It’s a hot topic, and for good reason. In recent months, most companies have had to rethink and retune their go-to-market strategies and approaches. In many cases, the way companies sell, who they sell to, and how they solve customer problems has been reshaped as organizations adapt to economic, logistic, and demographic impacts on a global scale.
Whether your organization has been radically transformed, or only lightly touched by recent changes and challenges, one thing is true for all: To maintain and sustain healthy growth, every business needs to attract, convert, and retain healthy relationships with its buyers.
If persona-building, experience design, and journey-mapping are unfamiliar concepts for your business (or perhaps sound a bit like “arts and crafts fluffy stuff”), you need to attend this webinar.
Our panel of marketing and business experts will unpack the basics, and share real-life examples of how a clear and thoughtful buyer’s journey can unlock healthy growth for any business.
Key Takeaways
- A clear ideal customer profile allows companies to focus their resources on the most promising leads, improving sales efficiency and reducing wasted marketing efforts.
- Regularly conducting interviews fosters a culture of feedback, ensuring that marketing and sales strategies remain aligned with customer needs.
- Think holistically about revenue enablement by integrating sales, marketing, and customer success efforts to create a seamless experience for clients.
- Articulating a clear company purpose aligns employees with the organization’s mission, enhancing motivation and engagement.
- Viewing marketing as an investment fosters a long-term growth mindset, encouraging businesses to allocate resources for sustainable brand development and customer relationships.
- A well-crafted job description can enhance the candidate’s understanding of the company culture, leading to better job fit and retention.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Orange Ball Creative
- Convergo
- Revenue Growth Engine Book
- Revenue Growth Engine Podcast
- The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results
- Authentic Growth Methodology
- Start with Why
Full Webinar Transcription
Introduction
Jennifer Zick: Welcome, everybody, to the Authentic Growth™ Webinar for today’s conversation on the buyer’s journey. I’m so excited you could join us. I’m your host and moderator for today’s conversation with a great lineup of panelists that we’ll be introducing to you soon and who you see on the screen here today with me. My name is Jennifer Zick. I’m the CEO and founder of Authentic® . We are a community of fractional CMOs that work with growing businesses to help them Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth.
Totally delighted to be with you here today. And I know that we had a really wide variety of registrants joining us for today’s webinar. So I want to recognize that out in the crowd behind the curtain, the faces we don’t see represent a really wide variety of entrepreneurial growth leaders in roles like owner, founder, visionary CEO, head of sales, head of marketing, head of product, head of customer experience. There’s a wide range of attendees here today. We’re so delighted you’re here with us. And my hope is that each of you, regardless of your role, your industry, or the size of your company, get something of great value from today’s conversation that you can take home and make actionable in your business with your team right away. But just know that as we have this conversation as a panel today, kind of to level set the world in which we work across our businesses is primarily with those entrepreneurial growth businesses.
At Authentic, our clients are usually between five and 100 million in revenue. So some of the challenges we’re gonna talk about today tend to exist predominantly within that size and scope of a business, but also show up in other ways in larger enterprises and early stage businesses as well. So I’m so excited to introduce the awesome lineup of panelists that I have with me here today, and I’m just gonna really quickly introduce them by name, and then I’ll invite each of you panelists to share a little bit more about who you are, the role that you play in the work you do with growing businesses, and why this topic is of interest to you.
So at least on my virtual left side, I’m not sure where she is in your world, but Barb Bertsch is one of Authentic’s fractional CMOs, and I’ll give her space to introduce herself soon. John Gamades is from one of our ally network partners over at Orange Ball Creative, and Darrell Amy is a friend within our ecosystem of entrepreneurial communities. The visionary at Convergo. So, Barb, I’ll start with you. Would love for you to introduce yourself.
Barb Bertsch: Hey, everybody. Thanks, Jennifer. Like Jennifer said, I am a fractional CMO with Authentic. And what that really means and what I really do is we work with companies in that five to 100 billion dollar range to really help them build their marketing from the ground up. All the things that are foundational, like the buyer’s journey being one of them. This topic is very near and dear to my heart.
We’ve been talking about it and socializing around it in the office for, I don’t know, a few months now. It’s a trending topic today and I think the more I’ve read about it, the more I start to question some of the clients that I work with and what happens after the sale. So we’ve got this buyer’s journey. What about the customer experience afterwards? And that’s really how I kind of got started with getting very excited about this topic and it has evolved and hopefully you all take away a lot today from our conversation. So thanks.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Barb. John, you’re up.
John Gamades: Hey, guys, my name is John Gamades. I’m one of the partners at Orange Ball Creative. We’re a brand agency here in the Twin Cities. We do a lot of work in the identity space, website development, and print. And one of the things that really ties it all together for us is messaging. And that’s one of the things I’ll be able to share a little bit more about today is messaging. But that messaging is one of the things when you start talking about the buyer journey, that really ties all of the stages and all the pieces together. And so just to echo what Barb said, I’m really excited for this conversation. I think it’s really important to businesses of all sizes, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of this.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, John. Darell, over to you.
Darrell Amy: Yeah, thank you, Jennifer. My name is Darrell Amy. I’m the author of a Revenue Growth Engine, the co host of the Revenue Growth podcast, and the selling from the Heart podcast, and the visionary for Convergo, where we’re passionate about helping generous entrepreneurs grow revenue faster. And we do that primarily by aligning sales, marketing and operations to create an amazing customer experience. So we’re so excited to be a part of this conversation today. Jennifer.
