Market share is the single obvious criterion demonstrating a product's success. By speeding up the buyer decision process, you achieve more and more sales in the same period compared to your competitors and your market share goes up. Hence the focus should be on how to speed up the consumer decision-making process.
Consumer Decision-Making Process
Consumer buying behavior has been analyzed into different stages as follows:
- Recognition of a need: A person becomes a prospective customer for your product or service when she or he feels a need for the value that the product or service delivers. If the person is not currently aware of the product / service and the value it delivers, an educational campaign might be needed.
- Information Search: The feeling of a need is typically followed by searching for information on available solutions. The goal at this stage is to confirm that the solution will indeed meet the need and if so, on what terms (including price). The person wants not only to find likely solutions but also to feel confident that at least one of these solutions will indeed meet the particular need. The search might be given up if finding the information or making sure that it will meet the need proves too difficult.
- Evaluating Alternatives: If there are several credible solution alternatives in the market, each of these is evaluated against the others. This stage is also an information collection stage with the evaluation being typically done by reading comparison reports and reviews of the product or service by experts or existing users, and by asking around among friends and colleagues. It might also involve visiting sales outlets and getting a first-hand feel of available offers. The evaluation criteria typically involve features, functionality and price, as well as the dependability of the seller. It is possible that the searcher might drop out at this stage deciding that the offers do not meet the person's particular need.
- Final Purchase Decision: Those businesses that can guide the prospect successfully through all the previous stages stand the best chance of landing the order. Provision of full and credible information that persuades the prospect to buy your product is thus the critical marketing task.
- Post Purchase Behavior: The buyer might return the product if it does not meet his or her expectations. This can happen because of wrong expectations raised in the mind of the prospect either through deliberate misrepresentation or inadequate information. It can also occur because the product was poor quality and failed to meet the customer need. Dissatisfied buyers can also spread the word around either through word-of-mouth or through the Web
Of course, not all the above stages might be present in every buying decision. Buying decisions for small value items that have no major impact are usually impulsive.
There is a good article on the customer decision process at GUUUI.com.
Speeding Up the Buyer Decision Process
Considering that relevant information is the key input for making buying decisions, the focus of businesses must be on identifying the kind of information that prospective buyers need and making them available in a credible manner. In cases where decision making is done not by a single person but by a committee, there is also the issue of making the right information available to the right person. This usually happens for large orders placed by large organizations and the concerned salesperson will have to gain familiarity with the elaborate decision-making procedures.
Customers typically want the following information for making a buying decision:
- Suitability for Solving their Problem: The seller will have to identify what particular problem is being sought to be solved with the product or service offered. One key success factor is the ability of the seller to convince the prospect that the product or service not only solves the problem but also that the seller will indeed support the prospect in solving it.
- Proof of Performance: References from existing customers, product demonstrations and straightforward guarantees can help convince the prospect that the product does indeed deliver on its promise (or that they can get their money back if it fails to do so).
- How a particular Offer Compares with Alternatives: A product might solve the prospect's problem and credible proof of performance might also be available. However, if similarly good alternatives are available at lower prices or more conveniently, the decision might go in favor of such an alternative. A business will have to be prepared for this scenario, and might even decide to focus on a particular segment of customers to whom it can offer better value.
A business can help customers speed up their decision process by providing all the information needed for decision making as quickly as possible. This involves identifying the information needs of their particular target group and organizing to provide these in an easily accessible manner. Some prospects might need to be educated while others might require highly technical details to show how your product performs better.
The key issue is to ensure that the prospects do not have to go to much trouble to get the decision making information. That business which can do this best can often get the order even if it doesn't have the best product or service.
When you think about business success factors, you are likely to get more than a little bit confused. There are numerous factors such as customer satisfaction, product quality, company image and others, with numerous sub-factors under each, all of which seem to be critical. It is in this context that the single focus of analyzing customer buying decision cycle and trying to shorten the cycle time becomes significant.
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