When does the sales process really start?
Generally, we hear three different answers from different parts of an organization:
- Leadership teams see the process starting when the phone rings or an email arrives.
- Sales teams see it starting when a qualified lead reaches out to them for information.
- Marketers believe that the sales process can begin even earlier in the buyer’s journey.
The truth is, all three have a point. But their perspectives aren’t interchangeable. What each one sees is the moment a potential customer becomes more visible to them. The strategic question is: What’s the optimal place for your brand to become involved in the decision-making process?
The customer decision-making process – usually called the buyer journey – is more complicated now than ever before. There’s no way of knowing if someone will encounter your brand for the very first time through social media, your website, a YouTube video, a podcast, or any other platform.
Likewise, there’s no way to guess how many of your competitors or other sources a would-be customer might have consulted before they first heard about you. They might not realize they have a problem yet; they might understand the problem, but not the solution; or they might be looking for a vendor to provide that solution.
Since you can’t be everywhere at once, where does that leave your brand?
If you can’t predict where every customer might come from, you can at least influence where they’re going.
That means getting involved in their thought processes as early as possible, providing value, and giving them a real reason to put you on the short list for their solution. When your brand stands out from the crowd, you’re not just another source of information: you’re the source future buyers are coming to know and trust.
It’s a big challenge for any brand – but it’s one that the most successful companies take on.
The core issue is simple: long before someone calls you, they’ve made up their mind.
The Call Comes After the Deliberation Is Already Done
From the company’s perspective, a first-time call or email looks like a new beginning.
From the customer’s perspective, it’s an ending.
They’ve already been thinking about the problem for weeks, months, or potentially even years. Yes, years. It’s been nagging them. The same is true whether you’re B2C or a marketing agency helping B2C brands. Any company can get locked into indecision due to budget and changing circumstances. So can any person.
So, most problems you find yourself getting contacted about aren’t new. They’ve been building up under the surface for a while, only to finally burst onto the scene. Think about how much more productive, how much more fruitful, and how much more lucrative the relationship can be when you meet customers earlier.
Much earlier.
When you get involved in the conversation early, you can:
- Help people understand the problem they’re facing and avoid costly, time-consuming dead ends.
- Shape customer perception of what a good solution looks like and how it applies to their needs.
- Establish their understanding of what makes a potential vendor the best to help in their situation.
- Build your own brand reputation by helping them do due diligence, even if they don’t select you.
- Position yourself for follow-up business if they choose a competitor, only to get substandard results.
- Pre-sell the “shape” of your offerings and establish their value to reduce friction about your pricing.
- Proactively define yourself as an industry-leading brand that has discretion about who to work with.
The more complex your offering is, the more important it is to get involved with your audience before they get deep into research. The customer education your online content can do on your behalf makes a difference. You can go from being misunderstood as a commodity to being seen as a sophisticated, expert-driven service.
To do that, you need more than a conventional approach to marketing.
This calls for strategic content marketing built on business storytelling, not just dry facts or “vibes.”
And it pushes you to get started early with customer journey marketing.
Full Customer Journey Marketing Is the Solution for Winning the Sale Before Outreach Happens
Your brand is at its best when it meets customers as close to the start of their journey as possible.
Luckily, you don’t need to have a Fortune 100 marketing budget to make that happen. Customers themselves are doing the footwork, collecting the information they need, and comparing you to your competitors. Why? Most of the time, they prefer to control the timing and tempo of their decision without “pressure” from sales.
From the day they choose to do something about their problem, they are already deciding. But just because no member of your team is there, that doesn’t mean they’re doing it alone. Your brand can be a stable, meaningful presence even if a customer’s research process takes months – or years.
That’s because customers are making their deductions from:
- Your website
- Videos on YouTube and elsewhere
- Your social media posts
- Your podcast episodes
- Online reviews and testimonials
- Photography on these and other platforms
In most of these categories, your brand’s voice has more leverage than anyone else’s. You can’t directly influence independent review scores on websites like Google or Yelp, but you can give your happiest customers a forum where they can tell others how you helped them.
The challenge is broad, but manageable: You need to publish the right content to attract people to you as soon as possible, at the moment they’re thinking about something you can offer. That’s the way modern brands meet customers where they are, months before they’re ready to pick up the phone.
With full customer journey marketing, you:
- Build confidence, rather than uncertainty, with a consistent, compelling, full-spectrum media strategy.
- Recognize differences in audience backgrounds, needs, and use cases and calibrate content accordingly.
- Put business storytelling first, reaching the core, emotionally resonant reasons behind customer needs.
No matter if you represent a local business or a marketing agency with a portfolio of different clients, you can elevate your brand communication to the next level by thinking about customer confidence, not just content.
Intentionally Shaping Customers’ Early Impressions Moves Them Toward You
Every time a prospective customer reads a blog, watches a marketing video, or listens to a podcast, there are only two possible outcomes: either they move toward you, or they move away from you.
When you consistently publish content and structure it in the right way, that can happen very early. But getting noticed isn’t the same thing as being trusted. The way you shape those first impressions is essential to success.
Consider some possibilities:
1. They read a blog on your website.
- TOWARD: They see a specific, credible treatment of a topic close to the heart of their decision-making.
- AWAY: They see a generic, maybe automatically generated post optimized for algorithms, not people.
2. They watch a marketing video your brand created.
- TOWARD: They find a precise, memorable, emotionally resonant story of a real person’s experience.
- AWAY: They see prominent visual, audio, or other glitches, not how your brand relates to real people.
3. They listen to an interview from your team.
- TOWARD: They have an opportunity to understand not just what you do, but who you serve and why.
- AWAY: They hear more of what they already know: features, price point, and “rah-rah, we’re the best.”
With a commitment to strategic content marketing, your business really can be everywhere at once: addressing major questions customers ask and problems they run into, even months or years after content first goes online.
If you don’t take the reins and make those early impressions work for you, you might still get some business. But it won’t be part of a predictable, repeatable process you can refine with data. It’ll always stay inconsistent.
Paper Jacket delivers video production Tampa business leaders can count on, and podcast production Tampa brands consistently find is right for their needs. You don’t need to have a “golden voice” or learn videography: all you need is a customer journey marketing strategy backed by a media production partner you trust.
We work with you so you never have to leave early impressions up to chance. With studios in Tampa and DeLand, “shoot-only” or “shoot/edit” workflows, FAA-licensed drone operators, and clear, consistent SOWs, you’re empowered from the first frame to the final edit. Contact us today.