#35: Buyers Don't Buy Like They Used To, Don't Sell Like You Used To

If you want to grow your business, embrace the digital evolution of the Buyer Journey + therefore, the evolution of your Demand Generation + Sales efforts.

Here are 6 actionable tips:

1. Map the buyer journey of buying committee / each individual member

   1. Keep it simple by picking your top 1-3 personas and think through the buyer segments, associated phases + their behavior / resources / platforms involved for each persona.

2. Get in their heads

   1. What are the top 3-5 critical problems they're looking to solve, needs vs wants, jobs-to-be-done framework etc and how can your Demand Generation content help them see around corners?

3. Break the complex sales cycle down into actionable, bite sized bits

   1. Sort out how you want them to feel, think and what you want them to do across each stage.

   2. Create a shared gameplan between a cross-functional pod of Demand Generation + Sales people responsible for executing each initiative to move them from one phase of the sales cycle to the next.

   3. Focus the cross-functional pods on pre-determined opportunities and associated revenue numbers to ensure alignment on next best actions + accountability from the top to bottom of the funnel.

   4. Seamless, no handoffs.

4. Lean on your friendlies for their super valuable perspective

   1. Validate your assumptions, stress test your Demand Generation content / prototypes etc with actual buyers in your network that are aligned with your top 1-3 personas to gather genuine feedback on do's, don'ts etc

5. Embrace full stack Demand Generation aka Demand Generation 2.0

   1. Align cross-functional pods of Demand Generation + Sales people by opportunities to generate increasingly customized Demand Generation Content / Experiences etc through EVERY buyer journey phase / segment from top to bottom of the funnel aka optimize for Sales Cycle Velocity (SCV) and you'll be good to go.

6. Think only as much as necessary but execute as much as possible

   1. This game is won by those that out execute their competition which includes a deep commitment to test / learn / iterate aka invest in your system, feedback loops + the application of performance data to inform your next best action.

January 29, 2021 (Tweet Link)