The Buyer’s Pyramid: How You Can Access An Additional 66% Of Prospects

The buyer’s pyramid is one of those things that make an awful lot of sense when you know about it. In this article today we are going to look at what this is and why it plays such an important role in your lead generation efforts. Not only this but it will give you a much wider understanding of how to attract your ideal prospects to your business in the mid to long term future.

Once you understand how the buyer’s pyramid works, you will be able to focus your efforts on generating leads from areas you never thought would be possible, as well as covering issues and topics that are far removed from what you may think would be of interest to your ideal clients.So, let’s dive straight into it.

 

What Is The Buyers Pyramid?

The buyer’s pyramid is an incredibly powerful principle that identifies what percentage of people are ready to make a purchase right now. It is a visual representation of the groups of people who are at the point of making a purchase and those who are at different stages in their customer journey. In fact, the customer journey map can be heavily linked to the buyer’s pyramid as it helps you to identify what a person needs to see at what stage in order to move them along to make a purchase.

 

The buyer’s pyramid is broken down into 5 separate groups:

 

• Those ready to make a purchase now
• Those who are open to making a purchase
• Those who are not thinking about making a purchase now
• Those who don’t believe they are open to a purchase (based on the info they have)
• Those who are definitely not interested in making a purchase

 

So what does this actually mean for you? Well, what it means is that you’re probably focusing too much on a very small portion of the market, which is costly and highly competitive. 

 

The 3%

This is the group that everyone wants to go for, which would make sense as they are ready to make a decision right now. They are in buying mode. What that means for you is that the person who has a large pension they wish to transfer is ready to do it right now. They want to give you money! The problem with this, is that those people don’t come up very often and everyone else is chasing them too. They need little to no convincing of the action they are about to take, they have done all the research they need and want to move as soon as possible. 

Now, the thing about the 3% is that once they have made a purchase, they aren’t in purchase mode again for a while, especially when it comes to financial services products. The 3% don’t hang around and they also don’t come around all that often. In terms of lead generation efforts and closing new business, it can seem very much like a feast or famine cycle and in fact for many financial advisers, this is the case. This makes it seem like the market to generate new clients is unpredictable. However, this is not the case, you’re just looking at the wrong end of the buyer’s pyramid.

 

The Customer Journey

The buyer’s pyramid contains an additional 97% of potential clients. It seems madness that financial advisers don’t pay any attention to them. Again, it makes sense. None of them are ready to buy yet, so why would you waste your time in going after people who aren’t ready to do business. For exactly that reason. They aren’t ready to do business yet. 

Now, let’s get rid of the bottom 30% of people who simply will never work with you. They know they aren’t interested, so you don’t ever have to waste your time with them, until they do become ready, but that’s a different story for another time.

This leaves you with 66% of potential clients who could at some point make their way to the top of the buyer’s pyramid and eventually become ready to work with you.

The typical mindset and journey that a financial adviser would have is this. Let’s take an example of someone wanting to transfer their pension. Advisers recognise that recently was a great time in which to transfer pensions because of the great interest rates. This was the leading topic of conversation to all those whom they wanted to transfer their pensions. The issue with this is that it is a topic of conversation for those who are in the 3%. As we’ve already identified, there aren’t many of them so everyone else will fit into different levels. They need to know other things and learn about the things that are important to them before them make that decision. 

If you now look at things from the point of view that most of our audience is sat in the ‘don’t think they’re interested’ bracket, then you’ll realise that what they need is more information to help move them along to the next stage in their customer journey.

 

Content Types

What sort of content do you think someone would need to see as part of the 33% of people who fit into the, ‘don’t know their interested,’ stage of the buyer’s pyramid? Would you go straight in and tell them it’s a great time to move their pension over because of the good rates? Probably not. In fact, you’d probably just start by asking them some questions that let you know if you can even help them.

A great potential idea would be to run an advertising campaign that leads to a quiz or questionnaire that helps them to identify if they have enough in their pension and if it’s even worth them doing it. A few simply qualifying questions, such as, have you worked for xyz company or similar and paid into a pension plan, could be all you need to bring this subject to the attention of your potential audience.

Again, many people may not be ready to speak to anyone or make any purchase decisions at this point, but they may be interested to learn more about what they can do, how they can do it and of course the benefits of doing a pension transfer. What sort of content do you think they would need to see at this point? One thing’s for sure, it isn’t going to be that there are great rates available for them. 

 

Nurturing The Buyer’s Pyramid

Everything we do here is based around playing the long game. If you need to make money now, then you’re probably better off leveraging your immediate network and picking up the phone. What you want to create is a long term, self filling pipeline that will start to pay off for you in 3 months’ time. Understanding the journey and questions that someone has at every stage of their customer journey means that you are better able to leverage a larger group of potential clients sitting at different stages of the buyer’s pyramid. 

When these prospects make themselves known, it is highly likely that they will have interacted with all of your content for a long time, know all the info they need to know and will walk right up to you to make that purchase; no cold calling or chasing required. In the long term what this will mean is that you don’t ever have to fight for the 3% who are ready to make a purchase as they have walked themselves down your sales funnel. 

Now, you must be thinking, okay, so why even bother advertising to the 3%? Well, they’re still ready to buy now aren’t they? What it does mean is that there isn’t so much pressure on making a sale from a small group of people. You can relax knowing that eventually and with regularity new clients will come to you so any business you pick up from that group will be an additional, but not essential bonus.

 

Want to learn how you can create a simple 3-step funnel that will automatically fill your pipeline? Download our guide by clicking the button below.