The stages a buyer goes through in your business specifically

4 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Introduction

Published journey models come with tidy stages — awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy — and they are a reasonable general description of buying. They are also not your stages. A buyer of emergency plumbing goes through two of them in four minutes. A buyer of a commercial fit-out goes through eleven, three of which involve people you will never meet.

Using the template rather than identifying your own produces a document that describes buying in general and your business not at all. Nobody can populate it, nobody uses it, and the exercise is abandoned. Finding your actual stages takes a morning and produces something people recognise.

1. The stages a buyer goes through in your business come from their behaviour

The source.

What people actually do, in what order, from your interviews and records. Not the headings from an article, and not your internal process either. Twelve customer accounts produce the stages without anybody having to invent them.

2. A stage is a change in what they are trying to do

The definition.

Working out whether they have a problem is one thing. Choosing between suppliers is another. Where the buyer's objective changes, a stage boundary exists. This test resolves most arguments about where one stage ends and the next begins.

3. Name them in the buyer's terms

The language.

"Working out what it would cost" rather than "consideration". Stages named the way a customer would describe them are recognisable to everybody in the business. Abstract stage names are also harder to populate, because nobody is sure what counts.

4. Expect between three and seven

The realistic range.

Fewer than three is not a journey. More than seven is usually a process map with the buyer's name attached, and it will not be maintained. Start at the lower end and add resolution only where a problem shows.

5. Urgency compresses stages

The variation to allow for.

An emergency purchase collapses several stages into one call. If you sell both urgent and planned work, those are two journeys and forcing them into one describes neither. The two also need different marketing entirely.

6. Some stages happen entirely without you

The uncomfortable part.

Discussion with a partner, an internal approval, a conversation with somebody in the trade. These are real stages and they belong on the map even though you cannot observe them. Naming them at least tells you what material needs to travel there.

7. Mark where the buyer changes channel

The transition points.

From search to phone, from phone to email, from email to site visit. Channel changes are where journeys break and they are invisible if the map is drawn as one continuous line. Mark each one explicitly.

8. Test the stages on somebody who does the work

The validation.

Describe them to whoever handles enquiries and ask whether that is what happens. Their corrections are usually the difference between a plausible map and an accurate one. They will also tell you which stage people get stuck in.

9. Fix the stages before measuring anything

The sequencing.

Counts, conversion rates and elapsed times all depend on stable stage definitions. Measuring first and defining afterwards produces numbers that cannot be compared.

Be careful about stages that describe your internal handovers. Passing an enquiry from reception to the estimator is a step in your process and not in the buyer's journey, and mixing the two is the commonest way these maps stop being useful.

Conclusion

Identify your own stages from what buyers actually do.

Define a stage as a change in what the buyer is trying to achieve, name them in the customer's own language, expect somewhere between three and seven, treat urgent and planned purchases as separate journeys, include the stages that happen entirely without you, mark the points where the buyer changes channel, validate the stages with whoever handles enquiries, and settle the definitions before measuring anything.