory experience at ‘solution deployment’ or ‘help desk and service support’ would damage not only the current sales transaction but also repeat purchases.

Let’s take the B2B purchase experience model for an IT solution as an example. (See Figure 1) This was derived from our survey conducted with 757 IT managers and buyers. We mapped the 25 highly relevant touch-points and attributes, denoted as T1, T2, T3, … to T25. The attributes are experience-centric and staged in a natural time sequence running across the entire B2B purchase experience process from pre-, at- to post-purchase stages. From the survey data, we derived the Experience Ratings for each touch-point and formed an Emotion Curve. The Emotion Curve shown in Figure 1 represents an example of how IT managers and buyers perceive the end-to-end purchase experience delivered by IBM.

For each touch-point / attribute, B2B customers can interact with your company through different channels. For instance, for touch-point T1 ‘Easy to search for solution information’, customers might find information via your marketing channels, such as trade show / exhibition, advertising, promotion, PR, and referral; or via online channels, such as search engines, company websites, blogs, and email; or via telephone channels, such as enquiry hotline or call centre; or even via face-to-face channels, such as meeting with your sales force.

Now you are able to visualize how to deliver and manage an integrated and consistent Total Customer Experience (TCE) for your B2B customers across the matrix of multiple touch-points and channels. It doesn’t mean all barriers are broken and the resistance of “silo” or individual department thinking will disappear. What you get here is an option: an alternative for you to listen to the Voice of Customers (VOC) systematically, put the experience data to practical use, and form a quantifiable management system; an alternative for you to direct the change program of your company with an outside-in approach, through experience data, in order to migrate from product-centric to customer-centric; and an alternative for you to create a genuine and effective TCE, from which both you and your customers can benefit.

Not all customers are equally important to your company. According to our research, 20% of the top B2C customers generate 60-65% of revenues; 20% of the top B2B customers generate 80-85% of revenues. Treating all your customers equally means you are not optimizing your resource allocation among customers. The same rule applies to touch-points. Not all touch-points are equally important to your company and to your customers. Some touch-points are more important in driving customer satisfaction; some are more important in reflecting your brand values; and some are more important in driving repeat purchases. Some may not be important at all.

By building a Multiple Touch-points and Channels Customer Experience Process Model, you can derive the importance levels of each touch-point to customer satisfaction (Customer Importance Weighting), to brand differentiation (Branded Importance Weighting) and to purchasing (Purchase Importance Weighting).

To put it into strategic perspective, you can manage your touch-points with target objectives. For example, if IBM wants to improve NPS (Net Promoter Scores), IBM should focus resources on those touch-points represented by a combination of yellow and blue dots. Why? Because those touch-points (i.e. T12 ‘Perceived quality of the solution’, T15 “Service attitude”, T19 ‘Ease in deploying the solution’ and T23 ‘Help desk and service support’) are highly important in creating brand differentiation and in driving positive emotions and memories. We have conducted a series of global customer experience surveys covering a wide range of industries and the survey findings prove that only when customers experience both high levels of satisfaction and brand differentiation, can the NPS scores be maximized. (Based on our global customer experience surveys with Starbucks, Louis Vuitton, and the Cosmetics, Automotive and Financial Services industries, covering a total of 135 customer segments with over 11,000 respondents, the highest Net Promoter Scores (NPS), ranging from +81% to +97%, were achieved only when a branded experience was delivered. That is, customers experience both high levels of satisfaction and brand differentiation. NPS dropped significantly when customers experienced high levels of satisfaction only)

The beauty of the purchase experience process model is this: if you aren’t IBM, these same importance levels for satisfaction, differentiation and sales mean nothing to you. In other words, competitors will find it more difficult to copy your unique branded experience than to copy the product, price, service and related attributes because different companies have different brand values, which leads to a different mix for ideal performance of touch-points and channels. Similar to most B2B companies, quality and price can be replicated easily in your competitive business. To stay ahead, you have to differentiate – and a branded experience model is definitely one of the key differentiators, especially in a recession.

A Sample of a B2B Purchase Experience Process

About the Author
Sampson Lee, the founder of G-CEM, has invented three U.S. patent-pending customer experience management methods. Lee’s three methods combine the art and science of Customer Experience Management (CEM) in experience innovation and assessment. They work synergistically to discover the three critical moments during an experience process: moments-of-truth at experience (for service), moments-of-differentiation (for brand) and moments-of-buying (for sales), to design the most effective experience for target customers. Lee and his International Partner team deliver the Global CEM Certification Program in Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Singapore. Company website: www.g-cem.org