Buyer journey frameworks: The key to focusing your GTM strategy

This article is based on a presentation given by Tony Yang at #GTM23. Catch up on this presentation, and others, with GTM OnDemand. For more exclusive content, visit your GTM Blueprint dashboard.

When it comes to go-to-market strategies, there's a lot of talk about getting to grips with the buyer journey. 

But why is the buyer journey important? 

Well, let me give you a couple of scenarios.

Scenario number one: An account executive (AE) does a product demo with a prospect. She thinks it’s going great. She walks through all the key features, and the demo lasts a full hour, but at the end, the prospect says, “Looks good. Why don't you reach back out in six to nine months and we'll reconnect then.”

Scenario number two: A sales development rep (SDR) sends out hundreds of messages like this: “Hi, I'm John Smith from ABC Company. We work with top brands to do XYZ. What does your schedule look like next week for a quick chat?” Unsurprisingly, most of the time, there's no response. In fact, studies show the average response rate is only about 8.5% for these cold outreach messages.

Scenario number three: I don't want to just pick on salespeople here, so let me give you an example from marketing. Here’s something you might have heard from your CMO: “Why are our sales reps rejecting or, worse, not even following up on the leads that I’m passing over to them? I mean, these were hot leads from target accounts who downloaded our eBook!” 

Sound familiar?

Every single one of these frustrating and all-too-common scenarios comes from a lack of understanding of the buyer journey – specifically, a failure to understand buyers’ decision-making process as they evaluate solutions.

The sales funnel is NOT the same as the buyer journey

Before we dive any deeper, let me clear up one common misconception. The sales and marketing funnel is not the same as the buyer journey. I know we're aware of that difference logically, but in practice, we still execute go-to-market strategies as if they're one and the same.

Essentially, the funnel is an internal concept for companies to track growth metrics using indicators like marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). It also helps us establish workflows between various go-to-market teams. The issue is that the funnel is very company-centric. 

On the other hand, the buyer journey looks at the decision-making process prospects go through before purchasing. This framework needs to be buyer-centric. 

Mapping out the buyer's journey creates a framework to align your go-to-market messaging. There's been a lot of discussion around crafting the right messaging for buyers at each stage. An effective buyer journey map serves as a messaging map – getting all go-to-market teams on the same page about communicating the appropriate messages to the right personas at the right times.

The buyer journey decision framework

Now we’re clear on why it’s essential to understand the buyer journey and decision-making process, let’s walk through the SiriusDecisions framework. In my view, this is the best of all the buyer journey decision frameworks out there because (unlike many others) it’s clear, prescriptive, and customer-centric.

Here are the key steps involved in this framework:

Step one: Loosen the status quo

Your goal here is to help your target audience recognize what’s wrong with their current situation, whether that's related to pain points, unmet needs, or challenges they face. You want to illustrate the contrast between the outdated "status quo" and show them the new world they could be a part of.

Step two: Commit to change

Once prospects are convinced their status quo needs to change, it’s time for you to instill a sense of urgency so they act now rather than putting decisions off.

Step three: Explore potential solutions

After getting bought into change, buyers enter the research and exploration phase to understand their options. At this stage, it’s vital for you to highlight how your solution can meet the customer’s needs or solve the problem they’re facing

Step four: Commit to a solution

Here is where your unique differentiation comes into play – demonstrating why your solution better meets the prospect's unique needs compared to the alternatives your prospect is evaluating.

Step five: Justifying the decision 

At this point, your prospect’s mind is made up – now they just need to make sure their stakeholders are on board, too. This is your moment to swoop in with a compelling business case based on your persona’s decision criteria.

Step six: Making the selection

Great news! The deal is in the bag. All that’s left is for you to confirm to your new customer that they made the right choice. You can do this through case studies and testimonials from their peers.  

Why it’s essential to align your funnel with the buyer journey

Earlier, I outlined how the buyer journey differs from the sales and marketing funnel. As go-to-market leaders, our goal should be to align those two frameworks as tightly as possible. A clear symptom of misalignment is low conversion rates across funnel stages.

Let’s refer back to those previous examples. When the AE finishes the demo, and the prospect says, "Come back to me in six to nine months," that deal likely won't progress beyond the initial funnel stage. 

Why? 

Because the AE thought the prospect was already at step three of the decision-making process – exploring possible solutions. That means they skipped step one and didn’t do any foundational work to convince them that change was urgently needed.

The same issue applies to the scenarios with the SDR and the CMO. You can’t expect prospects to seriously consider solutions if you haven’t first sold them on why change is necessary and convinced them to prioritize addressing this issue.

The first buyer journey stages should focus on selling the “why” – why change, why act now. However, we often jump right into product capabilities (the “what”) and implementation details (the “how”) before establishing an emotional case for change. Start with why there is a burning need for your platform, then move into what you offer and how you uniquely deliver value.

Demand creation vs. demand capture

Going back to the SDR example, blasting out 1,000 cold emails and getting 85 people to respond sounds decent on the surface. But the reality is those 85 people were likely already convinced change was needed, so the SDR just got lucky targeting those buyers who were actively in-market. Meanwhile, they’ve wasted their time and energy on the 915 people who were never going to convert. 

So, how can you do better? Well, you have to put on your demand creation hat. Assume most cold outreach targets aren't yet in the market for a solution like yours and sell prospects on why there’s a need for change. 

