Customer Buying Journey - How Customers Buy and Why They Don't - with Martyn Lewis

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Welcome to today's question and answer session. I'm pleased to be joined by Martyn Lewis. He's the CEO and founder of Market Partners, and also the author of a very compelling book on the customer buyer journey, and specifically the DNA and how you map and manage the buyer journey. I'm Ray Wright. I'm the founder and CEO of RevOpSquared. And I'll just go ahead and turn it over to Martyn, let him induce himself, but we'll get right into the top four questions we're going to be asking today.

**Martyn Lewis** (0:29)
Thanks, Ray. Pleasure to be here. And yes, I'm Martyn Lewis. I founded Market Partners 20 years ago. After 20 years in corporate sales as sales manager, VP marketing, VP sales, and finally CEO with 700 salespeople working for me. And the matter of sales process and the most efficient, effective, productive way to sell has been a passion of mine forever.

**Ray Rike** (0:53)
Well, Martyn, I know that when I first met you and I read your book, I was really compelled, especially about the framework that you built for mapping and managing the buyer journey. But today is not the normal time. Before we knew about things like Shelter in Place and Dr. Fauci and the three stages of reopening our economy, everyone was talking about the buyer journey and how we need to better map our customer acquisition process to the buyer journey. But you and I have a little bit more experience than some people in the industry. We've lived through 102 and again through 8 and 9 I guess the first question I wanted to ask is, can you tell me a little bit about what's the philosophy behind mapping the buyer journey in the book that you wrote?

**Martyn Lewis** (1:41)
Well, yeah, right. As I said, self-process has always been a passion of mine. About 18 years ago, we were working with a client. We always looked at how our clients were selling and what was working, what their best practices were, and that client asked me to interview some of their customers. I thought, well, that's perhaps a good idea. We started talking to their customers and we found out a lot of things about asking their customers how they were buying and why they weren't. That started to become what we did.
About 10 years ago, we found that we'd actually talked to over a thousand buyers about how they buy across a broad section of industries and offerings. And we kind of realized there's some revelations in what we're doing. The first thing, and as a salesperson, as somebody that was kind of so passionate about the sales process, the first thing is we realized, perhaps obviously, that buyers don't buy as a result of the sales process. They buy as a result of the buying process. So the only process that actually gets you somewhere is the buying process. We also found that they don't buy rationally.
That if you put a great offer in front of them, and you show them how your offering can save them money, and the ROI would be nine months or whatever it is, they don't just sign up. There's many reasons that they don't buy what would appear to be rationally and economically. We also realized that the hard work that goes on in the buying journey, this is absolutely key. Hard work that goes on in the buying journey is after somebody in the company has said this is something we should do. It's often known as the champion in sales parlance. Once you've got the champion and the champion is saying, yes, I believe this is what we should do. When we talk to customers, that's when they think the work actually starts. That's the work of getting everybody on side, handling all the objections, handling all the issues around implementation, about change. The hard work actually occurs after somebody has said, yes, this is a good thing to do. Then the final revelation we had was when it comes to a particular market, buyers buy in a very similar way. So in a particular market, when buying a particular offering, buyers will buy in a similar way. The same kind of people will get involved. They'll do the same kind of things. They'll have the same value drivers and they'll have the same concerns. So we realized at that point that we could actually map the buying journey. If we can map it, we can then manage it. Indeed, the idea of sales process, then we said that's from the 80s. The only process that matters is the buying process. We should map it and we should manage it. That indeed led to the book a number of years ago, the realization we had that concept, that IP and the book essentially lays that out.