How to Map Your Sales Assets to Your Buyer's Journey

As product marketers tasked with developing sales assets, our ability to have a keen mastery of our customers’ buyer's journey is critical to success.

Not only does it allow us to create sales assets that strategically map to the stages that all go-to-market stakeholders can comprehend, but it also gives us a roadmap to understand the impact that our efforts have on revenue.

What Is the Buyer's Journey?

The buyer's journey represents the steps that a customer goes through when purchasing your product. This journey can be initiated in two primary ways:

• Customer-Initiated: This refers to when the customer starts down the buyer's journey on their own without or with very little influence from external stakeholders. This often leads to the customer coming “inbound” to learn more about a vendor. This inbound action might consist of asking to speak to a sales representative, attending a trade show, signing up for the product, and other educational experiences.
• Vendor-Initiated: This refers to when a representative of the vendor reaches out to the customer through a prospecting process. This representative is typically exercising a sales or marketing motion of some sort. However, the vendor can also leverage non-human resources through targeted advertising or even artificial intelligence.

There is often a blurry line between how buyer's journeys are initiated and attributed.

What Are the Buyer's Journey Stages?

In reality, there are many ways to bucket the stages within a buyer's journey however the popular terms are awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision, and purchase.

At a high level, these stages represent the steps and process of the buyer recognizing a problem, exploring available solutions, and then making a purchase.

Here are some example visualizations of the various terms used within a sequential flow:

‍Example A: Awareness > Consideration > Decision

‍Example B: Awareness > Evaluation > Purchase

Buyer's Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles

The initial steps of beginning to map your sales assets to your buyer's journey begins with having your buyer's journey developed based on buyer's personas and ideal customer profiles.

Buyer personas are profiles that represent different types of prospects, users, and customers. They range in things like purchasing power and influence, use cases of your product, and targets for expansion opportunities. 

Ideal customer profiles or your “ICP”  is a detailed description of the type of company that is the best fit for your product, characterized by specific attributes including but not limited to industry, company size, technology stack, and business challenges.

By analyzing existing customers and market data, and continuously refining these profiles, you can focus your strategies to attract and retain the most valuable customers.

It helps your company focus on prospects that are most likely to buy while aligning marketing and sales efforts.

Ultimately, they help you identify the buyer segments you’re targeting, define the various buyer's journeys that may occur, and optimize your revenue generation strategies.

Align Product Marketing and Sales Teams to Develop the Buyer's Journey

We sound like a broken record here at AssetMule, but I’ll say it again (and again), alignment is critical to your individual and overall organization’s success.

Developing your buyer's journey in a silo without gathering insights and feedback from multiple stakeholders across multiple functions within your organization is a recipe for disaster.

I’d recommend spending a significant amount of time with the founders, sales managers, sales reps, and customer support/success reps. These stakeholders will have unique perspectives on the vision, market, and customers’ reality.

In addition to speaking to internal stakeholders, you must listen to sales calls recorded using tools like Gong, Chorus, etc.

Hosting focus groups and one-on-one research calls with external stakeholders within your ICP and buyer personas will provide another point of view that can be cross-referenced against the internal insights you have collected.

Also, I highly recommend scheduling regular meetings with sales beyond just sitting in their sales meetings. You want to have regular meetings with the sole focus being on collecting feedback for improving product marketing initiatives.

Lastly, this is not typically spoken about enough but you must develop deep relationships with the stakeholders that you work with - period. The idea that you can just have surface-level “work relationships” and do great things as a team is a lie. Schedule regular fun, non-work activities with your sales team colleagues. It will pay dividends and help reduce misalignment and ego-driven conflict.

Types of Sales Assets and How They Map to the Buyer's Journey

• Awareness Stage Sales Assets: Optimize brand visibility, communicating a personalized version of your brand’s story and value proposition as it relates to the prospect. These should be used to educate the prospect so that even if they are not currently in the market, they will be educated of the pain that exists that maybe they didn't know existed or why they must prioritize solving.
• Consideration/Evaluation Stage Sales Assets: Establish your product as the better, more relevant option versus competitors or non-action. These assets should be hyper-customized to the insights that have been uncovered throughout the buyer's journey so far. These insights include data collected through marketing channels and sales interactions.
• Decision/Purchase Stage Sales Assets: These assets are introduced at the stage in the buyer's journey that your sales process has deemed ready to buy. These assets highlight and summarize the most impactful and important points discovered so far. These assets should also include a mechanism to execute the purchase through a payment gateway or legally binding signature.

Below are a few sales asset examples that you can use to think through your buyer's journey and determine at what stages they should be used:

‍Outbound Assets: These are awareness stage assets that SDRs and AEs can use when conducting outreach to new prospects. They should be personalized and relevant to the prospect based on what you know about their persona, the challenges companies like theirs face, and how to help them succeed with your solution.

Conducting effective outbound requires a mastery of your industry, target accounts, and knowing more about the world your prospect lives within than they do.

Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/outbound-with-product-video

Follow-Ups: These are assets that sit in between the awareness and evaluation stages. This is where the human SDRs or AEs managing the sales process must determine how to categorize the stage based on the data they have so far.

At this stage, the SDR or AE should have conducted a disciplined discovery process to get an understanding of where the prospect sits in the buyer's journey and the next steps. These assets are used as follow-ups after sales calls with prospects.

Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/follow-up-with-product-video

One-pagers: These assets can vary quite a bit based on the context in which they are being sent. They can be used across the awareness, consideration/evaluation, and decision/purchase stages. The level of customization and relevance should increase, the further along the prospect is down the buyer's journey.

For example, they can be feature-focused supporting a new product launch, or a strategic asset used as a leave-behind after a call. They should be hyper-personalized at the personal level that the prospect represents.

Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/new-feature-one-pager-with-video

Case Studies and Competitive Comparison Docs: These are typically consideration/evaluation and decision/purchase stage assets that AEs use when working with a champion or other stakeholders involved in the buying process.

Case studies should be relevant and customized to the prospect’s situation, ICP profile, and personas involved. Competitive comparison docs should also be relevant and customized to the prospect’s requests and insights you have uncovered.

Case Study Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/case-study-with-video

Competitive Comparison Doc Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/competitive-comparison

Sales Decks: These are assets that can be used across the awareness, consideration/evaluation, and decision/purchase stages whenever the SDR, AE, or SE is conducting a live presentation.

These should be hyper-personalized based on what stage they are being used in the buyer's journey. They should also be relevant to the range of personas attending the presentation meeting.

Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/sales-deck‍

‍Proposals: These are decision/purchase stage assets used by the AE when driving a deal to the close. They outline the terms, conditions, and value proposition of a product or service being offered to a potential customer.

They are a key tool in the sales process, helping to communicate how the solution meets the prospect's needs, objectives, and goals.

Example: https://www.assetmule.ai/templates/proposal

Conclusion and Learning Resources:

In summary, it’s critical as a product marketer that you have a mastery of your buyer's journey and how it’s supported with carefully developed sales assets. These assets are strategically developed and mapped to each stage in the buyer's journey using feedback from various stakeholders within your organization.

You should never deploy a product marketing initiative like developing a buyer's journey or creating the sales assets associated with it without authentic, intimate, human-level alignment with sales and customer support/success teams.

Human connections matter and will take you and your organization to the heights you desire.

🎙 Bonus Content for Product Marketers:

Check out this recent webinar with our Co-Founder and CEO Justin Dorfman, product marketing expert Nitin Kartik, and me discussing how to map your buyer's journey for product marketers.

It will provide you with insights on how to think through the topics discussed in this article.

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