One of the biggest challenges in today’s market is understanding customer behavior and purchasing decisions. How can a sensemaking approach help with this issue?
What is sensemaking?
Sense making is a practice through which people try to understand ambiguous, equivocal, confusing, or complex information or situations and decide how to deal with them.
Also, you can use sensemaking as an information-sharing approach to guide a customer toward a high-quality, low-regret purchase decision.
Sensemaking is intended to address the issues of customers’ indecisiveness and lack of self-confidence. It’s designed to encourage customers to make higher-risk decisions, such as buying a larger, more complex product or service.
Sensemaking is a guide to creating simplicity out of complexity. It serves to clear up the confusion caused by information overload and a complex digital environment.
Customer behavior
The rich, dynamic, and complex digital environment has a major impact on customer behavior and the purchase decision process.
There’s a ton of easily accessible product or service information on the internet: analyst reports, corporate blogs, display ads, podcasts, email marketing, infographics, and white papers – all at your fingertips.
But instead of this being a good thing, it turns out it overcomplicates the buying process. There’s simply too much information! And even though it’s all quality information from reliable sources, too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.
Faced with this complex abundance of information, choices, and noise, customers struggle to make sense of it all. They can feel overwhelmed.
Information overload can cause decision paralysis and choice dissatisfaction. Therefore, customers fall back on delaying the purchase decision. They may not return for the product or service, or buy it at all.
With all this in mind, it’s vital to determine the strategy and approach that will lead to the closing of the best deal from the perspective of both buyers and suppliers.
Customer approach
The effective customer approach relies on understanding not only what your customers face during their buyer journey, but also what drives their behavior.
Some sales reps follow the more-is-better strategy. It’s known as the giving approach. Giving sales reps generously provide more and more information to their target prospects. As a result, this can add an ancillary burden to an already complex purchasing decision-making process.
Others employ the telling sales approach. Telling sales reps provide information based on their personal experience and knowledge. They believe that sharing their own perspective and opinions with their customers leads to a successful deal.
Both approaches are effective to some extent. However, you risk losing sales if you fail to help your prospects make sense of all the information about the products or services you are offering.
Sensemaking approach
Sensemaking is all about creating a guiding hand for your customers in evaluating the quality of a glut of information, and making sense of it. In essence, it’s a collaboration with your prospects to filter through it all and increase their confidence in their decision-making.
Using sensemaking tactics, the sales rep assists prospects on their complex buyer journey toward job completion. It’s pretty simple. You need to provide your customer with the right information at the right time during the process.
Sensemaking is by no means about manipulating the customer into making a decision. The idea is to focus on customer experience and create a mental framework for decision-making.
By making purchases and life easier for your customers, you gain their trust and stand out from the competition. All this increases your chances of success.
Sensemaking in practice
What can you do in order to advance toward your and your customer’s goal?
Provide your customers with relevant resources
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Think about all the challenges they face on their buyer journey, such as identifying the problem, exploring solutions, defining requirements, or gaining consensus with their colleagues.
Try to understand how this process can be overwhelming, especially when dealing with the abundance of information. Pay attention to questions people ask online, by email, via chatbots, and on social media.
Analyze what information is truly relevant for your customer, and provide them with carefully curated content, sources, and tools.
Simplify information complexity
It’s good practice to show the customer that you understand the difficulty of making a complex purchase decision.
Help your customer by reducing the information complexity. Clarify problems, and explain technical information. Consider what format would be best for providing useful content and answers your prospects need.
Carefully plan what information, when, and how you will provide it. Focus only on useful information, and avoid all unnecessary details.
This can help your customers process and interpret the material, turning it into valuable information on which to base their purchasing decision.
Assist your customer in learning
It’s not enough to carefully curate your content and leave it to your prospects to make sense of it on their own. Make sure your customers understand the information before moving them forward. Is it useful? Do they have additional questions? Make it easy for them to reach a real person when they have the need.
Also, sensemaking reps don’t tell their customers what to think or do. Their role is only to guide them along the learning journey.
The aim of a sensemaking approach is to ensure that customers reach their interpretations, conclusions, and decisions on their own.
Automate parts of the process
Embrace automated tools to build a simple and comfortable customer journey.
Also, consider deploying AI assistants to help create a more personalized and improved user experience. You can use these powerful tools for your SEO, content curation and recommendations, email automation, ad targeting, or chatbots.
This allows your sales and marketing teams to focus on customers when they reach out to them.
Why sensemaking?
Customer behavior is a complex interaction between financial, social, cultural, and personal elements. Infobesity takes a toll on their confidence, which can lead to a reluctance to buy.
A sensemaking approach to customers allows businesses to understand their customers and align their business strategies with their customers’ needs.
