29 May 2019 by Lisa Lambert in Blog, Marketing

Regardless of industry, today’s sales and marketing professionals share a linchpin role: they’re all travel guides – travel guides for the buyer’s journey that is!

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is the safari your customer takes as they decide to do business with you. While the exact path varies a bit by industry, there are four key common stages:

Why is it important for salespeople and marketers to understand the buyer’s journey?

As guides, understanding each stage of the buyer’s journey can help sales and marketing professionals embrace more customer-centric strategies to better deliver both customer and business success. When you are deeply familiar with the ins and outs of the buyer’s journey, you’re in position to plan your customer’s safari and make it awesome for them – plus more readily avoid potential dangers that can impede a decision to buy or long-term customer success.

Below is a collection of quotes to help illuminate every stage of the buyer’s journey, offering actionable guidance to help you get better results.

If you want some portable inspiration, download our understanding the buyer’s journey infographic featuring select quotes.

80 quotes to help sales and marketing professionals deliver a more customer-centric buyer’s journey every step of the way!

Buyer’s Journey Stage 1: Awareness (Attract)

“Your future prospects resemble your best customers, and that’s the place you should start.” – Holger Schulze
“The more you know about your customers, the more you can provide to them information that is increasingly useful, relevant, and persuasive.” – Jay Baer
“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” – Peter Drucker
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis
“The attention economy is not growing, which means we have to grab the attention that someone else has today.” – Brent Leary
“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.” – Milan Kundera
“Market like the year you are in!” – Gary Vaynerchuck
“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis
“Markets are conversations.” – The Cluetrain Manifesto
“If you harness the power of innovation, you’ll convert sales complexity into a brutal competitive advantage.” – Tim Sanders
“As marketing converges with customer service and sales, marketing today is more about helping and less about hyping.” – Joel Book
“You have to tell a story before you can sell a story.” – Beth Comstock
“Always be closing… That doesn’t mean you’re always closing the deal, but it does mean you need to be always closing on the next step in the process.” – Shane Gibson
“It’s about caring enough to create value for customers. If you get that part right, selling is easy.” – Anthony Iannarino
“Brands must become architects of community.” – Simon Mainwaring
“Marketing is a process, not a decision… and never a magic trick.” – Jonathan Gebauer
“If you’re only thinking big and quick, you’re probably overlooking small and guaranteed options for long-term success.” – Dan Waldschmidt
“What we really need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today’s consumers, a mindset shift from ‘telling & selling’ to building relationships.” – Jill Stengel
“Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin
“A mediocre person tells. A good person explains. A superior person demonstrates. A great person inspires others to see for themselves.” – Harvey Mackay

Buyer’s Journey Stage 2: Consideration (Convert)

“Not personalizing your message is the biggest mistake you can make while selling to enterprise customers.” – Lacey Bell
“Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov
“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” – Mary Kay Ash
“Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey
“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Stop selling. Start helping.” – Zig Ziglar
“Being seen as an expert is a good thing. But you need to be seen as an expert in something clients think they need an expert to help them with.” – Ian Brodie
“Customers don’t care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business. It’s easy to forget this in the heat of a sales cycle.” – Aaron Ross
“If the perceived risk of making a change is greater than staying with what they’ve got, you won’t close the business.” – Barbara Giamanco
“You can’t propose a mutually beneficial business relationship if you can’t understand their business.” – Craig Rosenberg
“When reps take the role of a curious student rather than an informed expert, buyers are much more inclined to engage.” – Jeff Hoffman
“If your sales have tanked, maybe the issue is not your lack of sales skills, but you are rushing the knowing and trusting aspect of the buying process.” – Leanne Hoagland-Smith
“The best salespeople wonder what it would be like to be in the other person’s shoes. They know they can’t play that game unless they continually strive to train themselves in how we as human beings communicate.” – Bob Phibbs
“One of the main aims of content marketing, is to help people before they actually purchase something from you.” – Neil Patel
“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie
“An empowered buyer is exactly what a sales and marketing organization should be targeting. Sales and marketing should unite to determine who their ideal customer is and how to reveal their latent pain and to move the customer to a place where they are more successful because of the product or service being offered.” – Claudine Bianchi
“Making your prospects feel like they have an exclusive membership in a club makes lead generation a positive customer experience.” – Eric Bower
“If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.” – Zig Ziglar
“We do a lot of one night stands in lead generation and not enough in long-term relationships.” – Mike King
“Selling is really about having conversations with people and helping improve their company or their life.” – Lori Richardson