Ideal Customer persona and Profile
Jennifer Zick: We got to have a little prep meeting to get more fully introduced to this whole panel. And I’m going to tell you, audience, you’re not going to have any fun here today. These people are pretty flat. I’m kidding, of course. This is going to be a great time and we invite you participants to be part of the conversation. You’ll notice on your zoom button controls that there is a Q and A as well as a chat feature, and I want to quickly point out the difference. Please use chat if you just want to be saying hello and throwing out some thoughts or comments as we move through, and we’ll be keeping a side eye on that. But if you have a question that you want to put in front of this panel, we’re going to try to leave some time at the end of our conversation today to welcome questions or thoughts from the audience. So please use the Q and A for that if you’d like to surface a question for us to potentially riff on as a panel.
So let’s dig in. Let’s get right into the fun stuff here. The buyer’s journey. You all come at it with really unique vantage points based on the role you play in the work that you do with your growth clients. But you all share a common passion for the importance of what this means to the success of building strong businesses and brands and customer experiences and relationships and value. I don’t think there’s ever been a time that I’ve lived through in my career where this conversation’s been more relevant and important because the last couple of years disrupted everything for everybody. Nobody escaped the fact that the journey for buyers and stakeholders and employees has changed substantially. And so if companies haven’t really taken a fresh look at what the experience their brand is bringing into relationships, this is the time to do it. So let’s go ahead and dig in.
And Darrell, I’m going to start with you. I’ve been a marketer, a sales and marketing leader now for over 20 years. And I remember when the word persona first started bubbling up, and it initially seemed like this. It was kind of like this fast moving fad that companies were defining their personas, but the personas were kind of cartoony. It’s like Bob is 42 years old and lives in the suburbs with two and a half kids and three goldfish and drives a minivan. And that’s our persona, right? There were little cartoon concepts for the characters that the business interacted with, and that was supposed to set us all up for great brand building. I’d like to take that back a bit and have your thoughts on what it means to clarify not just persona, but an ideal customer persona? And why is that so critical as a foundation for business health and growth?
Darrell Amy: Yeah, it’s such an important distinction here that I wanna make at the beginning is when we think about ideal customer profile or ideal client profile. And I’m speaking mainly to my friends in the B2B space where I spend most of my time. If you think about the customers that you work with these days, it’s never one person. Brent Adamson and the Challenger customer research ten years ago, twelve now said there’s 5.4 decision makers on average in a buying cycle. That number in most industries is larger.
So when we look at an ideal customer profile, we would say, what is the type of business that we want to work with? And that business in itself has characteristics and has business objectives. They want to achieve challenges related to that, all of that. But inside that business, there are multiple decision makers and influencers, and that’s where we want to get to the persona level. And I think from a business standpoint, if you look at it through that lens, and for my B2C friends as well, each one of those individuals, yes, they’ve got some demographics. It’s business owner Bob that drives the minivan and is 42 and lives in a. Whatever, blah, blah, blah. That’s all great. I think that is meaningful.
However, what I really want to know for each of the personas, the CFO, for example, the HR director, the IT person, the end user, whomever touches the decision making process during that buyer’s journey, I want to know what are the specific business outcomes that that person wants from their perspective, and then also psychographically, based on whether they’re a top level decision maker, a middle manager, or someone else in the organization. What’s their psychological bent like? Are they looking for a return on investment? Are they looking for status and career advancement? Or are they just simply looking for low price?
And so, understanding that, go ahead and keep calling a business owner Bob, or this client that I’m in their office right now has. We had, it was Morgan midsize. Great, great. Go do that. But let’s also look deeper in terms of the business outcomes that each one of those specific people want to have. And I think look at your ideal client profile from a business perspective, and then apply that to each person. And now you start to have some grit and some meaning to how you communicate with those people.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. The second side of the question that I just teed up to you, which I’ll open up to the whole panel, is what happens when a growing business does not define their ideal customer or client profile. What have you seen happen?
Barb Bertsch: I think they start to make some assumptions, and those assumptions are going to carry you only so far. You’re not going to be able to shorten your sales cycle based on assumptions. You’re not going to know enough to be presenting those personas with the right assets along the way, the right touch points. So I think you’re going to get behind the eight ball for those competitors of yours that are doing the right work.
John Gamades: And just to tee off on that a little bit, it goes back to something you talk about all the time. At Authentic, it leads to random acts of marketing. It leads to I’m going to invest money in marketing and I’m not going to see results because I haven’t done the work on the front end to really identify who I’m marketing to. It’s so important. Yeah.
Darrell Amy: And I think you end up your message from a sales standpoint, a marketing standpoint and what your client success people are saying ends up being static. I call it a marketing adjective soup. Right? You just end up, you’re not specific. You’re like, we can help you enhance productivity, streamline operations and it’s just like noise until you understand the ideal customer and the people and what’s important to them. Because the reality is we’ve got to be able to get through the filter. Everyone’s exposed to thousands of messages every day. The only thing that gets through the filter, in my opinion, is something that’s related to a specific outcome that I want. An adjective soup is not going to get you through the filter.
Jennifer Zick: That’s absolutely right. And I think we’ve all heard it said that when companies try to be all things to all people, they’re really nothing to anyone. Right. Without that differentiation and the clarity of the value you bring and to who, you’re going to be lost in a sea of look-alikes.
Darrell Amy: That’s right.
Jennifer Zick: You’ve all seen that in the work you’re doing with your clients.
Darrell Amy: Yeah. If I might add, you know, ideal client profile is helpful because unless you’re Coca-Cola or Nike, you’ve got a limited marketing budget, you’ve got limited bandwidth on a sales outreach standpoint and limited execution ability as well in your operations. And so it’s not that you won’t sell to someone who’s not an ideal client, but when it comes to focusing that marketing budget and focusing that sales effort, getting clarity on that ideal client profile and the decision makers and influencers, the personas is where things really start coming to life and you can accelerate your business.
