Martyn R. Lewis - How Customers Buy…And Why They Don’t: Mapping and Managing the Buying Journey DNA

Martyn R. Lewis

RADIUS BOOK GROUP

NEW YORK

Distributed by Radius Book Group

A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

New York, NY 10016

www.RadiusBookGroup.com

Copyright 2018 by Martyn R. Lewis

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval, without the written permission of the author.

First edition: August 2018

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-63576-514-4

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-522-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-523-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955621

Cover design by Nicole Hayward

Interior design by Scribe Inc.

This book is dedicated to all those who depend on someone, somewhere buying something that they invent, create, design, develop, manufacture, distribute, finance, market, support, or sell.

T hose who have written a book know what a challenge it is to go from an idea to a typeset manuscript. Those who have not are perhaps better off not knowing the mountain it is to climb and thus like me may one day set about writing a book in a blissful combination of passion and navet. Along the way, they would discover, as I have, that you cant go it alone, so I would like to acknowledge and thank everyone who has contributed to my journey and helped along the way. The list is long, including many who may have no idea how much they helped, challenged, and shaped my thinking. I couldnt possibly list them all, but for everyone who has at any time engaged with me in discussion about business, its strategy and tactics, marketing, and salesmany thanks.

In particular, let me thank the following:

Tom Percy. After we worked together in corporate sales in the early 1990s, Tom joined Market-Partners as its second employee in 1997. Since then he has challenged my thoughts and provided much sage advice along the way. He is the talented individual who takes my notes and translates them into the pages you read. This book would never have happened without his help, support, and guidance.

My clients. I owe you a sincere thank-you not only for the business you have trusted us with but for the laboratory you have provided for our research and development.

My clients customersthe buyers. I thank all the individuals whom we have interviewed for their time and their candor in sharing their observations and experiences.

My publishing team. It comes toward the end of the journey when the book is drafted, but there remains a significant divide between a Word document, albeit a very large one, and a published book. We went looking for help as a customer buying in the top-left quadrant (for those who havent read the book yet, that indicates our perception was that we had plenty of choice of publishers, but we knew we needed a lot of help to know what it was we were buying). We found Mark Fretz at Radius Book Group, and he quickly moved us to the top-right quadrant by demonstrating his expertise and the partnership we could gain with him in successfully launching a book. So my thanks to Mark and his team at Radius; my editor, Jennifer Boeree at Scribe, for her elegant command of the language and her steady patience in working out all the details with us; and our illustrator, Angie Lagle, right here in Napa County, for her work in turning the various diagrams and doodles into what you now see in the book.

How Customers Buy... and Why They Dont represents a milestone on my personal journey of learninglearning about business, strategy, marketing, and sales. My thanks to my family, friends, and colleagues for the role they have played along the way. I look forward to the continuing journey with all of you.

Martyn R. Lewis

Calistoga, California

August 2018

W hy did it take me so long? Why didnt I figure it out sooner? Perhaps I needed to look at it, yet not see it, many thousands of times. Perhaps I needed to fail or be part of failure many times. Perhaps it hadnt always been this way. Or maybe I was simply accepting a common belief by going down the same well-worn path as so many had before me.

In the beginning, I believed that if a business had a superior product offering that provided a clear value to a prospective customer, then that customer would likely buy. I believed it was the role of sales and marketing to position such an offering in the marketplace so that customers would be convinced of the value andgiven time and perhaps a nudge or twowould be motivated to buy. I also believed that if a customer failed to buy yet clearly had the means to do so, then it was a failure on the part of sales and marketing to correctly position the value and convince the customer of the inherent merits of the offering. And I was not alone.

While strength in numbers may not be the most responsible defense, I suggest that the clear majority of entrepreneurs, investors, business executives, and sales and marketing professionals share this worldview. Simply put, the success formula is to come up with a great new mousetrap and then tell the world about it. And in the always-misquoted words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the world will beat a path to your door.

My beliefs had been shaped and honed over two decades of immersion in sales and marketing, starting as a frontline salesperson. I had been steeped in the gospel and logic of the return on investment (ROI) analysis showing the customer what they would undoubtedly gain by acquiring the various offerings I was responsible for taking to market. As I became more familiar with consultative selling methodologies and value selling techniques, they all reinforced this same theme. There were tweaks and twists, adding techniques such as finding the decision maker, calling high, linking the value of your offering to the things that mattered most to your prospect. Everything I saw, everything I didindeed, everything I believedwas based on this same theme of positioning the offering so that the value was clear to the buyer.

Along the way, my career advanced from sales to unit manager and regional sales manager, to VP of marketing for one of the largest computer technology companies in the world, and then to CEO of a multinational that included several hundred salespeople. During this time, I participated in countless sales training programs; my proficiency rose to the point that I became certified to deliver one of the leading sales methodologies. I attended peer-level executive retreats, where I met and worked with the key opinion leaders and authors on the topics of business, sales, and marketing. All these interactions reinforced my belief that if you have an offering that will deliver value to a particular market, then the salespersons job is to convince that market of the inherent value they will gain and then take the order. If they dont buy, then you have obviously failed to convince them of the value.

In the mid-1990s, I left corporate life and the position of CEO to start my own consulting company, Market-Partners Inc. It would be easy to say that I did so to escape the clichd corporate grind, but the reasons were much more complex. Because as successful as I had become, I was not what most would define as a natural salesperson. I began life as a programmer. My interests ran to engineering, taking apart and rebuilding the engine of my Lotus, designing and handcrafting high-end speaker systemsscience, methodology, planning, and results. Yet throughout my sales career, I continually ran into the myths and legends of the art and black magic supposedly utilized by top-drawer sales wizards. And perhaps for a tiny minority of overachievers, those particular shoes might fit. But my concern had always been for the majoritythe whole sales forceto succeed, and perhaps not spectacularly, but certainly consistently and profitably. I wanted to apply the elements and rules of science to sales, to prescribe method where madness often prevailed. And I wasnt going to be shy about it, as my companys original tagline was The Science of Sales and Marketing. Of course, with science comes research, and research we did. I also knew that if we were to bring true scientific discipline to the needs of our clients, we had to exercise that same discipline in our own efforts of observing, recording, and analyzing what we found.