How to influence the customer buying journey

Jackie Zach
April 11, 2024

The first step in the buying journey is the customer identifies a problem and what do they want. Listen as we discuss the customer buying journey and how you can help to influence it.

Want to learn more about how to influence the customer buying journey in your business? Take advantage of a complimentary business strategy session to discover the opportunities in your business! https://actioncoachwi.com/podcast-ask-a-question-complimentary-session/

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Full Transcript:

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Welcome to the tough love for business podcast. I’m your host Jackie Zack. I’m here with my co-host Mike McKay and our topic today is the customer buying journey.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So what happens then right? And how can you help influence it?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Yes, where do they start? What is the problem?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Alright. What’s the problem that you saw we talked about?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Our is the problem that we solve is a problem. Right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So, you know business owners find themselves stuck someplace to too much work. I’m too busy, whatever. And they want that problem to go away. Right? And so, you know if they want to do it in a fast and efficient way they often call us and we help them get on the shortcut.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So what what do you sell right and what’s the problem that your customers are trying to solve?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Hey, at end of the day. That’s all we want. Right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “We have a problem. We want to solve it right and and how do you make you position yourself to be there when we when people You to say help them solve that particular problem.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “That’s your specialty. Right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Right. So the first step as we talked about last time is always the customer says to themselves.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “I need to solve this or I have a problem or I’d like this to work better or something like that. Whatever right? I’d like it to be more efficient. Whatever it is your customers start out saying to themselves.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “What is that? Do you know what it is?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Right right and it’s not even usually a need right? So I need my taxes done is the flip side of a coin that I don’t want to get thrown in jail for avoiding income from right? Right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “And so even though lots of people say, what’s the market need? I think you can go faster and make bigger impact if you ask what is market want. Right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So like I said, People don’t do taxes because they want because they need to do taxes. They do it because they want to avoid the negative impact of not doing taxes. Right? So say that you’re remodeler and well the guy that our house is retired. Now, it’s guy named Tom Haver. We had three people come and do proposals on having our kitchen done when we had it done like 10 years ago now and they all came and said what they wanted to do. And it was all tied to exactly where we were at that stage or kids were still young and Tom came in and said this is probably going to you know be for 10 years. So how do you want to manage your kids having girlfriends and boyfriends coming over for dinner? Like you’re in the teenage years our kids were all our oldest one was probably 14 or 15 at the time. So he’s like what happens when they’re all teenagers and they have their friends over and I’m just like like no matter what the price is. This is the guy my wife’s going to pick. Immediately, she’s like, oh, yeah, you’re the one thinking about how our family is going to grow. And as soon as he said that it discovered and we wouldn’t we wouldn’t have said that was something that we wanted right until he asked that question, right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So if you’re remodeling a house You want a different outcome.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “You want to feel better about yourself. You want your house to work better for you, right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “But because at the end of the day we’re people all we need is a roof over our head and a furnace right air conditioning in the summer right some way to eat.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So everything else about houses is because of something that we want it to be you.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “I mean you just remodeled your house, right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “I did. Uhuh.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So why did you do it?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “I well I want I wanted to do first first of all to update it.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “But secondly I moved my Stove from one end where my back was to the living room and I moved it so I could look out.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So when I had company I wasn’t I was part of the they could be part of what was happening and I could be part of the conversation instead of having my back to everything.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So I just moved my hat. I move my stole that was one one thing and made a huge difference.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Yep, but you didn’t need to I didn’t want to absolutely I wanted to hmm.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Yeah, and I think that sometimes we.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “At We Buy in the by the sale of you shouldn’t want this and you don’t need to that’s for other people write all these non direct ways of saying well, you shouldn’t want that that’s not for you.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “And so whatever your customer is going through on your customer Journey. If you can figure out the emotions that you can tap into right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Why do you want to face your audience or face your guests when you’re cooking right because the emotion is.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “I want to be connected to my friends while they’re over here and I’m making him dinner. Right right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “I’m creating sustenance and life and enjoyment and blah blah blah and I want to be engaged in that so whatever your customers looking for, right if it’s a CPA they want to be protected, right they wanted and they want someone to do something that they think you know minimizes their tax for a year, but they have they don’t want to answer stupid questions.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Questions from their CPAs like we used to they don’t want to have to go, you know, listen to their CPAs say their bookkeeping is a mass and it’s going to cost them five grand to fix it. They want it done, right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So whatever industry you’re in there is a set of wants that your customer has.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Hey, if you’re a restaurant they want to feel good and whatever their design choice is right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “If you have a rustic, we cook steak and potatoes. You’re never going to get a fish lover to come there.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Don’t even try to Market to them. Right Mark it to the people that want what you’re selling, but if you can get the difference between need and want.