Buyer’s Journey Breakdown and Implementation
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And I have a couple minutes left in this part of the discussion, so I want to insert you just teed up perfectly for me. An analogy that I use with our customers to help them understand. Because often when you are a founder-led, sales driven organization that has tried that, that has approached the market like any revenue is good revenue, so you haven’t narrowed down. It can be a scary conversation to talk about strategic marketing focus because founders, owners and sellers can feel like you’re going to tell me what I can’t do now, and that’s going to be a limiting factor.
Those of us who’ve been around the block on the marketing side understand that. No, that’s a growth catalyst. And so the word picture I use is to think of your organization like a baseball team. Your delivery, whether it’s product or services, is the outfield. And they have a really wide range of capabilities and things they could solve for different end users and business use cases. That’s true. Think of your sales organization as the infield. They can maneuver left to right to shape a deal. Right. They can get creative based on what’s available in delivery. But think of your go to market and your marketing organization as the pitcher and pitching to a very specific strike zone. And that allows you to take the limited resources that you do have, the limited time and the limited energy, and make really pragmatic choices about what you chase versus letting everything come through without a filter. So getting all your energies pointed to the highest potential, healthiest, happiest kind of growth, right?
So yeah, that’s where this starts to where it really hits the ground. So my next question I’m going to tee up over to you, John. Barb kind of set the stage for this at the beginning of the call in terms of what gets her excited about this. I think in my experience, too many companies think of marketing only as lead gen demand creation and setting up the at bats for the sales organization. Or if you’re B2C, marketing is simply about acquisition, right. And demand creation. But I feel like, and I’ve seen there are so many, what I would call critical conversion points in the life cycle of any relationship with these stakeholders, whether they are buyers or influencers that get overlooked and leads to a lot of loss opportunity for growing businesses because the view of the role marketing can play in the buyer journey is too limited to acquisition.
So John, how in your experience, what are some of the most common places where the buyer’s journey breaks down? And how can organizations plan ahead to make sure they’re not missing out on key opportunities?
John Gamades: I think exactly where you’re going with this. One of the first places that it breaks down is where the focus is only on filling the funnel, only on business acquisition, only on lead gen. That’s like the beginning of the marathon. If you’re not paying attention to nurture on the backside of that, you are going to get people into the funnel. You may get customers, but you’re not going to keep them. And you’re not going to create raving fans, which is what we all want. I use the analogy of dating and marriage.
When you’re dating, you’re trying to get somebody into the funnel. You’re trying to get them to that spot where they become a customer or a client. But even after you’re married, you have to continue dating them. And if you don’t, the relationship is going to lose strength. It’s an important part of the relationship. So I think our ability to continue dating our customers, continue adding value after the sale is a huge part of the buyer journey that gets missed all the time. One of the other things that I think where we see customers experience a breakdown is they want to have one buyer journey that fits all of their customers. And to Darrell’s point, your customers come in different personas. There’s not one buyer’s journey that’s going to cover all of those bases and speak to their struggles, their aspirations, the things that they really want from you. You can’t do that with one message. One message is not going to create these guys for every customer. And so it’s really important to break those down.
And one of the other things you used when you were talking earlier and introducing the subject, you mentioned employees. That’s probably the third place that I see the buyer’s journey break down is where businesses aren’t including employees as a buyer. And that, I think, is a massive miss right now. Over the last two years, where recruiting and retention have become so much more difficult. You need to be thinking about how you’re going to attract new employees. How are you going to retain employees and make them into raving fans of your organization from the inside? And mapping out their journey, I think is equally important to mapping out the journey of new prospects and new customers coming into the funnel.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And you just gave us a really nice preview to something we’re going to dive into even more deeply on the employment side of employment, journey and brand. But let’s come back to where the customer journey breakage happens. And Barb, I know that you, along with many of our peers here at Authentic, have been talking about this and really building models and tools to help make it tangible for businesses. What have you been learning in that process as all of you CMOs have come together to compare notes?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah. So what we’ve been finding is we’ve researched a few different templates that are out there. We had a template at Authentic that we were using. I was kind of like, oh, I think we need to simplify this. And as we kind of work through it, I’m like, no, we don’t need to simplify it. We need to add more to this and really kind of glom on to not only what happens after you deliver the product and what is the buyer experiencing or now customer experiencing at that point, but how do we keep them? How do we get them to be an advocate for our business? And then there’s another column there too, of, you know, what happens if they leave? What do we want to learn about why they left and can we get them back? Or how do we not make that mistake again to make sure that we’ve, you know, retained them further down the road? That’s expensive to lose customers. So we talked a lot about that.
Just like John was alluding to, you can’t fill out this template for your company. You really need to fill this out for each buyer’s persona. I can’t stress that enough. You can try to start doing that and, you know, once you start filling it in that you’re going to miss the mark, you’re going to have gaps. So taking those buyer personas, so you’re making this assumption that we have these buyer personas. Deciding on the right template and format for your business is going to be important and getting the right people in the room to answer the questions you need to fill in the template is going to be paramount.
If you get to a point where you’ve tapped everything that you can out of the individuals in the room, the sales leaders, the CEO, the operations, whomever that is that touches that customer, that’s when you know that you need to really go to the customer, go find some key customers, interview them, talk about, you know, if you’re going to change vendors, what is your approach in doing that? Is that what you did with us or did you start from scratch and you didn’t have a service like we provide? What was your process in getting to us and what was important to you? How did you come to a decision point? You’ve gone through the awareness, the discovery, you’ve started to consider what were our touch points that were really key to you, to pull you through that funnel that’s so important.
Jennifer Zick: Barb, I think. You mentioned earlier that if a business hasn’t done this as an exercise and reviewed it on the regular, they’re running on assumptions. And I love this. I like using analogies, metaphors, and word pictures, but I love this idea that when we work internally in our own companies, we’re working inside the bottle and we can’t read the label right. No matter how much we love our customers and feel connected because we’re part of the marketing team or part of the sales process, or we’re one of the founders and we know what we do, we really don’t know.
