The Buying Cycle - Part II

Members Hate to Be Sold To, but They Love to Buy

“The next big thing,” said Paul Greenberg as we ate a Thai lunch in Tyson’s Corner last week, “is customer experience management.”

Paul waved a fork, chewed and explained some more. “I’ve been reading and writing about it for a while now, and I’m giving a few talks on it.”

“I’ve recently been asking some executives and MBA candidates about their grocery store preferences,” he continued.  “I never mention the grocery stores’ brand names, I just describe how they differ in the way they’re laid out, how helpful the signs and staff are, and so on.”

Paul went on about how grocery stores have different ways of interacting with you and making your experience match your expectations. Whole Foods and Giant couldn’t be more different, he said. They’ve chosen signage, employee training, aisle size, product choice, literature and layout precisely to give clients what they want. While I might prefer the Whole Foods experience, Paul Greenberg’s conversation with the MBA candidates showed that they preferred Giant.

Would CEM be the next popular three-letter acronym, like CMS for the content management systems that captured the imagination of businesses and associations over the last few years, and CRM – customer relationship management – that now dominates business’ radar?

Greenberg, author of the bestselling CRM at the Speed of Light, (third edition, McGraw Hill), should know. He hobnobs regularly with analyst groups, consultants, educators and CEOs. When I told him about this series for The Canadian Association on the buying cycle and how that echoes his “CEM” idea, he got excited. I told him that my goal is to show associations that trust is built in a series of tiny transactions (what I call trust transactions), most of which don’t involve an exchange of money, but nevertheless constitute an exchange of value, one that makes a prospect or member believe in the association’s mission, activities and values.

Paul got it right away. “It’s not just a buying cycle,” he said, “it’s a buy in cycle.”

Exactly.

The buying cycle, reprised.

In the last article, I said that people love to buy. They hate being sold to. This applies to your prospects and members.

Pause for a moment, go to your web site and ask: How much do we use our home page to sell?

Probably too much.

But I’m not asking you to abandon your non-dues revenue activities. If you have an annual meeting, there’s no reason you can’t mention it on your home page. In fact, making a customer or prospect aware of your offerings is the first step of the buying cycle.

But then you have to support their ability to explore what you’re offering. And you’ve got to do this with material that focuses on the customer’s perception of value. Since that varies from segment to segment, you’ve got some work to do. (See last year’s series on perceived customer value and CRM in this magazine.)

For example, non-members probably attend your annual meeting. Wouldn’t you love to convert them to members? Or, failing that, wouldn’t it be great if you could sell them more than just admission to your meeting? If you help the non-member explore the annual meeting, benefits of membership and your product catalog, you’d be supporting their exploration of your association. The key points to remember is that you are respecting their need for good information, and that this information is targeted to non-members, not to members.

After all, members know about benefits of membership.

So, pause again, look at your site and ask: Does the information about our annual meeting support different ways of exploring it based on what the customer, prospect or member wants?

If not, you’ve already frustrated your site visitor, failed to support the buying cycle and diminished the odds that your customer or prospect will come back to you.

Negotiating with yourself

How do you develop information that supports the buying cycle?

Simple. Find out what information your customers, prospects and members need to help them make a decision. The big issue for members might be scheduling because they get a membership discount, making price less an obstacle. Prospects might want to focus on networking opportunities. Others – for example, professionals who may never join your association but who might buy your products or attend your meeting – may have different needs.

Then format this information so it supports the internal conversation of your site visitor: “Is this for me? Am I compelled enough to interact with this association right now?” If their answer is no, you’ve lost a chance to create a positive interaction.

That doesn’t mean a sale. Get away from the idea that you’re selling. You’re building buy-in. So perhaps instead asking the site visitor to register now, have them download the meeting schedule, perhaps formatted as a checklist. Make it a nice PDF. Or have it as an online form. The point is that someone will be much more willing to download a PDF or click on a link that has little if any obligation than they will be to actually pull out their credit card and pony up $450 for the meeting.

This incrementalist approach to crafting a buying cycle also lets you measure where your prospective meeting attendees “fall off”. As you move them through the buying cycle, what do they download and click on? At what point do they leave the site? This will tell you a lot about whether your value proposition is well targeted to the needs of your different audiences.

But more importantly, an incremental series of “aware-explore-negotiate-interact” creates a trust transaction at each iteration. Give them something they value, something that teaches them or inspires them about what you offer, and that interaction becomes successful.

Success

That brings us to the next step in the buying cycle. You must define what your audiences count as a successful interaction. If you’re obsessed with the idea that the only success is a new registrant, you’re still missing the point of the buying cycle. Stay with us. You’ll get it.

For example, if you know that one audience views seeing old friends and colleagues as part of a successful annual meeting, can you give them a taste of that success during the buying cycle?

One example of social network theory that I’m applying on a project for a medical association builds in precisely this idea. I’m making it possible for a member who’s thinking about going to the annual meeting to find out whether people in his/her “inner circle” have signed up yet. As soon as one of them does, it boosts the odds that the member will go.

The beauty of this approach is that each attending member will be in more than one “inner circle”. This creates a cascade of interest in the annual meeting each time a new member decides to attend the meeting.

What if, in the buying cycle, you supported a member’s ability to encourage others to attend as well as the ability to determine whether a trusted friend has already signed up?

This doesn’t guarantee the sale. But it guarantees buy-in: The members know that you understand how they measure success and you’re intent on helping them achieve it. One step at a time, you build trust.

That’s the payoff of the buying cycle, if you support it well.

Next time, we’ll discuss what you should do after an interaction with a customer has been successful.

Paul K. Ward is a CRM, Branding and Customer Value Consultant www.Pkward.com.  Paul regularly meets with top Washington-area executives to discuss business best practices, and has recently inaugurated an advisory group for the American Society of Association Executives to assist in creating ASAE member value. He writes for ASAE Global Link, ASAE Association Management and Canada's The Canadian Association.