The psychology of your customers' purchasing process

How would you like to get a hold of a tool that helps businesses understand where their customers are in the buying cycle and how to optimise for it?

Well we have this, it’s called The Buying Clock. Let’s learn about it.

Think about a recent product or service you purchased that you’re really happy with, for example, a new yoga class, a meal-kit delivery subscription, or even just a packet of biscuits. When you’ve thought of something, try to answer these questions about it. What made you decide to part with your hard-earned money to purchase it? Why did you feel you needed it? How did you hear about it? Why did you decide to go for that particular brand instead of another? Was it an easy process to purchase it? Are you now happy with it?

All these questions point to a decision-making process with specific stages that customers go through (whether they are conscious of them or not), when they go to purchase something. In fact, our research discovered it’s a cycle and that it involved twelve stages.

So why should you track the stages customers go through?

These issues highlight the value of a tool that businesses can use a reference when they want to know what stage their customer is at in their buying cycle, what they need to be doing to satisfy their customer’s needs at that stage and ultimately help them move on to the next stage. This directly addresses issues of sales forecasting, inaccuracies, avoiding customers who may never invest an identify when competition looks tobe likely to win.

12 Stages
There are 12 stages on the clock, each one represented by an hour. To make it easy to build a broad picture, the stages are grouped together in 3 sections: the decision-making process (stages one to four), the purchasing process (stages five to eight) and support/satisfaction (stages nine to twelve). Each of these sections contains three - five stages, the total of which makes up your twelve stages.

Stages 1 - 4: The decision-making process
Let’s take a closer look. What’s happening at twelve o’clock? Well this is stage one of the decision-making process. At this stage your customer is experiencing a pressure to do something often driven by a change in their environment. This means they have become aware of a problem, gap or need that they have. What should you be doing at this point? You should be checking and learning about current trends and coming up with products and services that align with them.

Let me give you an example. I recently subscribed to Hello Fresh, the meal kit delivery service that sends customers fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes, allowing them to cook meals at home. Twelve o’clock for me was starting to feel fed-up with my variations of pasta and vegetables rut that I had gotten into at mealtimes. I like cooking and eating fresh, nutritious and yummy food, who doesn’t? But with a busy full-time job and hectic social life it’s really hard to find the time and energy to come up with ideas, find all the right ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes to make them. Hello Fresh is exactly what I need and it has transformed my meal times in the most wonderful way. It has taken the hassle out of cooking, put the fun back into it and I’m eating fresh, delicious meals at home almost every day for an affordable price.

Stage one is not just about having the right products and services but having them at the right time. And of course trends change all the time, which means you have to too in order to keep up with them. Is your offering resonating with your market right now? Maybe it needs a revamp, or maybe just a little tweak. Try to answer this question honestly.

There are three more stages to the Decision-making process:

Stages 5 – 8: The Purchasing Process

At 4 o’clock they start to move in to the Purchasing Process where they are researching suppliers in detail and evaluating products (5 o’clock), building confidence in your products (6 o’clock) before making their decision to buy at 7 o’clock at which point you should be offering attractive payment terms and making it easy for them to make the purchase. Is your website set up with ecommerce so they can pay online? Can they pay by credit or debit card, apple pay, paypal? Is your product or service subscription based? They have made their decision now, all you have to do is help them complete the transaction.  

Stages 9 – 11: The Support / Satisfaction Process

At 8’oclock the payment takes place and is the final commitment the customer makes to realising the change and solutions from 5 o’clock.

And of course your relationship with your customer does not end at the conversion, in fact we like to think that it's just the start of something beautiful, because there are three more stages to go through. At 9 o’clock their order is approved so you want to ensure they receive a clear order confirmation and understand if after-sales support is available.  At 10 o’clock they want to check their order status and be able to access support if they need it and if they make it to 11 o’clock, congratulations, it’s time to communicate their experience with a 5 star review. It’s really important to encourage positive reviews, testimonials and show them prominently on your online channels because we’ve got news for you; purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by customer review sites, testimonials, influencers and bloggers rather than your own sales and marketing efforts.

Your website and digital marketing should align with every stage of The Buying Clock. It’s a rigorous process and optimising your website to our buying clock will make you ask difficult questions about your current sales marketing processes. But it will also show you where your gaps are and what you need to do to be relevant, reach your market, increase conversions and maintain loyalty.  

Our workshop My Business and The Buying Clock can help you get started. It’s a two hour session with our digital transformation coach Steve Pye completely tailored to your business.

You can check availability and book it here  My Business and The Buying Clock.