Buyer’s Journey Stage 3: Decision (Close)

“To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don’t close a sale, open a relationship.” – Patricia Fripp
“The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you.” – Derek Sivers
“Value the relationship more than the quota.” – Jeff Gitomer
“Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others. Or to put it more appropriately, since the research shows that when the facts are on your side, questions are more persuasive than statements, don’t you think you should be pitching more with questions?” – Dan Pink
“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Don’t reinvent the wheel. Focus on winning one customer at a time. Be honest and sincere. Do what’s right. There’s nothing magical about this. That’s been my guiding principle. To make it work, you have to live it every day. Make it your mindset.” – Robert Spector
“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” – Mark Cuban
“Sales is an outcome, not a goal. It’s a function of doing numerous things right, starting from the moment you target a potential prospect until you finalize the deal.” – Jill Konrath
“Referrals are the best source for qualified leads. However, the worst error most representatives make is to inquire about new introductions while only mid-way in the sales cycle.” – Elinor Stutz
“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources — not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” – Daniel Pink
“People buy emotionally, and they justify their decisions intellectually.” – David Sandler
“Pay attention and adapt your style to that of your prospect and customer. I work with great salespeople and the most successful know how to connect with a variety of buyers.” – Colleen Stanley
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” – Seth Godin
“Prospects are making their purchase decision based on whether they think you understand their problems and you have the knowledge, resources and commitment to solve them.” – Trish Bertuzzi
“Make a customer, not a sale.” – Katherine Barchetti
“You have to drop your sales mentality and start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.” — Jill Konrath
“Great salespeople are relationship builders who provide value and help their customers win.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
“Customers don’t care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business.” – Aaron Ross
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” – Warren Buffett
“If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.” – Jim Rohn

Buyer’s Journey Stage 4: Nurture (Delight)

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell
“There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” – Roger Staubach
“Every day we’re saying, ‘How can we keep the customer happy? How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this?’… because if we don’t, somebody else will.” – Bill Gates
“If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.” – JW Marriott
“Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.” – Satya Nadella
“Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.” – Zig Ziglar
“If I say to you, ‘Who’s really great at customer service?’ you can come up with two or three companies right of the top of your head. Why? Because they’re so rare.” -Jay Baer
“The rise of the citizen review site is a sobering development. No longer are you on top of the mountain, blasting your marketing message down to the masses through your megaphone. All of a sudden, the masses are conversing with one another. If your service or product isn’t any good, they’ll out you.” – David Pogue
“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
“If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey
“The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.” – Seth Godin
“When people call our call center, our reps don’t have scripts, and they don’t try to up-sell. They are just judged on whether they go above and beyond for the customer and really deliver a kind of personal service and emotional connection with our customers.” – Tony Hsieh
“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer focused allows you to be more pioneering.” – Jeff Bezos
“Let’s take most of the money we would’ve spent on paid advertising and paid marketing and instead of spending it on that invest it in the customer experience / customer service and then let our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.” – Tony Hsieh
“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.” – Peter Drucker
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
“Good customer service begins at the top. If your senior people don’t get it, even the strongest links further down.” – Richard Branson
“True loyalty doesn’t come because of an app. It doesn’t come because you have a punch card where after ten punches you get a free sandwich. It is about the relationship. Take away those “perks” and would the customer still be loyal?” – Shep Hyken
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They DO expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” – Donald Porter
“Activate your fans, don’t just collect them like baseball cards.” – Jay Baer

Over to you!

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Did one of these quotes strike a chord with you or provide new insight on the buyer’s journey? Do you have a favorite quote or mantra that informs how you guide customers along the buyer’s journey? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Want to learn more about the buyer’s journey?

Here are some resources:

3 myths of the B2B buyer’s journey (Microsoft Dynamics 365)
What Is the Buyer’s Journey? (Hubspot)
How to Align Email Marketing to The Buyer’s Journey (Neil Patel)
What is the Buyer’s Journey and Why it Matters (Uhuru)

20 Quotes for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey to Help You Get Better Results