Hacking the B2B Customer's Journey

Understanding Product Market Fit

Hey everybody welcome back to the Product Market Fit Newsletter 🚀

My name is Guillermo Flor and I write this weekly newsletter to help founders, growth professionals and product people to grow & fund their companies.

This week I wanted to talk about how people make the B2B buying decisions.

This is paramount to create an effective go to market strategy.

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But before, as always, some nice beats to help you enjoy the read ☕

News!

• I’m opening up 2 hours of free weekly consulting for startups fundraising or going to market. Find a slot here. (Soon to release Podcast)

• Inbound website is live!

In this newsletter I want to talk about something that I feel many early stage founder struggle with: understanding how customers make buying decisions.

This is critical when creating a good go to market strategy. Many startups think it’s all about creating a sales machine, generating leads, cold call and close.

That’s cool and all, but you have to start with understanding how your customer behaves!

The Buyer’s Journey

1. I have a Problem

The first step of any customer’s journey is realizing they have a problem.

The realization can come from two different sources:

1. I realize I have a problem:

   For example: a sales rep can’t keep track of his commercial calls and realizes the need for a CRM

2. I don’t know I have a problem (I don’t know what I don’t know)
   For example: a marketing manager that doesn’t know that Tik Tok is the best channel to market his company right now.

2. I’m going to research

Now, once the customer realizes to have a problem, if the problem is important and urgent enough, it will start looking for solutions. That’s the research phase.

How do they do it? Well, think about how you’d do it

1. Google: still the main search engine people use to look for solutions. However, there are upcoming search engines like Perplexity that can be an opportunity

2. Social Media: Social Media has become a great channel to learn about B2B

3. Asking friends or people that are experts in the field: trust is the most important thing when trying to solve any problem.

   Most people prefer asking for help to people they know than to people they don’t know, even if the people they know have a worse solution than the people that they don’t know.

3. Now that I research, let me see if it works

So, depending on the level of sophiistication of the problem and the complexity of implementation of the solution, customers will try to validate solutions two different ways:

1. Trying the solutions on their own: you’ll see this example in most SaaS companies targeting SMBEs, with the free trial.

2. Talking to experts/consultants that will analyze the company’s problem and will explain the potential customer how they would implement a solution. This is very typical for companies targeting big businesses or enterprises.

4. Now that I trust it works, I’ll buy

Customers purchase when they:
1. Have a Problem
2. Need a solution now
3. Trust the solution will solve your problem
4. Can Pay the Solution

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