Demystifying your customer buyer's journey

Even if you think you are a buyer's journey master, you must take notes during this episode. We not only unpack what the buyer's journey is and how it connects to all of the great content you're creating ... 

We also talk about ... 

• What the true function of content is in your buyer's journey.  Max unpacks this in a way that reminds us that while the buyer's journey isn't rocket science, it's easy to look at it the completely wrong way with your content.
• How the buyer's journey relates to sales and the sales process – because Devyn has a lot of great takeaways on how to use the buyer's journey to create a better strategy.
• In my effort to always stay on-brand, I talk about the human side of the buyer's journey, because it's all about your customer, right?  
• For you seasoned inbounders, we also spend time debunking some of the most insidious buyer's journey myths that may be holding you back.

... and we may or may not have had the first official HubHeroes disagreement? There's only one way to find out! 

Resources for this episode

Some of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... 

• You've gotta go back and check out the second episode – what the heck is great content?! (HubHeroes, Ep. 2)
• What is the buyer's journey?
• If you have questions about your current HubSpot strategy, I've got your back
• Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?!

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Remember, you don't control the buyer's journey, your customers do. Heck, it's their journey, right? So, if you remember nothing else today, let it be this – if you're unsure if you're doing the right thing (sending that email, pushing that piece of content to someone), ask yourself, "Have I earned the right to do this?" Yes, you're facilitating the journey of your buyers, but you have to earn their trust along the way.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT 

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.

Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording.

This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

George B. Thomas: So I'm not even sure how to start because I'm still giggling. By the way, just so everybody on this episode knows, I am gonna clip out what happened during the intro of that and just put it on the Internet because, oh my gosh, it's crazy. Speaking of crazy, it's funny to think about that we're gonna have a conversation around buyer's journey or the buyer's journey today. Because if you've been doing inbound since 2010, 2011, 2012, whenever, you're like, oh my gosh. I've heard about buyer's journey or the buyer's journey so much and so many times.

But have you heard about it? How we're gonna talk about it? Because we're gonna bring out some things that we don't think are stated enough or maybe even thought about. And honestly, here's where I go with this gentleman is today is somebody's day 1. Today, somebody purchased HubSpot.

They just learned about the inbound strategy, and they're like, the buyers whoop, and we're gonna help them out right here, right now. So let's start very at the top of this conversation, kind of the foundational piece. Historically, when you 2 were training folks, and you had to talk about this framework, this methodology, the buyer's journey, how did you actually teach it? What did you talk about?

Max Cohen: And I'm hoping for anyone listening to this, if you haven't listened to episode 2 first, go listen to episode 2, then listen to this one. Because we talked a lot about the idea of what you're doing and attract and the idea of what good content is, goals, challenges, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We might have even, like, mentioned buyer personas at some point. The way that I always kind of framed up what the buyer's journey is, is really as a tool to help you explain what should your content be doing. What is the change in mindset?

What is the mindset of your prospect, and what do you need to be doing with your content versus just making sure it's valuable. Because the whole idea of solving for a goal or a challenge, at every single stage of the buyer's journey, yeah, you wanna make sure your content's doing that. But there is this mindset shift that you have to be facilitating with your content to really get someone to a place where it makes sense for you to eventually say, hey. We got this product that solves for a problem. But the fact of the matter is is if you haven't already figured out that you have that problem yet, US marketers don't really have a right to say, hey.

You should buy our product. The buyer's journey is really kind of like utility. You can kinda it's like an extra layer you can put over your content to kinda gut check yourself and say, what am I actually trying to do with this content? What mindset change am I trying to facilitate? So on so forth.

George B. Thomas: Well, and it's interesting. Right? It's interesting because, Max, if I unpack just for 2 hot seconds, the fact that you actually went marketing and content. K? I wanna sum that up for a second.

Now, Devin, when you think about the buyer's journey, where does your brain go? How have you historically talked about it?

Devyn Bellamy: I usually talk about it from a sales perspective. Mhmm. So when salespeople are talking about what they can do for somebody, it's like Max said, a lot of times people aren't even aware that the problem that you're solving is a problem, or they're, like, tangentially aware. They're aware of something that's problem adjacent. They might be aware of a symptom of the problem.