Only once a prospect reaches the “exploring possible solutions” stage do you need to enter demand capture mode. They’re already convinced of the “why” – now it’s time to convince them of the “what”: your product. Later on in the buyer journey, you can dive into the “how.”

However, it’s important to keep in mind that demand creation spans the entire buyer journey, not just the early stages. To drive continual success you need to perpetually generate interest and create demand – including with your current customers.

The buyer journey in action

Let me walk through an example of how you could apply this buyer journey framework, matching each stage to the right kind of messaging. 

This comes from some work I did with a robotic process automation company – let’s call the company ACME. One of their target personas is HR leaders responsible for onboarding new hires. 

Here's how I mapped out the journey to craft compelling value statements – the key ideas we wanted prospects to understand – at each step:

As you set about crafting the ideas that you want to implant into buyers’ minds throughout their journey, remember that you might need multiple value statements for each persona at each stage. These persona-specific value statements then become the foundation for all other GTM programs, including:

• SDR messaging sequences
• Lead and account scoring 
• Customer marketing 
• Content marketing 
• Ads
• Social media campaigns
• Nurture programs

Rather than generic product-forward messaging, focusing on the buyer journey allows much more personalization to where prospects are in their decision-making process.

SDR sequences by buyer journey stage

So you can see what this looks like in practice, let's check out a couple of cold outreach messages. This first one is likely similar to the emails your SDRs are sending today:

This message might get a few responses, but most recipients will likely ignore it. And let’s not forget: if you send this to 100 contacts, while you might get 8 positive responses, you’re creating a negative brand impression with the other 92. No one wants their inbox filling up with irrelevant sales pitches. Nobody cares what you’re selling until they believe you understand their needs.

So, instead, let’s focus on the “why.” Let’s educate them about the challenges that they should be solving. Here’s how you could do that: 

In this example, rather than immediately trying to get the prospect to sign up for a demo, it focuses first on highlighting and addressing underlying business issues. The call-to-action is for a virtual roundtable with others facing similar challenges – with a generous offer of lunch to incentivize participation.

Of course, one touch point alone won't guide prospects through the full journey. However, by speaking to their current concerns with the status quo, you significantly increase engagement, rather than just sending emails into a black hole. Over time, continued relevant messaging can steer buyers through the journey to selecting your product.

Tailoring your content strategy to the buyer journey

A similar concept applies to content strategies and nurture programs. Recently, I helped a company audit its entire content library across blog posts, eBooks, webinars, and more. We tagged each asset based on which buyer personas and stages it addressed.

This allowed us to create tailored nurture tracks specific to where our target customers were in their journeys, leading them from early education on industry trends and peer benchmarks all the way through to product capability overviews and customer case studies later on.

Just like with the cold outreach messages we saw a moment ago, the buyer journey provides a blueprint for more strategic messaging rather than one-size-fits-all content spray-and-pray. Plus, it helped us fill the gaps in our content strategy, ensuring that there was at least one piece of content for each persona at each stage of the buyer journey. 

Aligning lead scoring to the buyer journey

Before we wrap up, let me give you one final example of how you can use the buyer journey to drive more targeted go-to-market activities. This one’s all about aligning lead scoring to the buyer journey stages. 

Many marketing automation platforms like Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo, and Eloqua give you the capability to implement lead scoring. Maybe your team already does this.

I've always advocated splitting up the scoring into two components:

1. Fit score
2. Engagement score

The fit score confirms a lead’s alignment to your ICPs (ideal customer profiles) and buyer personas based on attributes like their title, industry, and company size. This ensures that you’re engaging with the right people at the right companies. 

Meanwhile, the engagement score is driven by content interactions mapped to specific buyer journey stages. So, as prospects consume content that aligns with particular stages, their engagement score increases accordingly.

Early in my career, I took the wrong approach by arbitrarily assigning point values to how leads engaged with content – for example, giving ten points for attending a webinar, five points for downloading a whitepaper, minus two points for visiting careers pages – why? What did any of those values represent?

Instead, you want to tie engagement to the buyer journey. As we discussed a second ago, you’ll need to start by identifying all your content pieces and mapping them to the buyer journey stages they support.

Then, as prospects consume assets mapped to a certain stage, they accumulate an engagement score for completing that phase of the journey. So, downloading three pieces of stage one content might add 30 points to a “loosening the status quo” score. Registering for a webinar that supports stage three of the buyer journey might add ten points to their “Exploring potential solutions” score, and so on.

This way, you can gauge where customers are in their decision-making process. Having a higher score for early-stage content consumption indicates they’re still learning about current problems with the status quo. High middle-stage scores mean they’re researching options. Late-stage scores show they’re ready to buy.

All this is going to tie into how you define an MQL. I like to set the MQL threshold to when I believe prospects have embraced the “why” – they’re not content with the status quo, and they recognize that they need a solution. 

Key takeaways

We’ve covered a lot today! Let’s recap the key takeaways:

• The buyer journey is not the same as your funnel.
• To make the buyer journey decision framework work for you, create value statements that guide each of your customer personas through each stage of the buyer journey.
• Do a content audit to align your content assets to a particular persona and buyer journey stage.
• Use the value statements you create to guide your messaging across all of your go-to-market channels.

Your ultimate goal is to make sure that your approach matches the way your potential customers think and make decisions. Therein lies the power of the buyer journey decision framework - it helps you create a solid messaging and content plan that can lead your customers from questioning the status quo to feeling confident in making a purchase decision and beyond.