We get myopic, we get so close to the subject matter. So all three of you are external advisors and guides and consultants to clients on various aspects of this. I’d love for each of you to chime in, like, how can a business know when it’s time to bring an outside person or team or agency partner in to help them read the label? What are some of the telltale signs that a third party helper would be important?
Darrell Amy: I think, you know, in one sense, the answer is, I think we always need third party people. I’m in a client’s office. It’s funny, there’s a forest behind me. The analogy is seeing the forest through the trees. I like the bottle analogy as well. And it’s really a struggle because we live inside our business and live inside the bubble of the industry that we’re in. And because of that, we end up, first of all, from a message standpoint, we end up talking our own jargon all the time and talking about our products and how great we are. And by the way, your competitors are all doing exactly the same thing.
So one of the reasons to bring some outside perspective in is it kind of can lift you above the trees. You can have someone help you see the forest. And in the context of the buyer’s journey and personas and ideal clients, you know, you’re in the business every day. I’m just seeing this wonderful management team working this morning. They’re doing a great job serving all different clients, but some of them really are the ones that are going to move their business forward. And I think in the rush of day to day business, it’s really hard to see the perspective. So having a fresh viewpoint from outside your business, I think is helpful all the time, but it’s certainly helpful when you’re trying to get clarity on who your ideal clients are.
Because I think the founder will take revenue from anybody for a while, and then just any business in general. Is so dedicated to everyone, providing great client experience, customer service, that you miss the point of who we really should be focusing our marketing and sales efforts on and what’s important to them from their perspective. So definitely in this clarity of ideal client profile, it’s so helpful to have an external voice.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely.
Barb Bertsch: Can I chime in on that, Jen? Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I think too, that oftentimes, and Jen said this earlier, that these entrepreneurial organizations are sales led and sales driven. And there comes a point in time where you’ve hit a wall with your revenue coming in and you sit down and you start looking at your sales cycle, for example, and can’t figure out a why you can’t move through that faster. Bringing in that outside perspective is going to help somebody else from a different lens and a different vantage point. Come in and pick apart your sales cycle. Start talking about those buyer personas. Well, who are your buyers? That might not have even been a consideration where you’re classifying your customers all into one bucket and forgetting that they all have different personalities, are there for different reasons, and that outside perspective could probably point that out pretty quickly.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Authentic is a five year old company and fast growing. And so we’re young and innovative and on one hand that allows us to adapt quickly and keep fresh eyes. But on the other hand, I cannot tell you how often our leadership team has to challenge ourselves to say, just because we did it that way yesterday doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do it tomorrow. Right, but it’s hard to recognize inside the bottle or within the trees that we’ve reached a point where the way we did it before isn’t the way that’s going to help us scale. And that’s a hard thing to recognize as an internal team that maybe has been moving through that business from a certain perspective. Without that vantage point of let’s look up, let’s look outward, see where we’re growing next.
And is it even the same audiences that is going to fuel next level growth for our business? Most businesses we’ll move through stages of growth and intervals where their ideal customer from five years ago is no longer their ideal customer for tomorrow. In fact, most of the clients we work with, that’s the case. They’re trying to move upstream or carve out new markets or define new audiences. So I don’t know. John, was there anything you wanted to add? I see you looking like maybe you’ve got a thought.
John Gamades: I do, actually. I think one of the interesting things that’s happened. And I’ll attribute it to the last two years where things have gone more virtual, we’ve become more separated. I think it’s been easy for organizations to fall into silos where marketing is in a silo, sales is in a silo, ops is in a silo. And a lot of those conversations that used to happen a little bit more regularly, hopefully within all of those groups within a business are not happening as much as they used to be.
And so that’s another place where I think that outside perspective becomes important. To have somebody, when we do this with clients, often to be able to bring those, those silos together, get people out of their silos to have conversations about what are you seeing in sales that might impact marketing, vice versa. Where does Ops fit into this? To get everybody in the room and talking together at the same time. A lot of times when we’re busy, we’re not having those conversations, and we coast through work and we miss key things that would help growth, that would really help impact where we’re going. So that outside perspective also is a key tool for opening those doors and those conversations.
Change Management and Setting Expectations
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And that’s why, like in our business, we work with, we run on EOS, you know, the entrepreneurial operating system as an.org operating system, and we work with an outside implementer because that person holds our feet to the fire. Make sure we show up for that quarterly and annual. And as CMOs, we’re working with our clients through our methodology for workshops and cadence meetings that ensure that kind of alignment and accountability, and to get out of the day to day execution and into the strategic thinking. It’s so essential. We could stage us on any one of these topics for an hour, but I’m going to keep us moving forward because there’s more to dive into.
So my next question. Darrell, I’m coming at you. We can talk all we want about the importance of all of this great planning and frameworking and strategic thinking and growth mentality and get it into a plan and a template and work with an advisor and all of that. But once you’ve landed with a vision for how you’re going to shape the buyer’s journey and the customer experience, you actually have to implement. And that’s where in organizations things can get messy, because implementing means change. Somebody’s cheese is getting moved, somebody has new accountability for a step in the process. Content has to be created, systems updated. So once the buyer’s journey is outlined and you need to operationalize it, what advice would you give for an organization taking first steps to put a thoughtful buyer’s journey in place. How do you manage expectations for the company? Like, what does it really take, to move a plan into action?
Darrell Amy: Yeah, you know, I think we can take a cue from our enterprise friends, and I’ve spent three decades in sales, two decades in digital marketing, and now work in the middle of all of that. In enterprise, we talk about sales enablement, but I think what, which is a whole discipline of providing salespeople with the resources, tools, talk, track, all the stuff they need to move the deal forward. I like to think of it, though, in more of a holistic sense, in terms of revenue enablement. So we’re all aiming at revenue, right?