They might even be trying to solve for that symptom, but not getting at the root of the issue, not even knowing where to begin. And so having a conversation about the buyer's journey when I'm talking to people that I'm I'm training, I say you think of it as where you're first going to find out the awareness phase, understanding for you, understanding what the person's problem is, and then helping the other person understand what the problem is. And that happens through a conversation. And then the consideration phase is when we're talking about the different ways you can go about solving the problem. Because, you know, we're all Hub Spot fanboys here.

We're gonna talk about Hub Spot until we're blue in the face. But the fact of the matter is there are a number of different ways and a number of different tools that you can use to solve your problem. And there are a lot of methodologies, a lot of different things that you can implement that will get you to your goal. Of course, we as HubSpot fanboys always say HubSpot's the best because it is. But, you know, that's just our biased professional and expert opinions that it is.

So, you know, take it for what it's worth. But then there is the decision phase. So now we've talked about and identified what the problem is. We've talked about different ways to go about solving the problem. Now let's talk about what tool we're going to use in order to solve this problem.

If you wanna talk about just using just literally generic tools, you have piece of wood that you wanna fasten to other piece of wood. That's the awareness problem. And then the consideration is, like, well, how can I do this? I can use a hammer and nail or or I can use a drill and a drill bit. And then we talk about the decision phase where it's, like, yeah, we can go hammer and nail.

But, you know, if we use a screw, it's really gonna hang on to the wood better. So you know what? I'm gonna buy a screw. That is, in a nutshell, the buyer's journey.

George B. Thomas: So here's the thing. I love that you actually went, Max, into marketing and content. Devin, I love that you went into sales, and I love that we kind of did this high overarching awareness consideration decision. Because here's the thing, I actually don't talk about it in either way. Like, yes.

It's all of those things. But when I talk about the buyer's journey, I say this. It's something that we all do. It's not HubSpot specific, but man, do I love to map it out in HubSpot. But it's something that we all do.

It's an unconscious thing that human beings do. Let me explain for instance, and I got a couple little stories I like to tell. 1, you're on vacation with your other half. You are at the beach. There's a sunset.

The ocean is, like, soft and the you know, a and it's just like beautiful. You lean in to get a kiss, all of a sudden you get the Heisman. You are aware that you have a problem. That's right. Bad breath.

Lord Black hits again. Bad breath. So what do you do? You run over to the local store and you consider mints or gum Mhmm. Or something else.

But you then go to the cashier, you put the mints on there, and you make a decision. You hand them your money. Now that's a very small thing. It's like a dollar 25, 2 dollar. I don't know now.

Maybe maybe $7 for some mints pretty soon, but it's a it's a small purchase. But you were aware, bad breath. You considered what do I need to fix it. You decided. You got your

Max Cohen: wallet out

George B. Thomas: and you paid. Same thing on an extremely large purchase. You're driving down the road. You happen to be driving in your 1989 Toyota, and all of a sudden, you're aware that you have a problem because there is a transmission laying on the freeway behind where you once were driving. Now you are aware, I am not going anywhere anytime soon.

So do I just start walking? Do I get an Uber? Do I call the tow truck? What do I do? Also, your brain then goes into well, do I wanna get it repaired?

Do I wanna buy a new car? You're considering all of these things and you decide, maybe I want a new 2022 Lexus. No. I'm just kidding. I don't know what you decide you wanna do, but small or large, it is about the consumer.

It is about you, the human. It is a thing that we unconsciously do. So should sales be leaning into it? Yes. Should marketing be leveraging it?

Yes. Should service be paying attention to it? Yes. And by the way, I haven't even mentioned that there's an emotion that you're feeling across each one of these phases that you're going through on a daily

Max Cohen: journey is not rocket science. It is just a blown out version of basic human decision making. And you go through probably millions of buyers journeys every day in your own life. You go, something's not okay. You figure out what's not okay.

You make the quick decision on how you wanna solve the problem, and then you choose the thing that's gonna do it. So, like, sometimes it's very fast, sometimes certain parts of it are very quick and other parts are longer. But all it is is basic human decision making. Those two examples of gum and buying a car, same idea. The other, like, big thing to kinda think about here, a lot of marketers are only operating in that decision stage.

