Improve the B2B Customer Journey by Educating Prospective Buyers

While its fancy moniker is relatively modern, the customer journey has existed since the dawn of civilization.

The Ancient Canaanites and Egyptians bought and sold property. Cows, candied figs, and clay tablets all commanded good prices in the marketplaces of Sumer and Uruk. Medieval merchants hawked their wares from the prows of ships and the steps of manor halls.

Not much has changed today. Sure, we sell our candied figs through fancy online shopfronts. We keep track of communications through detailed SaaS software applications rather than cuneiform tablets. And the only people standing on manor hall steps are tourists.

The journey shares the same general path as its ancient brethren: The customer has a need. The customer becomes aware of a solution. The customer considers the solution. Customer purchases … from you or someone else.

What has changed? Our 21^st-century recognition of the role that education plays in that journey.

What Is the B2B Customer Journey?

The B2B customer journey, also referred to as the B2B Buyer's Journey, is the process potential customers take from first becoming aware of your product to considering it to making a purchase. They then move on to the next stage, post-sales. There, they begin to use your product and hopefully succeed with it.

Whether they do depends strongly on whether you give them the tools they need to do so.

Education: A Necessity Before and After the Purchase

Today, customer training has become a valuable asset in growing a product’s user base and developing product experts. Companies deploy (or should deploy) a strategic series of customer success efforts to help their customers receive maximum value from a product.

Vigorously implemented programs can generate more loyal customers and retain existing ones. It turns the entire process into a positive experience, and Integral to this positive experience is education.

When trying to convince a prospect to sign up for your online service, you can accelerate that decision-making process with accessible educational content. You can gently introduce them to an ever-increasing number of features when trying to keep them around.

Thus, it improves the B2B buyer's journey to the point of sale and after. Don’t forget that even though your prospect has signed on the dotted line and become a customer, they still need a well-scaffolded onboarding process and ongoing education. Only then will they see success.

And only when they see success will you see continuous renewals, upsells and cross-sells, and word-of-mouth marketing. If you want to reduce customer churn, education is the only way to go.

So how do you do it? This article will discuss how to educate prospective buyers, the benefits of training-led growth, and how educating leads improves overall customer success.

How Do You Educate Prospective Buyers?

While beneficial to the entire life cycle, customer education specifically impacts leads and prospective customers. Training-led growth is an opportunity for a business or service provider to reinforce a brand’s value while moving leads down the sales funnel.

In a nutshell, it helps companies attract users and grow brand experts through intentionally designed learning opportunities. While learning academies differ in appearance and execution by company and product, the goal is the same: help customers get the most value from your offerings.

Training Before the Sale

Many sales reps and companies miss the fact that education matters in every stage of the buying journey, both pre and post-purchase.

It starts when potential buyers begin considering your product and continue through their lifecycle.

(Interestingly, the opposite problem is true for nurturing, where sales reps and B2B marketing teams hype the product in the awareness stage through lots of outreach, then abandon customers to their fate after the sale. Raven360 consistently argues that every company must marry their marketing/sales efforts before the sale with customer success efforts after.)

Point being, the more a prospective customer learns about a product and its value, the more likely they will convert to an active customer. This education can come in many, many forms. These include:

• Case studies

• Blog posts

• Web pages

• Social media

• Webinars

• Whitepapers

• Checklists

• Testimonials

• Infotainment (a form of educational content)

• Infographics

• Product demos

• Other forms of content marketing

Naturally, these are only some pieces of a well-rounded inbound marketing and content strategy. However, these types of content are an excellent place to start with lead generation. Early-stage customer training looks to assure potential users that they will be able to maximize the brand’s value.

They also form multiple touchpoints between your company and customers. Not only can this help introduce your product and educate people on what’s possible, but it also gives you an excuse to reach out. Each email address or telephone number you get in exchange for a free download becomes a lead in your database.

Let’s look at a few of the most potent additional benefits now.

Benefits of Educating Prospects Across the B2B Customer Journey

When used effectively, customer training can increase the conversion of leads to customers, improve user retention, and develop brand experts – all improving customer success – but the main takeaway is this:

The core benefit of training-led growth is the ability to enable customers to become experts in a product.

A successful customer training program grows users’ confidence in a product by offering the tools and methods necessary to gain complete knowledge. A well-developed customer education program can be critical in increasing clientele in today's marketplaces saturated with products and solutions.

Naturally, you must tailor training efforts to your target audience, buyer personas, and their journey stages. Ditto if you use a different purchase process for different products. Again, ditto if the B2B companies you’re targeting have different personas for their stakeholders and decision-makers.

Overall, you can expect training to have the following general benefits.

1. Pre-Qualified Prospects

Companies with a training mindset usually find that their prospects come to the table with fewer questions. In a sense, they pre-qualify themselves before a salesperson even needs to step in because they’ve already absorbed so much free content.

That means your sales reps can instead spend that time countering objections, giving demos, providing testimonials, and gently pushing the sale. Without questions out of the way, you put your time to much better use.