Whether it’s net new customers, whether it’s cross sell revenue and revenue growth engine. We believe we explain how companies need to do both of those simultaneously, to drive exponential growth. So how are you enabling revenue? And we’ve talked about some things that are foundational to that. Who is the ideal client profile? What’s the journey they’re taking to become a client? And at that point, what’s the customer experience? But then looking and going, okay, how can we enable, whether it’s our client success or operations people or salespeople, how can we come alongside and enable that?
With tools, talk tracks, training processes for my canadian friends to be able to actually know what to do in EOS. And we’re very engaged with EOS. And thank goodness for our implementer who holds our feet to the fire. In eos we talk about followed by all. When it comes to your buyer’s journey and your customer experience, what is followed by all, and what are the tools that are there, the talk tracks or talking points? And have you enabled, have you resourced your people with that? So I think once you think through your buyer’s journey and once you identify the people involved in your personas, your ideal client profile, then it comes down to getting real practical with playbooks to make it all happen. Enable revenue growth.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. And for companies who are taking these first steps in putting together a strategic plan for what they’d like for their buyer journey and starting to implement the pieces of it. Like almost any process in a growing business, you learn through implementation and that influences the plan, right? Like the best laid plans only stand up so far until they make contact with the enemy. And that’s real life use. Right?
So what advice would any of you offer to companies that are putting process tools, communication strategies in place around the buyer journey? And then they’re getting some feedback along the way. That maybe wasn’t what they expected. Where do they go from there?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, I would say that when you put together a buyer’s journey, just remember that it’s version one, not version done, as Jennifer always says to us, and it will evolve. The pandemic is a prime example of that, where, you know, there’s a lot of people out there who no longer really want to touch and have a discussion with a human. So we as marketers need to recognize where they’re at and meet them where they’re at and make sure that we’re putting assets through social, through paid media, through all the different channels, make it more omnichannel than it ever has been, so that we’re meeting people where they’re at.
And if you’re not revisiting your journey, your buyer’s journey, you’re not maybe going to recognize that there’s a problem. And having marketing and sales, having those candid conversations, to John’s point, if those conversations aren’t happening, they need to be happening. So that you’re communicating with Jim over in sales, what are you seeing that’s changed since the pandemic started? There’s got to be something. Well, there’s, there’s tons of trending reports out there right now that are telling us that there’s data behind this and that has changed. But to your point, if you’re not paying attention, you’re going to get left behind. That’s right.
Jennifer Zick: It takes a lot of agility and constant internal feedback loops and external measures and checks and balances to refine the journey. Right. You start with version one. It really never, ever gets to version done. You’re listening, collaborating, it never just the buyer journey is not something that can just be delegated to the marketing team.
Barb Bertsch: Right?
Darrell Amy: No. And, you know, to the old axiom, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Layering on what Tina Whitman would say is you can’t improve a process if you haven’t already documented it. So the version one of documenting your client journey and building the playbooks around, that is really just a round one, because now you’ve got to go back and optimize based on changing market conditions. What I love is that I think the clients that the companies out there that thought through the customer experience and buyer’s journey, when things like the pandemic happened, they had a good ability to pivot because it was already thought through and documented and followed by all. So now you need to pivot, you need to reframe your message.
You can work that through an existing process. And I think we’ve all discovered in today’s environment, we’re all going to have to pivot many, many times, maybe more often than we’d like and more often than we had historically. So thinking about your buyer’s journey is really just putting a framework in place for continuous improvement.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, continuous improvement is a great label over the whole process.
John Gamades: Just to dovetail on that, those companies that were successful over the last couple of years did a good job of listening to their customers and listening to the feedback that was given to them freely, but also asking questions. We spend a lot of time as we’re developing messages for clients, asking customers for outside feedback. And that’s an important part of seeing the bottle from the outside.
Sometimes you have to ask customers what they think and you have to be prepared to receive some affirmation of what you think you’re doing well, but also receive some insights on some of your blind spots that you’re not seeing. The only way to find that is to ask. And when we get busy and we don’t spend time interacting with customers and asking them how we are doing, how our product is, those kinds of things, we miss valuable information in the process.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Absolutely. Huge majority in my experience of growing entrepreneurial businesses lack systems or structure or any forethought into how they create feedback loops with their buyers, with the marketplace and inside of their organization, between their teams. And one of the first things we often are addressing is what I love to call building connective tissue. How to bring sales, marketing and customer service, or experience those teams together to talk and to listen and to share and to collaborate and to start reframing the chart from this is my department. This is your department. To this is our goal. This is what we’re all aiming for. Right?
Employer Branding Strategy
Jennifer Zick: The next question. Barb, I’m going to start with you. There was a reason why I didn’t title this webinar the customer journey. Because the customer is the person who we typically think of, the customer or the client as the buyer of our product. But John already alluded to the fact that there are other stakeholder groups that have to buy into our value proposition, and that includes prospective employees. Current employees have to continue to buy in. Partners have to continue to trust and buy into the value of the ecosystem you have with them. Investors, all of those stakeholder groups are critical within the journey of the experience they have with your brand.
And we’ve done other webinars on brand concepts, but for the sake of setting up this conversation, I like to talk about brands as obviously way bigger than a logo and a color palette and a set of fonts. Brand is the promise your business has made to the people that are connected to it and the way that they feel about how you deliver on that promise. You’re either creating trust or you’re eroding trust. That’s really how it goes. So your brand has a lot of stakeholders connected to it. And that’s why I didn’t call this customer journey only, but buyer’s journey, everybody who’s buying in. So right now, one of the most critical things we’re talking about with all of our growth clients is what John already talked about, employment experience, both in retaining talent and in attracting talent.