Going back to your gum example, in the consideration stage, you were like, I could get gum or I could get mints, or I could go buy toothpaste. Whatever you ended up choosing, that's your consideration stage. In the decision stage, that's where you're saying, okay, I've decided I want mints, but am I going to go with Tic Tac or Mentos? Depending on how good the marketing of Tic Tac and Mentos is in the decision stage, that might help you make your your choice. The problem with most marketers these days is they spend 99% of their time on, like, the content creation that they're doing and the marketing they're doing just talking about the decision stage.

Because we're all trained to make content or or media or whatever about how awesome our product is and why it's better than our competitor. All this other stuff, because traditionally, that's what we've been doing. Traditionally, that's what that's what advertising has been forever. The problem is the amount of people that are already in their decision stage, where they've already figured out what their problem is, They've decided on the way that they wanna solve it. Now they're saying, who does this specific thing the best?

The amount of people that are already there is minuscule compared to the amount of folks in your audience or potential audience that are in those awareness and consideration stage phases, where they don't even know they have a problem. They don't know the way to solve it. The thing that I always kinda come back to is the idea of earning the right. I haven't earned the right to tell you my product is better than my competitors until I have shown you that our type, our kind of solution or product or chewing gum or whatever is the best way to solve your problem compared to the other ways you could solve it. And I have no business or any right to tell you this is the best way for you to solve a problem if I don't know you already have that problem yet.

And I haven't done the leg work to help you figure out what your problem is. So it's like these layers of earning the right to communicate in a certain way because people are in all different stages of it, but the vast majority of them are in awareness and consideration. Which is why you need to stop focusing just on your decision stage content and shift your focus up that buyer's journey into the awareness and consideration.

George B. Thomas: It's good. No. Because I as you're talking, I'm like, imagine going into the doctor's office and the doctor's like, I think we should amputate. Yo. Woah.

Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Let's back up, doc.

Devin, what are your thoughts?

Devyn Bellamy: My thing is that when we're talking about and this was something, that I mentioned in the last episode where, we're talking about not getting, you know, just focusing, getting hyper focused on the problems to actually solve, but talking about the, industry in general and being a thought leader on the industry, that is huge when it comes to awareness, level content. So True. The thing is is that when I mentioned earlier is that the problems that they might be aware of are adjacent to the problems you're trying to solve. They might not be aware of the problems you solve. You might not know that you have bad breath.

You might just be walking around burning people's eyebrows off, and they're just too polite to say anything. The thing is is that creating if you're talking about content, creating content that talks about industry challenges in general might bring someone to a point where they're like, oh my goodness. I didn't even think about that as an issue. I'd like to talk about I did a specifically buyer's journey focused campaign, some years ago, and and I'm kind of proud of it. What happened was that the the the goal was to get auto repair shop owners to buy this piece of software that gives these millennials access to seeing what's wrong with their car on their phone.

We could just tell them it's like, hey. You need to start sending out text with PDFs of inspection reports, And they could have told me what to go do with myself. If I'm telling them from the awareness phase is like, hey. There's a whole new market out there of these people who were just figuring out how to get their cars taken care of and don't have the kind of one to one relationship with their mechanics and and trust of a mechanic like people used to when they were older. And it's like, okay, so how can you market to these people?

Social media. So that was like the awareness. Here's how you market to younger people on social media, being an auto repair shop. Was it the problem that we solved? No.

But it was what used to be called top of the funnel content, where it was just content that made people aware of an issue, even if it's something that's not directly related to the problem we solve. The thing is is that what we brought it down to was the next step was, oh, hey. You know, there are ways other ways that you can connect with these young people as well, not just using social media. So now they're considering how to connect with young people. We made the problem of awareness that, you know, there are issues connecting young people.

Now we need to talk about the different tools you can use. And then the decision phase, oh, by the way, this is one of the tools that you can use that we do. Here's how it solves your problem of connecting to these people, which was the awareness that we brought up initially, which had nothing to do with what we actually sold. That's the path, and it worked really well and made lots of money, and people came and bought stuff and lived happily ever after. The the the point is is that when you're dealing with content, when you're talking with people, you have to be more open minded about what they need what they need to solve as a problem.

