Is the Buyer Journey and/or Sales Cycle linear or non-linear? Both.

Is the Buyer Journey and/or Sales Cycle linear or non-linear? Both.

One of the great things about LinkedIn is being able to engage in conversation with really smart people. For example, I had the privilege of a brief exchange with a SVP of Marketing and Sales – who is right in the middle of this issue. And the subject of Buyer Journey “models” came up. This is a critical thing to think about.

If you look at Gartner’s “non-linear” buying journey map above, you can see why I say it’s both non-linear AND linear. In other words, the Buyer Behavior is non-linear. But the sales progression is linear.

It’s like a football game. The ball and the players are all over the field/pitch in a completely non-linear fashion while playing. But, the field is clearly segmented and marked with progression points to the goal.

So if your sales conversation is happening through content (which most all the current statistics show is what Buyers want) – you need smart content in those “Solution exploration”, “Requirements building”, and “Vendor selection” stages that aligns with the boxes these Buyers are ticking in each stage in order to justify the purchase. This stage-aligned content journey IS now the sales “pitch”.

So, back to the notion of “models”… it would be the same if those progression points were labeled “Prioritized”, “Qualified”, and “Pipeline” like in the Sirius Decisions Demand Waterfall model. In other words, the model itself doesn’t matter. The clear progression points, the content alignment, and its efficacy at educating, compelling, and convincing the Buyer to purchase…that’s what matters.

One other critical consideration when thinking about which models to use or not use is that most MA/CRM platforms are fairly rigid around the model(s) they are/were built upon. So even if executives want to use new models, or eschew them altogether, their downstream MarTech teams can’t do that as easily.

That said, everyone across Marketing and Sales CAN agree on the progression points of their company’s sales cycle – and how to align and build smart content to give their Buyers what they need at each. They just need a common language and plan.