So I’d love to hear from each of you, and I’ll start with you, Barb. What advice would you give to companies who have not yet purposefully considered employees as a buyer persona? What steps should they take to think about how their brand is reflected as an employment brand and experience?
Barb Bertsch: I love this question. I am sure there are loads of companies out there who have never thought about it from this perspective. And when you look at a template for a buyer’s journey and you’re talking about customers, there’s never been a more important time to include your employee as one of those buyer personas from hiring and the challenge that everybody’s having today in trying to hire talent and then retaining them, now you’ve got them.
Thankfully, we found somebody. How do we keep them? What are those discussions we’re constantly having with them? To check in, see how things are going. Forget about just the 90 day check in. How about like all the time? You know, these are, you hired them for a reason. They were meaningful to you when you met them. How do you continue to make sure you’re making an impact for them and they’re making an impact for you and wanting to make an impact for you, wanting to become an advocate.
How are employees looking at different businesses today? They’re going to glassdoor. They’re going to LinkedIn. If we’ve got a bad rap out there as an organization, we need to clean that up, number one. But how do we get them, once they get in the door, to become an advocate, to write good things about us out in those platforms without it being icky and asking them to do it right? If you’re not seriously looking at an employee as your buyer, think again. I can’t stress this enough in today’s environment and generationally too, talk about not one and done. We have to continuously revisit this because what’s important to me is not going to be important to somebody that’s fresh out of college these days.
The Kegerator and those things that were real fun things to add to the office aren’t a thing anymore. So pay attention to that. What I’m finding younger people wanting these days is more training and development. And, you know, that’s exciting. If you’re missing the mark there, you’re going to be in trouble and you’re not going to be able to retain these folks. So, yeah, I could talk for a long time on that, so I’ll pass it off.
Jennifer Zick: Well, I’ll add that, you know, just like your business doesn’t want to be lost in a sea of sameness and commoditized so that you just look like your competitors, you don’t want your business just to look like any other business. And the only thing that makes you able to retain it is the next higher salary level. Right. If that’s the only thing keeping people, somebody’s always going to beat you there. Especially when you’re a small to mid sized entrepreneurial business. You have to know and be able to articulate the total value proposition of being an employee and part of the team and your connection to the vision and your growth opportunity and all of those things. So, John or Darrell, any comments on this? I see you both kind of nodding. I’ll start with Darrell.
Darrell Amy: So I am fresh off going last week to the purpose summit, which is a group of forward thinking companies, visionary and a lot of leadership stuff, a lot of HR stuff and talking about purpose. And what I’m realizing is that the best run companies recruit and retain employees based on purpose. And what I also realized in conversation with clients this week is the best run companies also craft their ideal client profile around their purpose. And so, but going back to retention on this, you know, you think about are we marketing clearly communicating the purpose of the company?
This company went through that process of really understanding what their purpose is. And when it comes to attracting, retaining employees, can we support leadership who should be articulating and storytelling and all of that? Can we support them in that way? Because if you go start with why, Simon Sinek. What, why, how? Or how? Yeah, why, what, how? Let’s get that right. You know, we talk a lot in the buyer’s journey about what we do and how we do it, but the why gets missed a lot. And it’s critical with employees.
Personally, I’m starting to believe that it’s critical that we weave more of that back into our messaging and our buyer’s journey with our clients to connect those two whys. And so the more we can facilitate the storytelling and the casting of purpose and vision out to employees, I think we’re going to recruit the right people and they’re going to stick around. The data I saw last week all says it’s not about the money, it’s about the purpose. There’s massive wins available there.
John Gamades: You’re absolutely right on that. And we’re doing a lot of work with clients right now to reframe mission vision, core values and retell those stories in a way that people can actually emotionally connect with. It’s been way too long that you’d walk into an office and there was a mission up on the wall that nobody could recite, nobody could remember, and meant absolutely nothing. We’re working to change that with clients right now, to create spaces and messages that employees can actually connect with and are meaningful and tied back to purpose. Because that’s exactly it. That’s what people are looking for right now.
Jennifer Zick: I love that we’ve talked through our entire existence at Authentic about purpose, both for our business and for our clients. But we recently added it to the very top item on our marketing roadmap to ask the question and make sure the client leadership team can answer, what is your life changing purpose for existence? Not what you sell. That’s why was the business started in the first place? How is your organization changing lives? If you don’t know the answer to that, then I don’t know why you’re in business, and nobody else who works for you will understand why you’re in business. That’s a really important question to start with first. And after you answer that question, you can then start to ask them, who matters to us and why should we matter to them? And then you get down to what your business is doing, right?
Darrell Amy: That’s right. Yeah. And that storytelling supports employee retention. But as the employees get to absorb those stories, not only is it reframing the culture, but it’s also those stories then get told back out to clients and prospects. And, you know, that, to me, is super, super powerful.
How Small Businesses Can Scale Their Content Production
Jennifer Zick: It’s so powerful. I’m going to have one last question for the panel, but before I tee that up, I want to invite the audience. If you have a question for the panel, drop it into the Q and A. Not the chat, the Q and A, and I’ll keep an eye on that. If there’s a question from the audience that I think would be thoughtful for all the participants. I’ll tee it up if we’ve got time at the end here. But here’s one more question.
I’m going to start with you on this one, John, one thing we haven’t talked about yet, it’s really fun and nice and well meaning to talk about the fact that many of our participants in small businesses have multiple buyers. It might be also starting to feel kind of overwhelming to the people attending who have had kind of a single thread message strategy. They’re like, oh, boy, now I’ve got to have a message strategy for maybe a few personas inside of my buyer, ideal buyer, and I got to talk about prospective employees and actual employees. This is a lot of material to develop. There’s a lot here. So every company we talked about has limited time, money and human energy.