Max Cohen: And Yes.

Devyn Bellamy: By leading them down the buyer's journey, by leading them down that path, you can bring them to how you're solving the problem, and then also help them become more aware of the larger picture. Mhmm. And they'll be eternally grateful for that even if you're not solving the entire larger big picture problem.

Max Cohen: If I could just, like, add something in there too. You don't have to over engineer it to think that, oh, I have to have an awareness piece of content that's, like, totally trying to get them to change their mind to perfectly slot them into this arc that I have in the consideration stage, which is going to then mold their brains then go to a place where they have to buy something. You could make a piece of awareness stage content that's just helping someone, like, figure out a problem in their industry that doesn't have to directly tied us down the line selling them something. Because again, a big piece of this is building community, building thought leadership, genuinely educating people so you have trust built. You don't have to say this must lead down a perfectly clean arc down to a purchasing point.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

George B. Thomas: Oh. So here's the thing. Disagree. So so so here's the thing so here's the thing. I'll say yes, and because I don't really like disagreements.

And I agree with you, Max, that sometimes it can just be a stand alone article. However, as a marketer, as a strategist, as a business owner, as somebody that understands the power of story for the humans that are going through a journey called the buyer's journey. There is a magic place that you can get when you start to think about content in threes. By the way, I do this with blog articles. I do this with videos.

I do this with lead generation opportunities. I think to myself, how can I craft an amazing piece of awareness content that the end or somewhere in that article links to the consideration article, what happens in act 3? The happy ending. They find the princess. They find the prince.

They find the solution to the problem that they're facing. And it's because I've taken the time to craft 3 pieces of content that threaded together tell the entire that they've actually been able to either sit and do at one sitting or bookmark and do over multiple sittings. And again, think about your lead conversion opportunities. When I talk about a pillar page, I talk about well, make sure you have an awareness lead conversion opportunity. Make sure you have a consideration lead conversion opportunity.

Make sure you have a decision towards the bottom of the pillar page conversion opportunity because now we're mapping to their needs to where they are in the journey that they're actually placing. So not disagree. Not every piece has to have that, but that is definitely a content model that I think people need to lean into. Now I also am gonna backtrack off of that for one hot second because, Devin, you said and I love this, and we always go in this direction. A problem they solve.

I can tell you in the multiverse, there is another type of buyer's journey that I wish people would start to think about creating. Mhmm. Because it doesn't always have to be about a problem. Many times, it can be about an aspiration. Mhmm.

Where are they trying to get, and what awareness problem is stopping them from getting to the mountain top. What do they have to consider to pack in their backpack and put on their feet to climb that mountain to what they're trying to get to? How do we get them to that decision phase of an now I am a professional speaker. Now I am a business owner. Now I am £100 lighter.

Whatever it may be. Yeah. How do we start to think about problem and aspirational buyers' journeys that we can put people through?

Devyn Bellamy: My thing is that when you start there, and I I do, encourage people looking at that, one of the things that you have to take into consideration is that you can open a can of worms in a good way. Where you can, by pointing out or setting a goal, then what happens is that you have more goals. Or if you're pointing out a problem, then you have more problems that are like a subset from this. It's like, so okay. I wanna get here, so I need to accomplish a, b, c, and d.

And so now we're back to the awareness phase on a, b, c, and d. It's one of those things when you're doing a content exercise, HubSpot actually has a really cool tool for it, when you are trying to identify topics, what you can do is you can start looking at your core topic and then branching off of that topic and looking at things that are related to it. Now the the point of the exercise ideally is to identify long tail keywords and, you know, and you get into your little SEO rabbit hole and push up on your glasses and. But what you really wanna do is you want to look at what's related to the goals and the aspirations or the problems that you're trying to solve. Understanding that it's not a linear process or, I heard George say it's spaghetti.

Basically, you started in one place, and then you have so many different paths you can take and so many different things that you can address just coming off of that one thing.

George B. Thomas: Yes. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, it's spaghetti. It is spaghetti. We are all crazy, weird, unique human beings that bob and weave and twist and turn, and it is oh, god.

