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?