So what advice would you offer, John, about how businesses can step into and scale in this area? Because, you know, as a creator, as a team that creates and produces content and assets that help to support this journey, a lot goes in to get the, the outcomes we’re talking about. How can companies start expanding?
John Gamades: I think the biggest challenge to that is for a lot of the companies that we work with, they’ve tried to do it all internally for a long time. And that means sometimes the owner or the visionary is trying to wear that hat. Sometimes they have somebody who’s doing marketing and creative internally, but is also wearing three other hats to break that mold and say, okay, we’re going to get really focused on this because we value it. We understand that it matters. A lot of times that means pulling in outside experts to really guide the process. We’ve been talking about that through this whole conversation.
If you’re trying to do it all internally and you don’t have the right resources in place, you’re going to create burnout, you’re going to create a lot of challenges for yourself. You’re not going to see the growth that you’re looking for as fast as you want and your results are going to show that. So being able to see that and have that reality check of, okay, if we really want to do this well, we’re going to have to pull in some outside partners, whether it’s creating marketing, marketing strategy, marketing plan, or to handle the tactical, how are we going to execute on this great marketing strategy and plan that we’ve got? How are we going to create website, print content, all the pieces that businesses need right now? You used the word overwhelming earlier. It’s very overwhelming.
And we hear that from clients all the time. There’s a lot of directions I could go. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how I’m going to get it all done. You probably don’t have the resources internally to handle it all. There are really good partners out there to help you and to open the door to that, I think is huge.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, go ahead, Barb.
Barb Bertsch: Oh, I was going to say I couldn’t agree more with John. And I see it too, obviously with the kind of work that I do. And bringing in partners like John is, is so uber helpful because even I can’t get in there and do everything. I’m not a jack of all trades that doesn’t exist today anymore with all of the different types of marketing that are out there. And it’s that business that’s really willing to invest financially in order to get to the next level because it does all come together.
There’s foundational elements to running marketing, for example, and the buyer’s journey, technology, metrics, all of those things coming together to formulate that foundation is really how you’re going to be able to drive the messaging and everything that you need to do in order to bring in those buyers further faster, get the company going further faster, and you need that platform and that foundation.
John Gamades: Can I add something to that? You use the word invest. That’s the mindset shift. Too often, marketing is an expense. That’s how owners see it. I need to check a box. I know I need to do it. If you can shift it from being an expense to seeing it as an investment and one that’s going to create real ROI. Now, that opens doors to create the results you’re looking for. But you have to make that mindset shift. That’s really important.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. And on that mindset about investment, I just had a conversation with a prospect this morning talking about the way to think about marketing. Too often we talked about marketing being relegated to lead generation. Just create demand, create engagement. And too many companies use marketing budgets as if it’s a checkbook. Like, we get paid our check, we go to the mall, we buy new clothes, we have instant gratification. But that’s not adding any value to our lives, right? That’s only a short blip. Right?
So if you can think of your marketing investment and your budget both as a checkbook and a long term investment account, you do have to do transactional things that are adding little bits of value and engagement and activity right now. Lead Gen or special campaign to further retain your current clients or a campaign, a listening survey, to get the inputs you need to do those things that give you those little bits of activity and engagement, while you also are investing in longer term brand building strategies that add value to your business and that are longer plays that don’t happen overnight, they don’t happen in a quarter, they may not happen in a year. But because you’re doing the right things in the long term with your messaging strategy and how your brand shows up in the world, you’re keeping your promise better to all of your stakeholders, right? And that means much higher value over time.
So I really encourage companies to think about marketing investment not as an expense, but as a long term investment strategy with some short term activities that are operating more at that level. Any other thoughts on that piece about managing with limited resources, how do you move things forward? Darrell yeah.
Darrell Amy: The two points we’ve talked about today give clarity. Sometimes you think about creating all this content. It’s like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do? But when you think about the stages of your buyer’s journey and customer experience, and then think about the different people and the questions that they have or the friction or the obstacles, then you can start to think, okay, not just lead Gen, lead Gen is great, but every stage of this experience, what content and what could we create that would be helpful in moving this forward?
And that’s where I think when you have the perspective of buyer’s journey and ideal client, you can start to put some, at least define, okay, this is what we need. And to me when something gets defined, then it’s not quite so overwhelming. It may be a lot, but at least you know what you need. And it’s not some endless loop of never ending, at least feeling like that. Never ending content.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. And not every piece of content that you need to create to strengthen your buyer journey has to be a finished work of art. Right? It doesn’t all need to be a white paper, a case study or a full blog. There might be a step in the journey that simply is. This is where our customer success rep makes a phone call. This is where we share this video our CEO created. And it’s two minutes, you know, and then you can keep building on content.
I really encourage teams not to try to perfect their content and get too hung up on perfect because when it makes contact with the journey, you will learn and then you can evolve. You can say that the video we thought would work is not working. We need to do it differently. Needs to be a different channel, a different, you know, container for this message.
Barb Bertsch: Which is part of the power behind completing that map, because it’s going to define your gaps. You may have more content than you think you do, but until you lay it out in this format to Darrell’s point, you’re going to see where your gaps are, which is also going to inform your marketing budget.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right.
John Gamades: And along those lines, it’s also going to help you see where your customers are at and where they’re spending their time at different parts of the journey. It’s fishing season in Minnesota. You need to fish where the fish are and the customer, the buyer’s journey, helps you map that out and see where they are.