It is not a linear path. Max, couple

Max Cohen: things. 1, I don't think you can make an honest attempt to, like, get a good understanding of what people are searching for or concerned with in the awareness and consideration stage if you don't do that. We talked a lot about the idea of goals and challenges. All this comes back to building your buyer persona. People over complicate buyer personas like crazy.

I can't tell you how many people have been like, here here's like a little template, go build a buyer persona or whatever, and they come back and they say, like, all the information they have was like, this is how much money we think they make a year, and they're this educated, and this is their job title, and their goal is that we wanna sell them software. That's the challenge. And it's like, no. No. No.

No.

Devyn Bellamy: No. No. No.

Max Cohen: No. No. If if for anyone, like, watching this right now, a buyer's like, a a very easy way to get started with a buyer persona so you can get that out of the way and start creating content is a list of goals and challenges, and that's it. Because that completely informs what people are searching for online. They have a goal they're trying to achieve.

So that aspiration you just talked about, George. They're on the way to achieving that goal. They're hitting a bunch of challenges that are getting in the way. They're also trying to figure out ways that they can hit that goal faster or just figuring out what the path is. It's all of those things that would fall into awareness stage content around getting to that goal or consideration stage content around solving for a certain challenge.

So I don't even think you can start touching the the buyer's journey without thinking about those goals and aspirations because that should inform what they would be doing. So for example, instead of paying some marketing firm to go out and do a bunch of, like, research, if you know you're selling to the owners of small mechanic companies, you can probably or mechanic companies, small mechanic shops. I don't know. Auto body shops. Whatever.

Let's say you sell software to auto body shops. If you know that you're trying to reach the owners of auto body shops, you can probably come up with some pretty good educated speculation around what their goals and aspirations are. They're trying to run a successful auto shop like auto body shop. That's like, one of their bigger goals. You know, maybe some of them wanna franchise.

Maybe some of them just wanna get more whatever. In general, you can probably safely assume they wanna grow their operate as successful whatever type of business it is. From there, you can then start thinking, well, it's like, alright. What are the potential problems that someone might face going there even if they don't even know that those are problems? And what are some symptoms of an issue they might face trying to achieve that goal?

That's where all your inspiration for awareness and consideration for come from. Again, that aspiration piece is like you I I don't think you can do it without that. Like, you have to have that in your your buyer's persona or whatever you wanna call it, your ideal customer profile. Like, I don't care. That should heavily inform all of this from a goals and aspiration perspective.

Devyn Bellamy: I wanna jump in real quick. People will turn around and ask, so so then why are the demographic questions on there if they're not necessary? They're not necessary for the topics, but what you have to consider take into consideration but most important thing with that content is how you say it. You don't talk to a mechanic the same way you talk to a doctor. And so that's when that information comes into play.

Regardless of the person's education level, regardless of what colloquialisms, vernacular jokes, whatever cultural norms may apply to this person, be it racial identity, professional identity, whatever it is, if you aren't solving for their problems, then you're missing a step. You need to know what you're solving for before you figure out who you're talking to and how. Yes.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yes. And listeners, fellow hub heroes, let me just say this. We dipped our toes into buyer personas, and we're gonna come real quick back out of it because today's conversation is the buyer's journey. By the way, I flipped to our notes.

Hashtag strategy for the win. Next week's episode is actually about buyer personas. Who are they anyway? Where I'm actually gonna get a chance to talk real deep about how I teach people to do personas when they're first starting with HubSpot, and it's gonna be a real interesting conversation. But getting back on today and the buyer's journey, why and all of the things we've talked about might be the answer to this, but I wanna dig a little bit deeper.

By the way, this whole almost 30 minutes conversation has been based off the, what

Devyn Bellamy: the heck is the buyer

George B. Thomas: why is it vitally important for anybody listening to this to pay attention to?

Max Cohen: Is that a question to ask?

George B. Thomas: Well, there's nobody else in the room. True.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, for me, it's a structural sort of guardrail for you to view. Okay. What am I tactically doing with my content? And I think the only other thing I wanna, like, make sure I I, like, get in here is an easier way to kinda synthesize what you should be doing when you think about these different stages.