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “I mean most I would say most still and 2024 business owners say yeah, but my customers need this. No, they don’t right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “There’s so much available in the world right now. There’s not very much shit that people need right, right, they want efficiency. They don’t necessarily need efficiency. They want efficiency and only in want some areas. Right? Right.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Some people want a big-ass house. Because it feeds an ego neither. They have a million kids or whatever. Right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Some people don’t some people want a house. That’s the perfect size for them so that it takes less effort to clean it and they want to clean it themselves and blah blah blah or they want to travel instead of what their money and their house right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “There’s never a case. Every human being around you is gonna want what you saw anyway,”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Right. So marketing. I was talk to guy off the ledge the other day.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “They were going to try to do this 10,000 house marketing thing.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Like what in God’s name are you doing?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Well, the marketing guy says you get a point zero one percent response rate to this postcard that was dollar twenty per house twelve thousand dollars.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “And you know, I want to get more clients. I’m like, well what’s 10,000 times point zero one and it’s not that big of a number.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “That’s right 00:01 because it’s a tenth of a percent.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So for those 10,000 random shit card sent dog. The most likely outcome is one job.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Well, their customer acquisition cost is two thousand dollars on their normal marketing program.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “This would have been 12. Why would you do that right versus.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Has you know, there another person who is really good at historic remodeling in Downtown Madison where it’s hard to get a building permit.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “You only markets the 200 houses a year because you only wants to do three jobs crisis total Craftsmen and he knows that all he has to do is send a letter but because of how much work he’s done.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “There is been working down there for 20 years.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Everybody knows his company’s name and all the people that work with them say, you know, he’s the guy that.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Can get that permits through the city he knows how to do what he’s doing get it approved right and that and other people that didn’t use him are like ah,”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “It was a 12 month away in a disaster because the guy couldn’t pull permits correctly.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So there’s a thing called the minimum viable audience, which is how many people do you need to talk to you to sell as much stuff as you want to sell and if you get that concept, then you can mark it to people who only want to get coached by a blond haired woman named Jackie looks like very good find the”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “You know 300 people that that’s all that’s who they wanted to work with and your audience for the rest of your career could be built by 300 people right? Alright,”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Then instead of you know, if that guy’s marketing budget was really twelve thousand dollars instead of throwing it against the wall and hoping that a dollar twenty per person by that.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “I mean, they only do three jobs a month. So 36 so find the 500 people.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Hey that really give a shit about what they do and spend 50 bucks. A piece on them.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Thanks who have the want they want what they do right right want some so part, you know, the first step in the customer journey is identifying what need versus want.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “And then understanding how do they go about making their decision? Yes, right making their decision along the way not only that it’s not only the customer the first time but what happens when now they bought from you once what’s their journey to buying from you a second and a third and a fourth time, right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So understanding that what the customer is going through and what the questions they have what problems they’re solving and their wants.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “We’ll make it a whole lot easier for you to all for all of you to find customers basically, right and you probably already know right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “You know what I mean? Like if you stop and think about what happened just before your last 10 customers bought from you.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “They probably told you what you’re solving for them. Right?”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Well, we got a couple of programs that were just watching that were one zqe in emotional intelligence Behavior change and Other is that emotional intelligence be like crazy.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “They want their investing in some of their leaders because they want a different outcome. And that different outcome is to take better care of the employees that those leaders are entrusted with right.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So they, you know, big companies like to spend they think the more you spend the more you get.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “So, you know, I argued for put them in management training to start with but they’re like, no we want coaching for them. Okay.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “But in big companies right now, it’s actually always been this case. It’s just they’ve all named it different things used to be Employee Engagement.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “And now it’s EQ emotional intelligence instead of IQ, but it’s the same thing. Are you a human being with emotions? Yes or no. Right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Yeah, then you have to manage your own and somebody else’s right and when you have that awareness then you can solve things a whole lot better than if you are unaware.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “And we get back to somebody coming to the end of your customer buying journey when you’ve helped them solve their problems right now.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “So you want to influence the problem they solve they want to solve.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “Right and in fact, if you can’t help them solve the problem. They want to solve. Don’t even try because they’re going to you know.”

Speaker 1 (Jackie Zack): “No, no no. Thanks anyway, but no thanks. I’m going to keep looking for somebody that understands what I want.”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “Right and some of that is this positioning that we’ve talked about right is what do you want to be known for? Right?”

Speaker 2 (Mike McKay): “And if you’re the person that is known for taking care of whatever.”