Jennifer Zick: So, yeah, that’s a great Minnesota analogy right there, John, way to bring it home for those of us here. All right, we have a couple questions from our audience, so I’m going to try to get those covered before we wrap up from Michelle. Michelle asks, do companies have a dedicated marketing person that focuses only on recruitment marketing or is this like engulfed within the broader marketing department? How are you seeing businesses set things up so that they are dedicating some resources to the employment brand?
Barb Bertsch: I think that it depends on the size of the organization, but what I’m seeing in the smaller to mid size category is it really falls between HR and marketing to be that, that person. So nobody feels dedicated just to that. But definitely being asked and questioned at the leadership level as to, well, can’t marketing do some of this for us? And what I like to call it is branding from the inside out of. So you’re taking that brand and how do we make sure that our brand is resonating externally from the inside? So how can we get our current employees to be brand advocates? So absolutely. That has to have marketing and HR playing together. Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: And I can provide a use case right from Authentic on this. So not long ago, when we were hiring for a new operating role within our business, we created a job description and we put it out to our networks and we got like no bites. We weren’t fishing where the fish were. We weren’t using the right bait. And when we asked ourselves why we weren’t getting traction with it and we looked at it, we were like, this doesn’t even reflect our brand and our culture. The right way to do this would be to have Jennifer, the CEO, do a video about who we are and what it means to join our team and what does it feel like and what are you contributing to the vision of who we are and then we rewrote the job description to be like real human talk, you know, a lot more conversational. And we put our brand and our heart into it and then we used our team to represent it.
And that’s when we had really well suited applicants come through. So, you know, you don’t have to have entire departments devoted to the employment brand, but you do have to critically look at all the touches with the stakeholders and ask, is this reflecting our purpose? Is it reflecting our heart and our soul and our culture and values? And if not, how can marketing help us make sure that shows up here? John or Darrell, anything to add?
John Gamades: I would just say I agree, and I agree with what Barb said. It’s getting the silos, breaking down the silos and getting HR and marketing talking together so they can collaborate. So.
Darrell Amy: Absolutely. And I think a lot of the things that you create, if you take the approach of purpose that we talked about earlier, the stuff you’re going to create for employee recruiting and retention is going to get used all over the place. It becomes a core part of the brand itself. But I do think it’s interesting, an interesting perspective to think of HR as a constituent audience of marketing, a customer, if you will, an internal customer of marketing. And I don’t know that I think that’s a relatively new category for a lot of companies to think in. But given the current challenge, recruiting, retaining employees, it’s a very, very smart thing to add to your mix.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. All right, we’ve got one other question from the audience, from Shannon, who’s asking, are there any specific questions that you would use in a customer survey that would get deeper and more practical feedback? Are there any kind of power play questions?
Darrell Amy: We have so many opinions and ideas on this. I’ll ask, I’ll answer this way. I think a lot of times when we survey customers, we ask, are you happy? Why’d you buy from us? What benefits are you receiving from our product? How are we doing that type of thing? That’s great. But what I really want to know is I want to understand what is top of mind for that person. I live in the B2B context, might be asking things more like, what are the top three strategic initiatives for your company right now or your department? How is the supply chain? You know, ask questions about bigger picture questions to get an idea of what’s top of mind. Because probably what’s top of mind? What they’re thinking about while they’re driving to work in the morning, what they’re thinking about in the middle of the night is not what you do. It’s probably not. It’s probably some bigger macro level issue and how it affects their business.
So if you can be the one, if you want to get through the filter, if you can be the one that is talking about the bigger issues from the business perspective and then building the bridge to what you do, I think you’re going to do much better. And I think we neglect that business level type of conversation with a lot of our clients. And in doing that, we miss a lot of the gold that would allow us to communicate with our prospects better.
Barb Bertsch: Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: Can I ask, I’m going to throw an audience question out at all of you. How do you all feel about the use of a net promoter score as the vehicle to understand how your customer is feeling about their relationship with you? NPS, any fans? Any.
Darrell Amy: So, boy, I can talk about this at length.
Jennifer Zick: You’ve got 1 minute to respond and then we break for poll.
Darrell Amy: Here’s the deal. I think net promoters keep doing it. It’s wonderful. But I mean, really, what percent of your clients ever answer that question? It’s usually a very small percentage. So if that is the only way you’ve got your finger on the pulse of what’s going on with your client base, you may be able to pat yourself on the back and go, we’ve got a better net promoter score than Apple, which by the way, so many companies find a way to say that. But in reality, I think it’s only a small indicator. I think we got to do more than just put that question out there. That’s my opinion.
John Gamades: Totally agree.
Barb Bertsch: I think back in the day it probably was a good indicator, you know, would you recommend so and so for. But things have changed so much. I don’t think that one question, to Darrell’s point, is going to get you where you really want to know.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, you got to build upon it. You guys, we could talk for a couple more hours and keep the energy up, but our people are only committed until the top of the hour, so. So we’re going to go ahead and launch our poll participants. Thank you so much for joining us today. There’s a live poll that’s coming up with three quick questions.
Tara, who’s helping us on the back end, hopefully can get that poll launched or confirmed. And I want you all, if you can, mark your calendars. We’re going to be back again with another Authentic Growth webinar on July 28. That’s also a Thursday, same time. We’ll soon be announcing our topic and our lineup of panelists for that event. And we just are so grateful that all of you have made time to join us today. Thank you for the kind comments coming through the chat. Thank you for your time. And panelists, thank you for sharing your wisdom, your time, your energy with all of us today.
I’m just so grateful that you’re all in our circle at Authentic and honored that you’d be here with us today. And we’re all going to get dropped off this call panelists, when we close this webinar. But I’d love to just, I’ll circle back with all of you to make sure I hear your final thoughts, too. So thank you. Thank you, everybody. We’ll see you again soon. Go forth, shine your light. Be a blessing.
Want more practical tips on employer branding strategy? Check out this blog post!