Because it's one thing to understand the definitions of each stages. And I think we've done a pretty good job about that so far. To recap for anyone who hasn't caught it, awareness stage, I have I don't know what my problem is, but I have symptoms. I'm trying to figure it out. Consideration stages, I know what my problems is, and I wanna figure out the best way to solve it.

Decision stages, I know how I'm gonna solve it. Who's gonna do it best? It's one thing to, like, know those 3 stages, but I've still had people know the stages, but that get confused on how that should guide them. Something that I've preached about for a long time to really try to simplify this is that there's 2 sort of mindsets you need to be thinking about when you're using the buyer's journey. There's the mindset that your potential customer is in that's doing all this research and going through this whole phase, and then knowing that there's the mindset that have how you should be acting as the marketer when you're creating the content.

What's the basic sentence you can tell yourself to ensure the content you're creating is doing its job? So in the awareness stage, the mindset of that buyer is, I don't know what my problem is yet, but I'm trying to figure it out. So you as a marketer, when you create content, you should be saying, this piece of content should be helping them figure out what their problem is. And if it's not doing that, the content that is gonna do that. In the consideration stage, they're going, alright.

I know what my problem is. Who does it best? So your content as the marketer, your your mindset as the marketer is, I need to create content that helps people how to figure out the best ways to solve those problems. This is how you should solve your problem. Not why our product's great, why our category is great, or the way we solve the problem is great.

And then in the decision stage, the mindset of the buyer is, I know how I wanna solve it. Who does it best? To you as the marketer should be saying, this is why we do it the best. The marketers are already pretty good at that or maybe you're not so good at it, but the marketers are majority already doing this. They're comparing their product to other things, all that other kind of stuff.

They're saying why their features are so good, da da da. All the stuff you're used to doing. So that decision stage should be pretty easy for people relatively, but it's the mindset of the first two that's tougher.

George B. Thomas: I'm gonna jump in here for a second because I wanna I wanna piggyback on something that came to my brain when you said, well, it should be the easiest because it's what you've already been doing. But since it's already what you've been doing, then it's also the easiest place to get better. And so the pro tip on this decision stage that you've already been doing is I would give these words to you, please, by all that is holy, learn the subtle sell. There is a way to have other people talk about you. There's a way to say things that isn't the 2 by 4 moment where the customer is picking themselves off the ground going, well, that didn't feel well at all.

Like, let me see if somebody else talks about this in a more eloquent, more customer focused way. Instead of you just telling all of the features, talk about the benefits. Mhmm. Again, it is about the buyer. It is about the ideal client profile.

It is about the human. And if you position the good things that you do in a way that what is in it for me from the human perspective, then all of a sudden this subtle cell becomes so much easier to pull off. Max, I love that entire section. By the way, I would say maybe that's a rewind section where people listen to that again because there's so much there. And I can't wait to get I'm gonna give Devin some time to unpack his thoughts on what just went down, but I wanna make sure we spend 5 or 10 minutes kind of debunking the buyer journey miss that we hate.

We'll get into that because I'm gonna backtrack kind of into what you were talking about, and I wanna talk about how there's layer 2, 3, and 4 of what you just unpacked. So listeners, rewind, relisten to that, jot some notes down, get ready for some very interesting conversations moving forward. But, Devin, unpack where your brain is right now on this conversation of the buyer's journey.

Devyn Bellamy: Cool. So the buyer's journey, Max absolutely hit it on the head from the marketing side. Let me talk a bit about it from the sales perspective. I know it's cliched, as salespeople, you hear you don't ask for a wedding on the first date. But so many do and Mhmm.

Don't realize it because the problem is care more about what you have going on than what's going on with your prospect. And and I know it seems counterintuitive because you have quotas and deadlines and thresholds and really wanna get to president's club and all that good stuff. The thing is that you have to take into consideration that this conversation isn't about you. You are here to add value. Hopefully, they give you money to add value.

