Capture Buying Signals from Customer Events

APRIL, 7 / 2021

Ever wished you could get Buyer Profiling and Buying Signals from your customer event presentations? In this #howtosuperslide post we'll step through the what, why and how of Buyer Personas to help automate and improve the effectiveness of your next best actions.

Buyer Profiling is the process of analysing an individual prospect to better understand their purchase path and requirements. This allows for better targeting of messaging and interactions by sales and marketing. Done successfully, you will meet the needs, exceed the expectations, and direct the actions of your prospects through the customer journey.

What are Buyer Personas?

When thinking about buyer profiling in a B2B context, four distinct types of buyer, of Buyer Personas, need to be understood, assigned and engaged for each prospective customer. These buyer types are Economic, User, Technical, and Coach.

The Four Buyer Personas

Economic Buyer

This buyer owns the budget that is needed to fund the purchase of your product or service. They are concerned with alignment to their strategy and objectives. While they are concerned with problem-solution fit, they are more likely to be driven by framing of the cost-benefit, and risk-reward trade off. Typically, there is only one buyer of this type related to a sale.

User Buyer

This buyer is the one that is driving the conversation with you since they are the ultimate owner or user of the solution. They are concerned about the features and functional benefits of the solution for themselves and their teams, as well as the implementation process and impact to their teams, processes and operations. There are likely to be multiple users for your solution

Technical Buyer

This buyer is the counterpart to the User persona and rather than assessing the functionality, will be more concerned with feasibility and implications of the adoption of the solution - both in terms of the initial implementation as well as any ongoing maintenance or management of the solution. While they may not be the buyer that says yes to you, they might well be part of the decision to say no.

Coach Buyer

This buyer is your advocate within your prospective customer. Quite often they are also the User of your solution but not necessarIly. Since they are motivated to see the sale completed, they assist you to navigate their organisation and, understand the other buyers and their level of influence on the sale. The more senior and personally influential your Coach is within their organisation, the greater the likelihood of your success.

Each Buyer Persona looks at the problem and your offering through their unique frame of reference. Consequently, each buyer has their own desired outcomes, decision making criteria, support needs, and role to play throughout the purchase journey. By understanding these buyer types and analysing their buying signals, we can build a picture for not only the spheres of influence within your prospect, but also understand the stage in the buying journey at which you find each buyer to better direct our efforts.

What are Buying Signals?

Buying Signals are observable behaviours that indicate the strength and readiness of a purchase intent. These signals are present throughout the customer journey. However, they are most typically tracked and actioned in the early stages of the journey by Marketing and Sales teams. Capturing these buying signals has historically been quite difficult in the context of physical and online events, resulting in antiquated approaches like event feedback surveys and generic, manual follow ups of the entire audience.

With the right tooling, you can now readily capture buying signals during live events, regardless of the event format. And drive buyer engagement in the moment that assists to capture additional buying signals as well as progress the buyer further along the purchase journey.

Capturing Buying Signals from Customer Events

By enriching your presentation with resources and calls to action that are targeted at each buyer persona, you are able to capture their primary buying signals. Excitingly, you can also layer in relevant, contextual materials that deepen engagement and generate secondary and tertiary buying signals.

While there is no limit to the types of buying signals you can capture, there are a number of proven approaches that support the activities of the majority of B2B sales and marketing teams.

Buying Signal 1: Presentation Content Engagement

Superslide makes it easy for audience members to view a specific content item from your presentation. This is the start of the audience engagement process and delivers you the primary buying signals at an individual buyer level. From there, they can engageme further by requesting a copy of the slides, capturing notes, and sharing content with a colleague, all of which provide secondary buyer signals to you as the presentation owner.

Buying Signal 2: Supporting Content Engagement

Having viewed, downloaded and shared the content, your buyer can then be presented with additional options to further engage via the Learn More Link feature. Typically, we see this being used to provide access to Detailed reports, Case studies, FAQs, How to guides, and Pricing pages, as the case may be. These tertiary buying signals help you determine their readiness to buy and the questions or concerns that remain unresolved.

Buying Signal 3: High Intent Actions

Where appropriate, you may wish to present high buying intent calls to action to your prospects. This is best achieved with the Learn More Link feature when combined with the Skip to Link feature. In this case, you can redirect an audience member away from the content item and instead present a Sign Up Screen to do such things as subscribe to a newsletter, book a demo, or sign up to a free trial.

Buying Signal 4: Direct Outreach

Another great way to stimulate engagement beyond your event is to connect directly with the buyer. Through the Business Card feature, you can easily share your contact details, including social media handles to facilitate direct contact from the prospect that might lead to Linkedin follows and connections, questions via email, or phone enquiries.

Upgrade your Buyer Profiling with Superslide

Superslide is a lightweight, easy-to-use tool that allows you to engage your audience and capture actionable insights. It works on any presentation, in all event formats.

As an event owner, the easy publisher gets you ready to track audience engagement in minutes. Superslide allows you to quickly upload a copy of your presentation and, enrich it with links to supporting content and resources. You then get a unique set of tracking codes to embed in your presentation. One unique code per slide.

These codes are used to capture and quantify audience engagement, and generate a customised performance report to review straight after your event. The performance report gives you the audience level observations required to complete Buyer Profiling through the unique engagement profile of each audience member, that informs your next best actions for each prospect.

Present. Engage. Track. Act. With Superslide.

So, what's your super slide?

Today, Superslide users span companies from all major sectors, from Technology startups and Financial Services, to Professional Services and more. They see lead volumes and quality rising, more deals closing and, customers activating faster and being retained for longer.

They've found their Superslide, have you? Get started with Superslide today. And start getting Buyer Signals on all your presentations.

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