The Beat: Cut a Long Story Short

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello!

Thanks again for opening this newsletter, I hope you’ve had a good week.

As I may have mentioned, I am writing a book about B2B marketing and today I was working on the bit about mapping the customer journey. And, as any bonafide writer, I was doing my research and was quite surprised.

If you are a regular follower of the stuff we do here, you’ll know that on the podcast recently, we’ve been looking at the very early stages of the buyer journey.

We’ve been referring to research that suggests that only 5% of your future buyers are in the market. And of those folks that are potentially in market, they are doing their own research and only approaching vendors once they’ve educated themselves on the solution, are deep into their buying process and have a short list in their mind on who can provide it.

I also found some really interesting research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute about what they describe this moment as “category entry points” that opens with:

Interesting right? We must influence what our future buyers think about before they Google as they search for their memories first.

And yet, if you dig around the interwebs for B2B buyer journey models, they almost always start with the Awareness stage. The moment this 5% of future buyers connect with the market, flush with education on the problem and probably have their mind made up on a potential solution.

However, there seems to be a huge opportunity to influence the buyer before that.

Similarly, at the other end of the journey, many of these models then focus on the stages that take the prospect through to purchase and run out of steam post-purchase.

Yet, as we’ve also discussed on Rockstar CMO, advocacy in customer success stories is marketing gold and renewals, and reducing churn for SaaS businesses takes the pressure off sales.

Again, another opportunity if we extend our thinking beyond the traditional journey.

I don’t just mean map this in a document and recognise these stages exist, but shift how we invest our marketing budget to an earlier starting and later finishing journey, which in most organisations is very focused on Awareness to Purchase.

This brings me to the subject line of this newsletter, as we cut a long story short, by not focusing on each end of the buyers story and I dip into the tunes of my youth, for a bit of Spandau Ballet, it’s a classic.

Aside from this tune, I’ve also shared some links on this topic below, and I hope you find them useful and maybe give the podcast a listen. I’d love to know what you think.

Enjoy your week,

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Street Knowledge

The good stuff from Rockstar CMO, our community and other stuff I’ve liked:

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