DESIGN OF BUYER-CENTRIC FUNNEL

What is a buyer-centric funnel?

A Funnel in business terms is the customer’s travel from a normal visitor to becoming a loyal customer of a particular product or a company. Buyer-centric means organizing the different business approaches from the customer’s perspective rather than building it from the seller’s perspective. A buyer-centric funnel is a marketing model built in a consumer-focused way that transforms normal visitors into constant customers.

Why do we need this?

In a normal world, the sales process is vendor-centric where buyer’s questions are not answered properly. So, to address the consumer’s problems, we bring in the buyer-centric approach which breaks the sales process into different stages such that it sustains existing customers.

The Buyer’s journey

The consumer funnel model build for the buyer’s journey should include the 3 stages:

1. Awareness – This is the phase where consumers explore and understand the problems they have. About 80% of the customers will be in this stage. So, the model should be built with more insights about the problems and with the possible solutions. The benefits of the proposed solutions should also be mentioned. No marketing of the product should be done.
2. Consideration – In this phase, the product’s information should be provided followed by a free trial or demo. Try to approach in an appealing way such as giving customer stories. This triggers the customers to buy the product which is the ultimate destination. An average of 15% of the customers reaches this stage.
3. Purchase – The customers would be ready to buy the product in this phase. Only 5% of the customers will reach this stage and be ready to purchase the product. The main aim of this phase lies not only in selling the product but also in retaining the customers.

Getting to know your Buyer Personae

This is one of the important parts where we identify the key characteristics and the target audience. Try to understand the customer’s business goals and thrive to provide those to the customers. Analyze their problems and pain points more deeply and find out what they are exactly looking for. Then try to give the needed solutions or the features that are the customer’s highest priority. Understand what they like and do not like about the company and address the questions and concerns they have. Next is to know what influences consumers to buy the product. Before buying a product, a customer looks for the pros and cons of the product. Good services make the chances of buying the product higher. Design and re-design the funnel until the customers reach the ‘Wow Moment’.

Wow Moment

The moment which drives the customer to explore more when he/she comes across something interesting and cool is the ‘Mini Wow Moment’. The moment which urges the customer to buy the product as soon as he/she is satisfied enough is the ‘Full Wow Moment’. 

Factors to be considered to reach the Wow Moment:

1. How many steps are involved before achieving a Wow Moment?
2. How much time is taken to reach a Wow Moment?
3. How much friction is involved before reaching a Wow Moment?

Keeping these factors to the minimum is important to design an effective Buyer-centric funnel.

Flip the Funnel

To change the traditional market paradigm, the Flip the Funnel approach is used which means investing fewer resources on the new customers and giving huge importance to retain the loyal customers. As a result, the existing customers share their experiences with their peers and act as a new client acquisition channel.

Flipping the funnel is done keeping the following factors into count:

• Look at the data – Frequently analyze the current marketing data. Three key metrics cited for this analysis are
  • Average acquisition cost
  • Average retention cost
  • The average cost of acquiring a new customer through a referral

• Adapt new customer service rules – If a customer is not addressed when he reaches the service department, then the company would lose the customer. In order to avoid this, companies should have 24/7 customer support and reach out to every customer in need.

• Identify influencers – Identify the influencers who make or break the business and treat them well.

• Reward customers – Recognize and reward customers on a timely basis and always have track of customer’s purchases.

• Convince management – The key considerations of this hardest part are
  • Metrics and benchmarks
  • Outside validation
  • Small steps, quick wins
  • Manage expectations                             

Don’t oversell, make the customers believe that the strategy is easy.