Today’s buyers hold all of the power when making a purchasing decision. That is where research comes into play. Whether you’re a newbie or experienced with market research, this guide will give you a blueprint for conducting a thorough buyer’s journey study and what is influencing their decisions.

Step 1: Define Your Personas

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers

  • They help you visualize your audience, streamline your communications, and inform your strategy
  • Use these templates to help you organize your audience segments, collect the right information, and select the right format

Buying Environment (5 Minutes)

Before getting into the details around a specific purchase, it will be helpful to understand their role and team better

Consideration (10 Minutes)

Probe into how and where the buyer researched potential solutions

  • Ask: What was the first thing you did to research potential solutions? How helpful was this source? Where did you go to find more information?
  • Tell me about your experiences with the sales people from each vendor

Lead the Conversations

Give participants space to think

  • Be comfortable with moments of silence
  • Don’t accept short answers
  • Keep things on track
  • Intervene if someone goes off-track
  • You can avoid looking rude by saying, “That’s really interesting, but I’d like to shift gears”

How to Recruit the Best Participants

Pull a list of customers who made a recent purchase

  • Call for participants on social media
  • Leverage your own network
  • Choose an incentive
  • On a tight budget? You can reward participants for free by giving them exclusive access to content.

Summarize Your Findings

Look for common themes that will help you tell a story and create a list of action items

  • Use presentation software to make a report
  • Background: What you conducted
  • Participants: Break groups down by persona and customer/prospect
  • Awareness: Describe the common triggers that lead someone to enter an evaluation
  • Consideration: The main themes you uncovered
  • Decision: Paint the picture of how a decision is really made
  • Action Plan: A list of priorities, a timeline, and the impact it will have on your business

Prepare a Discussion Guide

Create a discussion guide to make sure you cover all of the top-of-mind questions and use your time wisely

  • In an outline format, with time allotment and open-ended questions allotted for each section
  • Avoid one-word answers
  • Introduce yourself and explain why you are doing the study

Awareness Stage (5 Minutes)

Understand how they first realized they had a problem that needed to be solved

  • Think back to when you first realized you needed a [product/service category, but not yours specifically]
  • How did you know something in this category could help you? How familiar were you with different options on the market?

Step 2: Recruit Buyers

Find a representative sample of your target customers to understand their buyer’s journey

How to Determine Who to Recruit

Shoot for 10 participants per persona

  • Select people that have recently interacted with you
  • Aim for a mix of participants
  • Recruit people who have purchased your product, folks that purchased a competitor’s product, and a few that decided not to purchase anything at all

Decision (10 Minutes)

Which of the sources you described above was the most influential in driving your decision?

  • What, if any, criteria did you establish to compare the alternatives?
  • What vendors made it to the short list and what were the pros/cons of each?
  • Who else was involved in the final decision? What factors ultimately influenced your final purchasing decision?

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