But at the end of the day, every interaction you need to have, the you When you are doing a conversation about awareness, the most important thing you can do is listen and ask probing questions, Even if they tend to go on a tangent or outside of what it is that you're trying to solve for, talk to them and then help them understand what's wrong. And not just understand what's wrong from the perspective of what you do, but understand what's wrong, period, from the perspective of your expertise. Because you know what's going on in your field, because you are a student of the game, and you read your marketing department's content. That's how you get through with the awareness. Then consideration, have a candid conversation where you're not the hero of the story.

Have a candid conversation where you're talking about the problems itself and the different ways to go about solving the problems. Your first instinct is to talk about why you're so awesome and why this thing is the best thing on the planet. Oh my goodness. You need to be doing this because this is how I make money. That's not the case.

The number one place where you see this done wrong is in email. Or going past email now, it's in mails and Linkedin. When some random person is going to ask you about buying a list or saying, hey. I noticed you don't have a logo. Dude, I work at HubSpot.

We have a logo. I don't know what you were looking at, but you just came and just told me about everything you do. And you're an accountant. You can do all of my accounting for me. You don't even know what my problems are.

My problems aren't accounting. My wife graduated with a degree in finance. We have a budget spreadsheet that goes back to 2,012, and I met her in 2015. No. I don't have a problem calculating any of that.

But if you would bother to have a conversation with me instead of just bashing me over the head with all the cool stuff you do, then you might have found a different thing that is an issue that I have that you have the capability to solve or, and this is the hard part, know someone else that can solve my problem. Because the thing is is that with the consideration phase, I know now know how to solve my problem. When we get into the decision phase, even if, let's say, I'm talking about email marketing, I have a number of different options to choose from. I can choose HubSpot. I can also choose Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo.

The thing is, talking to you and the amount of value that you've added to me, I'm gonna trust you in that wherever you're coming from is the direction that I need to go. So that's why I'm gonna get your service as opposed to the other ones that could very well solve my problems. Probably not as well as what you're offering me because you have given me so much value during our conversation. That's how you successfully transition from the decision phase to them being a customer and delight throughout the entire process.

George B. Thomas: There's 2 things that I have to unpack out of this because, 1, a dirty little secret that everybody needs to know. I love when they go on a diatribe, when they just start, like, going into left field, when they just start talking. Because many times again, dirty little secret. If you let them go, they themselves will uncover the true problem that they couldn't see, but because you're an expert you can see, swing it back into the actual conversation that everybody thought we were having, and just knock it out the park. The other piece that was just screaming in my brain was I have found historically that, especially on the sales side, if your focus is how do I help this person get 1, 5, 10 percent better from where they are right now?

And you do it in a way where you're worried about their pocketbook or their wallet more than you are yours, and you have enough self awareness to realize what their pockets are and not sell out of your own pocket. Have that ability to be like, I know this is of value to you. I know that it's in the right place for you, and I know that it's gonna get you to where you need to go instead of and you mentioned it, Devin, the quota and the gold medallion and the ring and the what no. No. No.

No. All of that will come if you have basic human principles in place to move you forward. Alright. Let's use the next, like, maybe 5 ish, 7 ish, I don't know, minutes to talk about some myths that we wish we could debunk on this episode before we send people back to their regularly scheduled days.

Devyn Bellamy: I got one. The myth that the buyer's journey is a a one way road. We've talked about how finding one problem can lead you to another. One of the things that we didn't really discuss so much is that the problem that they're trying to solve isn't actually the problem at all. They could be trying to make iterative changes to their website when it turns out that it's not about the color of your calls to action.

It's just the fact that your copy is horrible. It's the fact that no one knows what you actually do. So you can be AB testing or multivariate testing until you're blue in the face on your UI. But it's actually a completely separate issue that requires completely separate set of skills in order to accomplish because you're not a writer and you have blinders on when it comes to your customers, and you know what you do, and so you look at the website, it makes perfect sense to you, that isn't always the case. And so that would take them as far as the buyer's journey back to square 1, where we're making them a whole new level of awareness and taking them down that journey again.

Max Cohen: If I had to look at something from, like, a myth perspective, I can't tell you, like, how many people I've seen in the inbound community who like to create content and get clicks on, oh, the buyer's journey is dead. Or, actually, there are 6 steps to the buyer's journey, and then it's called this different thing. Or it's demand generation. Inbound is debt. And, like, all this kind of stuff.

