After 15+ years of studying the psychology of how people buy, I've learned that it is mostly irrational how we buy.
I won't go into great detail about my thesis or research about how people buy in this article. Still, I believe we must be on the same page about the processes a person goes through when making a purchasing decision, whether it is your service or product.
For this reason, we must get to know your customer and potential customer.
I'll dive into the strategies we use to achieve getting to know your customer in a moment.
First, let me provide you with the answers you will have to the following questions after reading this article:
What is customer research?
What is the difference between quantitative and qualitative customer research?
Why is it important to align the buyers' buying process with the sellers' selling process?
How does custmoer research help with selling and buying?
Will my business benefit from customer research?
What are the best customer research methods?
If at any point you have questions or need help, feel free to reach out to me at jeff@jeffpayne.net.
Let's get started.
What is customer research?
Customer research is the process of gathering data and information about current, past, or potential customers and correctly deciphering that data into valuable insights.
These insights will help shape products, services, marketing, branding and even influence the buying and selling stages.
What is the difference between quantitative and qualitative customer research?
- There are two types of customer research:
Quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative Customer Research
Quantitative customer research focuses on the data about your customers.
Here is an example of such data:
- Age
- Gender
- Household income
- Location
- Type of internet browser
- Marital status
- Website history on your site
- Clicks
Quantitative customer research also evaluates just about anything that can be measured, such as time on your website, call history, marketing channels, NPS scores, reviews, referral sources, content viewed, and much more.
Qualitative Customer Research
Qualitative customer research focuses less on hard concrete information and numbers and is more on subjective things. It focuses on things that are observed --- but not measured.
The aim here with this type of research is to discover the beliefs, attitudes, and lifestyle choices of your customers. The objective here is to learn about customer motivations, influences, experiences, fears, regrets, insecurities, inhibitions, and anything that could influence them when interacting with or buying from your company.
This type of research is like being a psychiatrist. You are learning to ask the right questions to discover or understand why something is (or isn't) happening.
While both quantitative and qualitative research have their unique role in customer research, they are best and most useful when used together because they will provide you with a more transparent, clear, and balanced perspective of your customer.
Why is it important to align the buyer's buying process with the seller's selling process?
Today buyers are leveraging new information sources rendering the salesperson to a secondary source or even a non-presence --- particularly in the early sales process.
As the professional salesperson fades from view, so too does her ability to understand the buyer. Because of her absence, she cannot read the room by carefully watching the buyer's body language and is therefore unable to effectively guide the sales process.
Without these critical insights of the buyer and responsive strategies, the salesperson is blind to the participants' true motivations and agendas--and significantly at a disadvantage in shaping and influencing the purchase process.
We all know in sales, timing is everything. It is far more challenging today to align a prospect's buying process with the company's selling process. Today they are no longer synonymous. The buyer is the one who is in control --- not the seller.
This carries significant implications from lead generation to lead qualification.
When a prospective customer appears on your website, perhaps to view a video or download a resource, they are more than likely "kicking the tires" and not ready to buy.
Marketing, though, sees a lead.
Sales dismisses the lead because the person is not ready to buy.
This creates a "leaky funnel."
Vast amounts of effort are devoted to generating leads. Still, if those leads aren't perfectly synchronized with the correct phase in the buying process, the sales team will waste marketings efforts by ignoring the lead.
It's not that the lead is bad --- it's just an early lead.
Focusing on passing leads to sales in an active buying stage, rather than tire kickers, the number of leads qualified by sales will increase even as raw numbers of leads passed decreases.
When salespeople attempt to close deals with prospects that are early in their buying process, they create a leaky or faulty funnel. The prospects are neither ready to buy, and trust erodes.
Buyer Process
Awareness > Discovery > Validation
- Gather information/self-educate
- See Opportunity
- Problem is defined
- Options are evaluated
- Select the best option
- Negotiate and purchase
Seller Process
- Target prospects
- Qualify prospects
- Explain solutions
- Submit proposal
- Close
- Fulfill
Marketers who understand, guide, and facilitate the buying process can have a real and measurable impact on sales and revenue by ensuring that the message for each potential buyer maps to their interests and stage in the buying process.
How does customer research help with selling and buying?
When you understand your buyer, you can use your customer research for a competitive advantage. This is achieved by utilizing your research to align your selling process to your buyer's buying process. When this is perfectly aligned, magic happens.
Here's an example:
This helps you evaluate each step in the customer journey and enables you to answer these questions:
- Why did some people buy versus others who did not?
- How far down the page did the customer scroll?
- Where are the dropoff points?
What are the best customer research methods?
Customer research can be as simple as asking questions, whether by email or a form on a website. It can also be as involved as using focus groups or hand-selected people.
Instead of reviewing every single methodology, I will focus on methods our team uses that yield the most valuable insights.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is simple and has a lot of information --- not to mention it is free.
It is not a customer research tool in a traditional sense, but it does provide several ways to study the people who interact with your site.
Google Analytics is a tool I used every day, and it helps me understand the following data points:
- Traffic
I can learn where site traffic is coming from, whether organic, paid, social media, or referral traffic. - Top Devices
I can learn the devices my traffic is coming from, whether it is desktop, mobile, or tablet. This could be especially useful in making sure your user experience is optimized for your audience type. - Top Pages
Google Analytics will identify the top pages and the amount of traffic coming to those pages and rank them in order of traffic. - New Users
- Average Session Duration
- Pages / Session
