While the concept of the B2B customer’s emotional journey has been around for over 30 years, the practice of using empathy to improve the buying journey has historically been left to the B2C sector. Until recently, B2B brands have put more stock in business values, crediting objective decision making for purchase decisions and brand loyalty. While logic grounded in empirical evidence bolsters credibility, more B2B brands have come to realize the value of connecting with audiences on an emotional level — it makes them feel acknowledged and motivated to act.
Why? Because business decision makers are human, and humans are emotional. Because buying decisions often involve several stakeholders, multiplying the human factor. And because when those B2B stakeholders make purchases, they risk more than everyday consumers do: large investments, productivity, professional reputation and job security.
More importantly, however, because science says so.
Gallup’s 70/30 principal is based on research that found that 70% of decisions are driven by emotion and 30% are driven by logic. But other research suggests emotional drives may be even higher.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses two modes of thinking that occur in the brain, backed by research he performed with mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky. The first mode is fast, instinctive and emotional. The second is slower, intentional and logical. The studies revealed that people make financial decisions based 90% on emotion and only 10% on logic.
Stanford Professor of Marketing Baba Shiv believes that number could be even higher, with up to 95% of decisions being shaped unconsciously by the emotional brain system.
A study by Google and CEB Marketing revealed that B2B customers were much more emotionally connected to brands than B2C consumers. Results showed that B2C brands have an emotional connection with 10% to 40% of consumers, whereas seven of nine businesses had emotional connections with more than 50% of their business customers.
As today’s savvy B2B brands use empathy to ramp up their marketing strategies, it’s become imperative for other B2Bs to embrace customers’ emotional journeys or risk falling behind.
What is empathy?
Empathy is the ability to view a situation from someone else’s perspective. Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman identified three components of empathy: cognitive, emotional and compassionate.
- Cognitive empathy is acquiring a holistic knowledge of a person’s thoughts and feelings to accurately understand their emotions.
- Emotional empathy is the physiological response to another person’s emotions, feeling their emotions as your own.
- Compassionate empathy is what moves us to act.
How B2B brands gain empathy
Let’s discuss how a B2B company gains empathy for their business customers.
Active listening
Gain an understanding of your customers’ emotional journeys by picking up the phone and talking to customers and/or listening to recorded calls. Research shows that we’re overconfident in our listening abilities while we only retain about half of what’s said, immediately after it’s been said.
Here’s how brands can improve listening skills:
- Give your customer your full attention
- Visualize the situation from your customer’s position
- Keep an open mind — don’t judge or assume
- Don’t interrupt — wait for a pause and ask clarifying questions
- Provide feedback and validation
Research
Look at key performance indicators (KPIs) on social media, email and your website to understand how customers respond, and to what content. Pay attention to market research and customer feedback on social media, reviews and customer satisfaction surveys.
Develop a customer persona
Know who your customer is and develop a customer persona. Brands can put together a customer persona by gathering results from surveys and interviews, discussions with sales and customer service teams, analytics from websites and social media, and information from market research.
The data gathered should answer the following questions:
- What are your customer’s values? Values include professional goals, time concerns, budgets, beliefs and social relationships that determine what you communicate and how you do it.
- Where and how will they interact with you? Knowing where customers are located and what devices they use to interact with you determines what format your communication will take and what accommodations you need to make.
- What are your customers’ pain points? Know what prevents a potential client from doing business with you and what problems current clients encounter with your product/service in order to troubleshoot and eliminate these pain points. What business challenges do your clients face that your products solve?
- What influencers affect your customer’s choices? Identify who your business clients trust and where they look for information and solutions.
- What is your customer’s purchasing process? Know how buying decisions are made, where your customer stands in the decision-making process and what might prevent a purchase.
Use your customer personas as reference points to ensure your ads, emails and content will interest and accommodate your audience. Personas are also the first step toward developing an empathy map.
Develop an empathy map
An empathy map is a visual tool that teams use to better understand customers’ emotional triggers at specific stages of the journey. It evaluates the customer’s tasks, influences, risks, goals and pain points and maps what the customer sees, hears, says and does during that stage in the journey.
Before mapping the customer’s journey, know who the customer is (the persona), the stage where they are in the journey and the desired outcome. The desired outcome can be what success looks like for the customer, or what the customer needs to change or decide. Use the data gathered from active listening, KPIs and marketing research to note customer behaviors at each stage in the journey.
Once you’ve mapped the customer journey, explore what the customer thinks and feels. Unless the customer has specifically expressed certain feelings, you will infer thoughts and feelings from their behaviors.
Understanding the customer’s emotional drivers empowers brands to better understand the customer’s journey and the obstacles they encounter along the way. So armed, brands can incorporate empathy into the customer journey.
How brands incorporate empathy into the B2B customer’s emotional journey
Once B2B companies gain empathy, how do they work it into their sales and marketing processes?
- Provide empathetic responses and feedback. Responding with empathy means using understanding, validation and compassion in your response.
- Infuse empathy into your brand story. Develop a storytelling narrative that solves your customers’ pain points and humanizes your brand. Use authenticity and transparency to gain your customers’ trust.
- Develop empathetic content. Decide which emotional triggers content should respond to and write content that connects to your customer’s point of view, thoughts and feelings.
- Empathy training. Train sales, marketing and customer service staff to listen to, understand and respond to your customers with empathetic problem solving.
Guide Your Customer’s Journey With Empathy
In B2B sales and marketing, empathy involves more than just viewing a B2B situation from your customer’s perspective. It’s more than understanding what drives a decision maker to finalize a purchase. It’s listening, humanizing, building trust and being transparent and authentic about your solution. If you’re looking for assistance building empathy into your customer journey, we can help. At Elevation Marketing, we’ve been building connections between our clients and their customers for over 25 years. Contact us to see how our marketing strategies can help you tap into your customer’s emotional drivers.