2. Better Brand Positioning

The SaaS market is flooded with solutions for nearly every single problem. As a result, companies need to differentiate their products and services if they want to factor into the decision-making process of a particular buyer.

Offering customer training programs enables better brand positioning by giving potential customers the confidence that they can successfully utilize a company’s solution. Starting in the decision stage, you can show them what you’re all about, justifying your pricing.

After the sale, you can show them exactly how to use the software they’ve just purchased. Early-stage training materials introduce prospective users to the brand’s learning academy to familiarize themselves before a purchase decision. Showcasing unique free content before they’ve even given you an email address can make your sales cycle much more robust.

3. Improved Conversion Rates

By creating training materials oriented towards leads, customer education teams can soothe the worries of wary buyers. With demos and free trials, groups can highlight how their product solves pain points and joint problems, increasing the overall value users get for the price. Greater buyer confidence alone grows.

More importantly, customer training can be used to generate top-of-funnel leads. Since this is one of the most critical stages of the B2B customer journey and one of the key aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to get the messaging right.

If that message includes the fact that you can guarantee customers can learn how to get the most use out of the product – and that they won’t have to pay for it – that will hugely benefit your sales process.

4. Decreased Churn

When customers understand the potential solutions they’re getting upfront and can put a value to the price tag at every stage of the B2B customer journey, they’re less likely to cancel once they come on board. This saves you money, makes financial forecasting more reliable, helps you increase marketing automation, and generally leads to an easier job for you and your team.

5. Enhanced Customer Onboarding

Too often, onboarding is a user’s first encounter with the product in B2B sales. Ideally, that first experience comes sooner. Either way, you need that first impression to be good, and excellent training can ensure that. A poor experience, on the other hand, practically guarantees churn.

It’s essential to prioritize self-led learning. Rather than making the user feel dependent on you, you want to give them the freedom to learn what they need to learn 24/7/365. You’re there when they need you, but you don’t have to be in the “classroom” for them to succeed.

6. Improved Support Requests

When your clientele knows more, they need less from you. Therefore, better training equals fewer support requests, quicker resolutions, and fewer ticked-off customers that might quickly turn into former customers. Better training materials reduce redundant requests, give people more confidence in finding an answer independently, and make them feel better about working with you.

When you get requests for aid, you’ll be able to take that information and turn it into new training materials that can help prevent confusion on this topic.

7. Increased Revenue

It’s pretty simple: more experienced customers are more likely to upgrade products to higher plans. Therefore, intentional training creates skilled users who purchase more products. This increase in users directly results in revenue growth.

How Do Education and Training Improve the B2B Customer Journey?

Along with marketing and acquisition efforts, customer training is pivotal in growing customer success. It not only improves the confidence of leads but also provides sales teams with insight to improve their strategies.

With educational material designed for prospective buyers, those generated leads are converted to active customers at a higher rate. When more new users purchase the product with confidence and knowledge of how to use it, you will see longer retention and reduced churn. Together, these measurably increase your profit margin.

Plus, with their initial base of knowledge and additional available content, users can grow to become brand experts. As the base of brand experts increases, so does revenue through upsells, upgrades, and other purchases.

Frequently Asked Questions

Have a few more thoughts on the subject? Here are some of the most common Q&As on education in the B2B customer journey.

How To Measure Customer Success

Customer Success can be measured through various key performance indicators. Unlike business, customer success KPIs offer essential data for decision-making and forecasting. These KPIs can measure a product’s profitability, the amount of retained users, a customer’s expected cost and revenue, and more.

What Are the Best KPIs for Customer Success?

There is no short or comprehensive list of customer success KPIs available. Metrics can evaluate profitability, overall expenses, lifetime value, and more. Some common performance indicators for customer success include:

• Churn rate

• Conversion rate

• Customer health score

• Customer lifetime value

• Customer retention cost

• Monthly recurring revenue

• Net promoter score

• Renewal rate

How Much Should Be Spent on Customer Success?

The value of Customer Success cannot be overstated within the technology and SaaS industries. However, no standard roadmap or budget plan is consistent with every business or product. Factors to consider include:

• Product marketing and engagement campaigns

• Acquisition and retention efforts

• Learning academies

• Customer service and support

• Product updates and improvements

To establish meaningful budgets, consider project revenue, customer lifetime value, and other key performance indicators.

Final Thoughts: Education’s Role in the B2B Customer Journey

The B2B customer journey is as relevant today as it ever was in Ancient Rome, Imperial China, Medieval England, or the steps of the Aztec ziggurats. Given the mind-boggling increase in competition due to the advent of the internet, it is far more critical than ever– and increasingly so every moment.

That competition can either drown you … or you can use it to your advantage. You can do just that by fully understanding and inhabiting the buyer’s journey. Understand what your users need, then give it to them even before they become customers.

Only with proper education can you achieve the results you desire.

By educating users to become brand experts, customer training inevitably increases customer success. With benefits like improved positioning and greater conversion rates, training-led growth directly impacts a consumer's experience with a product. Managers can capitalize on these benefits by implementing education initiatives directed at prospective customers and active leads. And they can do it from the very beginning of the customer lifecycle.