And then they go and explain their strategy, and it's, like, literally the same thing. Call this, what we're talking about, whatever you want. Basic human decision making will never die. It's physics that's grained just into the way that we all operate. We all have problems, issues, challenges, goals, whatever.

We look for ways to figure out how to solve them, and then sometimes we buy something to help us do it. You can break that down into any number of steps, call those phases whatever you want. It just exists. Humans are humans and they're always gonna human. As long as you're looking at it from that perspective, I don't care what you call it.

I don't care about any of that. Just make sure your content supports that basic human decision making process. And I think also just it's not always just a selling motion. Yeah. It's called the buyer's journey because maybe some people eventually buy from you, but not all of them are gonna.

It's also just marketing. Just keep that in mind. Don't look at this as such a rigid thing. Also, don't use any of this as a way to say, like, why I can't make that next piece of content. Again, get good at creating content first, and then use this as a way to get better.

George B. Thomas: I have 2 that I'm gonna do. One's real short, sweet, and simple. One myth that I wanna debunk is that the buyer's journey is the be all end all. This is a great place to jump off and start the conversation, but if you're not also thinking about once they turn into a customer, what is the customer journey? And having that mapped out through the rest of your organization, which by the way may be customer journey and journey mapping, they might be.

Potentially, keep tuning in. They might be future episodes that we'll talk about. But here's the thing, I wanna double down and, Devin, I thought you were going in this direction. I love the direction you went in, but I wanna double down kind of in where you went, but this idea of spaghetti and Mac circling back around to your conversation that you're having. And here's the thing.

What I'm gonna say, busting the myth that it's a linear path, but the tip here, the action item is plan for the pivot. Plan for the pivot. Let me explain. I wake up in the morning, and I go make a pot of coffee. Oh, coffee pot is broken.

Crap. I go to let my dog out. Oh, dog ran away. Uh-oh. Crab.

Time to go to work. I go get to go in my car. Oh, car got stolen. The human being is always by the way, if that's your morning, I am sorry, and I will pray for you. To bed.

But

Max Cohen: Yeah. You're done at that point.

George B. Thomas: But the point is the human and and god, Max, I love that you said this. Humans are humans, and they're always humans. Well, what is that? Humans will pivot. Humans will transition into the thing that they are given and try to do the best that they can with it.

And so if you as a salesperson, as a marketing person, as a service person, as a business owner, start to think about everything that we've talked about today and plan for the pivot of the human in the journey that they're on, your content strategy, your sales strategy, your email strategy, your chat strategy, all of your strategies, which I hope you have, will be headed in the right direction. Gentlemen, any final thoughts before we end this episode?

Devyn Bellamy: Stop sending me and mills about trying to sell me stuff. I I I I hate it. If you wanna have a conversation, BDRs. Stop trying to book calls just to meet a quota. Actually, meet with someone and find out what their needs are and if they're a good fit for the AE before you book the call.

And AE, stop hitting me over the head with a demo before you even get to know me. And if I haven't said it before, stop sending me in mails. Just period. Just stop. Just like no no good comes of in mails at this point.

Max Cohen: Kinda sounds like you're you're reiterating the whole idea of earn the right to do those things.

Devyn Bellamy: You you think?

Max Cohen: I mean, that's like a good thing. It's like, one piece of advice I'd say is, like, you know, a good a good gut check for yourself is, like, have we earned the right to tell this person this yet? If if I haven't done the leg work to say this is the best way to solve it, why should I be telling you my product so great? I think that's a big piece. I think the other thing, use all these tools that we're talking about, you know, the whole idea of attracting gauge delight, buyer personas, the buyers journey.

Layer it in in the right way, but never let it get in the way of you creating content. And that's the hardest, most fundamental, biggest shift, but use all these tactics as the way to really mold that clay once you've become good at making ugly statues. So the harder part is, like, getting that statue built first, so then you could make it better over time. And the more times you do it, the more time you implement these different strategies, it'll get better over time. Don't feel like you have to do all this stuff overnight because it's never gonna work if you overwhelm yourself.

George B. Thomas: Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes dot com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes.

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