A Guide to Conversational Paths

Focus your product management, marketing, sales and service teams around profitable conversational paths to build a predictable high-growth sales pipeline.

Your biggest untapped competitive advantage

In the last 8 hours, someone’s just experienced a life event that’s led them to identify a new job to do, a problem to solve—something you can solve with your product or service offering.  As we live in a world of ‘I-Want-What-I-Want-When-I-Want-It’ buyers have a 24/7 access to the internet. Our prospective buyer is probably searching online for a solution right at this very moment.

The problem is—you don’t know who they are. Furthermore, they don’t know about your business, or what it can do to help them.

The ability of your business to articulate and formalize a conversational path that gets the attention of prospective buyers, draws them into a meaningful conversation with your business (and rewards them along the way to build trust and curiosity) might just be the biggest untapped competitive advantage your business has.

What is a Conversational Path?

A conversational path describes the mythical journey customers take from their original discovery of an ‘undesirable’ situation to purchasing a solution from your company.  It charts the events that facilitate a two-way conversation.

Conversational path begins with someone who’s having (or had) a life event and has now begun the process of working out what to do about it. You know they’re going to frame what they’re now looking for.  The phrases prospective buyers use to articulate their needs will determine which supplier solutions they find.  Will they find you? 

    Prospective B2B buyers spend more than 40% of their buying process browsing and developing their knowledge of what they’re interested in.  None of that gives you the opportunity to engage—because your prospective customer hasn’t told you anything about themselves yet.

    The art of business conversation

    Profitable customer conversations at scale

    Up to 80% of the buying cycle happens before a salesperson gets an opportunity to speak to the potential buyer.

    Creating interest in what you do, and drawing your audience into a sales conversation, might just be your biggest untapped competitive advantage. To get results, you need to tell your story, stand out in a crowd, reach and win over your audience.

    We call it a Conversational Path. It’s the planning that goes behind building profitable customer relationships, one conversation at a time, AT SCALE.  Making every customer conversation profitable is never easy, it may even be unachievable.  But it drives ambition, and a determination to deliver the best customer offer, with the best possible customer experience.  That’s what we do.

    Getting conversation right

    Conversations work best when all participants get rewarded by the exchange. Even if your business is the best at what it does, you won’t enjoy the rewards you deserve for your great ideas and hard work if you’re unable to engage prospective customers in profitable conversations.

    Can you answer these questions?

    1. How would you characterize ‘a customer prospect’?
    2. What events in their lives cause them to ‘activate’ and become a customer prospect?
    3.  Where do they go for answers? (Who do they look to as an authority on the subject?)
    4. What can you say to customers that they want to hear?
    5. Can you fashion a conversation that links their needs to the products and services you offer?
    6. Do you have a marketing engine to repeatedly stimulate conversations and create sales leads?

    Steps to defining your conversational path

    RESEARCH - Know why your customers will buy

    Newton Day began its life as a technology industry market research business focusing on delivering strategic insights to drive decisions on business model design, business direction and new product introductions. We continue to derive value from our competencies in customer and market research to shape our recommendations and B2B marketing strategies.

    Our ‘Lens‘ methodology is an exercise to test your value proposition and remove distortions in your understanding of your business offer.

    AUTHOR - Tell your story

    Sometimes, companies with great technology and fabulous support fail to make their mark.  It’s a crowded market out there.  We help tech businesses to tell their story.  We align your conversational marketing plans to your strategic goals and customer buying communities, weaving the stories together that create profitable conversations.

    Our ‘Storybook’ approach will help you to answer the most important questions that curate the story of your business into something that everyone in your team can explain.

    DESIGN - Design profitable conversational paths

    Designing a conversational path isn’t straight-forward.  To be successful, the author must acknowledge the heavy influence of Key-Phrases and Search Engine Optimization on marketing content.  It requires a confidence in knowing the needs of the target audience, what their buying needs are, why they will buy, and where they will go to find a solution.  Little of that insight comes from conjecture.  The benefit Newton Day has in designing profitable conversational paths is that we’ve developed effective methods, tools and skills to do so.  

