What Are The Customer Lifecycle Stages

The Buyer's Journey In 7 Steps

The lifecycle stages of the buyer's journey are important to understand if you want to improve your marketing strategy. Each stage requires different types of activities and are key to creating a great buying experience and gaining more customers.

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Problem Awareness

Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile's Awareness

The Awareness Stage is the first step in the buyer's journey. The Awareness Stage is the first impression someone will have with your brand and will affect how they think about your software platform before any of your actual teams even speaks to them.

This means that the first advertisement, display banner, LinkedIn message, email, or social media post needs to be putting your best foot forward. You may have heard it before, "you only get one chance to make a first impression."

In this first stage, you're trying to understand where your buyer's mind is. Are they aware they have a problem, are they aware of possible solutions, and is there an interest in finding a product to solve their problem?

Product Interest

Engaging With Prospects & Capturing Interest

While the Interest Stage is a great place to be, it is also important to encourage customers to move through the stages. How do you stimulate this change? Well, that's where your marketing efforts come into play.

The best way to encourage someone at this stage is not through a hard sell but rather by providing relevant and useful content that focuses on solving their problem but doesn't focus on selling your particular solution. This stage is all ungated content.

This can be anything from an article on your company's blog, an infographic, a video, or a report. The more appealing your content is, the more likely people will engage with it, and remember your brand, and when there's something people want badly enough, they'll consider taking action!

Product Consideration

Informing Prospect Of Results & Capabilities

The Product Consideration Stage is where prospects are actively looking for a solution and there is an intent to buy. They may have already identified their need to you or you know they are exploring other competitors.

At this stage, the prospect is deciding between different options that include your competitors or ways of solving their problems internally.

The customer is interested in learning more about the software platform you have to offer so in this stage it's about making bold claims about the functions, emotions and status prospects will gain when they choose your platform.

Product Evaluation

Understanding The Prospects Goals & Needs

At this Product Evaluation Stage, the buyer is evaluating if your software will get them the results they are working towards.

During this evaluation, they'll check numerous resources to get feedback on your software. They may check popular review websites like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, SoftwareAdvice, GetApp, or SourceForge to see what other people in their position are saying about your solution. They could also talk directly with peers to see what software they used for the problem they were trying to solve.

The key here is completely understanding the goals and needs your prospect is trying to solve and communicating your software claims results in the same language your prospect speaks, this is called the echo effect.

Product Purchase

Close The Deal & Promise Measurable Results

The Product Purchase Stage, as a business owner, is the best stage when the prospect buys your software. If this stage is done well, the prospect trusts that your platform is going to solve their problem and exceed certain claim(s).

At this point in the buyer's journey, your job is to deliver on those claims and exceed the customer's expectations. This means the journey doesn't stop once they become a customer.

Customer Support

Customer Onboarding, Quick Wins & Show The Value

Once someone becomes a customer, you should have a customer success team that onboard each new customer onto the platform and aligns the onboarding journey to match the claims you shared during the sales and marketing conversations.

By focusing on the claims during onboarding will ensure that the customers get quick wins, and achieves the success you promised. Assisting them in this process first-hand will ensure that it's done quickly which should leave them feeling excited because they were able to solve their problems.

Customer Advocacy

Gain Referrals, Retention & Upselling

If the onboarding process is done well, you should have a customer who is excited and enthusiastic about sharing your platform with their peers and others they know who are going through similar problems.

Asking them to share referrals, and reviews, and converting their journey into a case study will allow you to have more proof for prospects that you can deliver on your promises.

Afterward, focusing on retaining your customers for a long time by continuing to show them other parts of your platform to explore to get additional value will drive up their lifetime value.

More importantly, if you want to drive revenue even more, figure out ways to add additional functionality to your platform and upsell your existing customer base.

Concluding Thoughts On The Lifecycle Stages

Knowing how to market your platform and ideas is an art and science. The more you understand about the stages of the buyer's journey, the easier it will be for you to create effective marketing strategies that drive results as well as know the weaknesses in your process.

Keeping The Prospect In Control

As you go through each stage in the buyer's journey, it's important to understand what your customers are thinking and feeling.

You might think the customer is interested and move straight to purchase, but if they are not ready, you're going to meet resistance or possible backlash.

In fact, some prospects won't ever make a purchase and are just researching how they could do what you do internally. With this in mind, you need to prepare for every possible scenario and adapt your sales and marketing strategy accordingly as you discover more and more about each prospect.

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