How I designed a beautiful BX - buyer experience
When developing a website or app putting the user’s experience as they travel through the tool is central to the design.
The user experience relates to how a user feels as they use your product (as opposed to User Interface which describes the way a user interacts with the product).
Not every buyer is a user of your product
In a B2B context many of the people that interact with your company, especially in a pre-sales situation, will not be users of your product at all:
The economic buyer(s)
The CFO
The General Counsel
The category manager in procurement
The CIO
The CISO
The Learning and Development Director
The Project Manager
The Service Desk Director
And the list goes on…
What is their experience as they go through their buying process?
How do they feel about their BX - their buying experience.
How I built my own buying experience for clients
As a consultant, I don’t have a ‘product’ with a UX - the buying experience is the only thing that I can focus on pre-sales and here’s how I look at it.
The Dark Funnel
The start of any customer’s buying journey happens outside my field of view in what is termed the dark funnel.
Buyers are learning and researching about the problems their business is facing in private Slack communities, peer to peer conversations, third party events and through trusted partners they already work with.
I don’t want to infiltrate these channels with my own messaging, but I do want to make it easy for others to mention my name in their own conversations there.
I do this with free ungated templates:
The Free OKR Workshop Cards template
And a low cost physical purchase
I create daily blog content that is useful for my target ICP - a Series A founder scaling their GTM team.
If I continue to add content that is well designed and actually useful for founders, then the word gets shared for me in these private networks.
A website and socials designed to teach
The next step on the buyer’s journey is for them to take a look at me directly, typically by visiting the website and one of my social feeds.
I want a visitor to come away having learned something that they didn’t know before.
A founder has a set of jobs to be done.
They want to build predictability and repeatability into their revenue engine and to avoid the common trap of sales leadership mis-hires.
I focus on designing a website and social content that speaks specifically to this individual at this phase of their journey.
I manage the website myself.
It might not win any design awards, but by managing it myself I am able to constantly refine each page’s messaging and add new sections and pages as I create content.
As the site expands I can see the number of pages viewed and the average visit time increasing as it becomes a valued educational destination for visitors.
Convert visitors to email subscribers
Having earned the trust of website and social visitors that I am someone they can learn from, I can then ask them to share their email address in return for more valuable content.
On the website I offer the top 10 revenue growth articles into their inbox, and a subscription to my weekly newsletter.
They then receive a warm welcome to the newsletter
Whether you like the shocking pink or not the feeling from the free templates, to the website, the newsletter is consistent and the BX is all about education, at no point yet have I told buyers what I do to help them.
Over the coming five weeks subscribers get an additional bump with some freebies off the site including the free templates and a discount code for the playing cards and my book How To Sell Tech.
And every Friday they get the weekly newsletter with an article focused on revenue growth for founders. Value packed.
A recent weekly newsletter
Proposals are designed around the buyer not the seller
If we now skip forward a few steps and propose the founder now has some regular dialogue with me and we are looking at how I might help them, I want the process to add value and to be a consistent experience.
During initial discussions I’ll have gathered a significant amount of information on the customer during my own research - but it is no good keeping that in my own head.
So I’ll design the proposal and supporting content around providing value to the customer up front.
Typically this will involve creating a digital collaboration room of some sort, like this one created in Journey:
I talk to my buyer as if I am in the room, already providing them with advice, and will explain some of the more detailed content that I might be providing as part of my proposal:
The advantage of the digital collaboration room is that it is multi-format including video, checklists, images and documents (some people prefer to watch rather than read), and you can talk through the screen to new members of the buying committee as they join the buying process.
The pink theme flows through and the client continues to get value out of every interaction - there is very little about me or my history - this is about their future and how I can help their business immediately.
DocuSign agreements with branded templates
Having reached verbal agreement you can easily think “its just a signature so we don’t need to spend too much energy thinking about this”,
But the process of signing off the proposal is a critical part of the BX.
I have received rental agreements for houses or reference checks for employees using third rate e-signature platforms and the experience reflects badly on the companyies that sent them.
The signing process should be one of validation that your buyer has made the right decision, not one of questioning themselves.
I use DocuSign because it represents the experience I want buyers to have with me - seamless, quick and trusted, allowing them to move onto the engagement itself.
Project assets designed with care
Every interaction with a customer through an engagement is an opportunity to reinforce the brand and the buyer experience.
Revenue Operations is about providing a consistent experience to buyers as they move from marketing, to sales and on to customer success and its essential that I deliver that.
I use Canva as a simple design tool, so where I create project assets for clients I’ll create them in Canva and then input into a slide deck or document as needed.
An example project asset
Where appropriate I’ll use my brand colours to provide that consistent experience throughout the delivery of a project which provides a connection for those in the client and the next time they see those colours in their own dark funnel.
Encourage testimonials at every step of the way
Referrals are a big source of new clients for any services business, and yet companies are typically bad at strategically asking for them.
To help that process I use a platform called Testimonials that makes it really easy for clients to submit a video or text testimonial in a couple of seconds.
Why not try it yourself? 😏
I request testimonials during the buying process (if I have provided some value early), when an engagement starts, during the engagement, after the engagement and add these to the Wall of Love on the website which helps new clients to learn from others further along in their process.
Once again the brand is consistent to link the buying experience from front to end with existing customers encouraged to share what they have experienced with others in their network.
Any time a testimonial is submitted is an ideal opportunity to ask for a referral into other connections facing similar scaling challenges.
Consider every touchpoint as you map your buyer’s experience
I have a lot more to do to continue to design a buyer experience that I am proud of but this should give you some ideas of where to focus first.
As you map out your own buyer’s experience travel the journey that they will take:
through their own dark funnel
into your own events and web content
into your social channels and resources
into your marketing automation platform and SDR team
into your sellers, your decks
your digital sales rooms and proposal software
into your architectural diagrams and contracting documents
into your onboarding platforms and technical support site……
Is it consistent, does it reflect your brand and the user experience you have built into your actual product?
Does the customer’s CFO, general counsel or CISO come away thinking “wow, that was an amazing buying experience!”
Or do they say “if that’s how they handle the buying process I dread to think what the product experience will be like!”
Its worth thinking about!
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
Business Model Design Workshops - I’ll work with you and your team to design or refine a business model for a new or existing product.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.