    Our ‘Conversational Path‘ methodology helps you to design profitable customer journeys by linking the different stages of the discovery and buying process; leading up to the eventual sale of an offering – and beyond.  It’s important because it contextualizes how prospective buyers navigate a sea of content to find your business and its offering.  It’s arguably the most compelling competitive differentiator your business has, but has yet to harness. 

    MANAGE - Keep your sales opportunity pipeline on track

    To grow, technology companies must evolve a predictable sales pipeline.  Ultimately, this needs to function without the intervention of senior executives. Achieving this feat means that your organization must ultimately motivate ‘others’ to deliver those outcomes.  To gain predictability in the sales pipeline, your business will need to formalize its sales processes and approaches to marketing.  It will require people to develop habits that foster positive outcomes. Hard-coding these behaviors into your sales and marketing organizations, and supplementing processes with appropriate technology and data will be yet another chasm to cross.  We can help.

    Our Conversational-Map‘ methodology creates a summary visualization of your attraction and engagement articles; determine your best Call to Action (CTA) options.

    Our ‘Conversational-Planner‘ shapes your marketing plan so you’re always on-track.  It includes advertising and proposition, SEO, social, PR, research, sales method and product innovation.

    TUNE - Get your sales process firing on all cylinders

    A process is only as strong as its weakest link.  In our tune-up workshops. we help technology companies to identify weak-points in their sales and marketing processes, so they can channel their resources and investments in the most needy areas.  Data and systems also play a crucial role in delivering productivity and efficiency, minimizing cost of sales and maximizing opportunity.  Newton Day has designed and implemented various forms of Sales Information, Sales Content and Sales Intelligence systems to aide performance.  The solutions we create aim to capture and harvest data organically as part of the daily activities of selling rather than creating new data processing tasks.  We’re fans of technology yes, but we also believe that it can be distracting to salespeople when implemented poorly.

    Getting to grips with your conversational path

    We can help you implement the best conversational paths for your business.  Your conversational paths flow across the different stages of the discovery and buying process; leading up to the eventual sale of an offering – and beyond.  It’s important because it describes how prospective buyers navigate a sea of content to find your business and its offering.  It’s arguably the most compelling competitive differentiator your business has, but has yet to harness.  Services we employ to tell your story and build your conversational path include:

    Storybook

    We curate the story of your business into something that everyone in your team can explain–a fun storybook.

    Lens

    An exercise in testing your value proposition to remove distortions in your understanding of your offer.  It’s about going to see customers and using J-T-B-D methods to learn how they see you from the outside.

    Path

    This is a workshop activity.  It’s the point  your team works through the conversational path stages–from events to offerings–to formalize its first conversational path.

    Map

    Next, we work with you to build a summary visualization of your attraction and engagement articles; determine your best Call to Action options

    Planner

    Finally, you will produce a marketing plan that includes advertising and proposition, SEO, social, PR, research, sales method and product innovation.

    Strengths

    MAXIMIZE
    • Maximize customer experience and lead generation
    • Minimize operating costs (optimize marketing spend needed to create a predictable sales pipeline)
    • Grow repeatability of marketing success – build on one prototype conversational path that works
    MINIMIZE
    • Boom or bust marketing
    • Conflict between departments – Product Management, Marcoms, Sales, Service
    • Weak targeting of profitable prospects
    • Shortfall in ‘tell-me-something-I-don’t-already-know’ content
    • Cost of marketing tech tools 

    A Guide to B2B Conversational Marketing

    Learn everything about CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING and what it can do for your business. Download our free guide

    How are you going to attract new potential customers to your door?  What factors make your offer stand out in a crowded market?  How can you stimulate conversations?  What do you need to do differently to make every sales conversational profitable?

    Our guide aims to answer these questions and more.