The 5 Biggest Barriers to Understanding the B2C Buyer Journey

Marketing and sales leaders at B2C brands face a major roadblock to driving revenue growth—they don’t understand what the full buying journey looks like. In our recent State of B2C Revenue Execution report, only 28% of marketing and sales leaders said they’re very confident that they understand their customer’s full buying journey. 

Without a clear understanding of what programs, channels, and investments drive purchases, they can’t optimize any part of the buying journey, leading to slowed revenue growth.

Why B2C Sales and Marketing Leaders Don’t Understand the Buying Journey

In industries with complex paths to purchase like automotive, healthcare, home services, and financial services, it’s easy to see why. The buying journey spans online and offline channels, as customers do their research online and then convert over the phone when they set appointments, get quotes, or make a purchase with the help of a contact center sales agent or representative at a business location. 

The marketing team that drives lead generation — usually through digital channels — often operates independently of the sales teams that convert the leads in the contact center or business locations. Both teams are equally responsible for driving revenue growth but lack the alignment to guide the buying journey from the first click to the final sale. 

They don’t collaborate on strategy, share KPIs, or have access to the same data. Completely siloed, they have a handoff mentality where once marketing generates a lead, it’s on the sales team to convert it. This creates an open loop in reporting where marketing can’t accurately track the outcomes of the leads it sends and therefore has no measure of lead quality. With incomplete data on lead quality, they can’t optimize their campaigns to improve it — it’s a vicious cycle that perpetuates poor revenue performance because you can’t optimize what you can’t measure. 

According to our survey, the lack of understanding of the buying is attributed to (pun intended) poor marketing and sales alignment. The top barriers cited to understanding the full buying journey are visibility of phone call outcomes, lack of access to data from other departments, disjointed online and offline data, a lack of a single source of truth, and visibility of online interactions. Let’s dig into each of these, the consequences, and how to overcome them.

Barrier #1: Visibility of Offline Interactions

Over half of the respondents to our survey said that a lack of visibility of offline interactions (i.e. phone calls) was a top barrier to understanding the full buying journey. When a sizable proportion of your leads convert on the phone, this causes several problems: 

1. No attribution for phone leads: Without direct attribution for the phone calls that your marketing efforts drive, you only see half the picture. You’ll see ad clicks and website interactions, but once they pick up the phone, you have no way to tie the outcome of the call to your marketing spend. This results in artificially low conversion rates and inflated CPA because you aren’t tracking half of your conversions.
2. No ability to optimize lead quality: You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. If you don’t know the outcome of the calls your marketing drives, you have no idea if they converted or if they called for directions. Without data on lead quality, you can’t optimize your marketing to drive more high-quality leads.
3. No connection to revenue: Without full visibility into the outcomes of marketing-driven phone calls, you have no way to accurately measure your ROAS. You could be missing 50% or more of your conversion revenue, selling yourself short and making it difficult to defend your marketing budget.

Barriers #2 & #3: No Access to Data in Other Departments and Disjointed Online and Offline Data

The second and third biggest challenges to understanding the buying journey are a cause-and-effect duo. Online and offline data becomes disjointed without access to the same data across marketing and sales. Online buyer journey data tends to be siloed in marketing, and data on the phone calls marketing drives is locked up in the contact center. When marketing and sales aren’t tightly aligned on data:

1. Marketing and sales can’t align on KPIs: It’s tough to align marketing and sales on KPIs when they don’t have access to the same data. Neither team will have an accurate understanding of lead quality or what might impact conversion rates, making it impossible to find areas for improvement.
2. Customer experience is damaged: Disjointed online and offline data isn’t just a problem for marketing and sales, it’s a problem for your customers. For example, when the contact center lacks information about the digital journey that drove the call, they don’t have the information they need to quickly address the caller’s needs. The call may need to be transferred or put on hold, frustrating everyone who calls and reducing contact center efficiency. This in turn will reduce conversion rates, directly impacting revenue growth. 
3. View of the buyer journey is incomplete: Without a clear understanding of what happens to marketing-driven leads when they call, you can only see half of the buying journey. In fact, you’re missing the most important part of the journey — where leads convert (or not!) You need a clear picture of what the buying journey looks like from click to call to conversion to optimize every campaign and channel to drive the highest quality leads possible. 

Barrier #4: No Single Source of Truth

If your teams use different data from different sources, they’ll likely have different interpretations of the buying journey. Over 40% of our survey respondents said that differences in their understanding of customers are a major barrier to aligning marketing and sales teams. A lack of tools that act as data hubs for your revenue teams will lead to:

1. Conflict and fingerpointing: If your teams aren’t looking at the same data or just don’t have access to half of it, it’s easy to point fingers at one another when conversion rates dip. The classic argument where marketing says sales isn’t closing the amazing leads they send, and sales says the leads are bad will rear its ugly head without a single source of truth to settle it. 
2. Lack of alignment on KPIs: Again, you can’t align on KPIs when your sales and marketing teams don’t have access to the same data.
3. Poor optimization decisions: To make sound paid media optimization decisions, you need attribution for every call your ads and campaigns drive. Without a single source of truth, you may have no way to connect your paid media spend to conversions, leaving you guessing where you should place your budget or pull it back. 

Barrier #5: Poor Visibility of Online Interactions

This one may come as a surprise to marketers who are accustomed to having access to exhaustive digital journey analytics. However, a lack of visibility into online interactions causes significant issues for the contact center and the customer call experience. 

Today’s consumers are quite sophisticated and many know that companies collect their data with every interaction. So it’s extra frustrating for them when it feels like they have to start all over again when they call. This survey found that over a third of consumers expect that you know something about why they’re calling, even if they’ve never done business with you before! And nearly half expect the highest level of personalization when they call — more than any other channel. 

Unfortunately, due to the disconnect between the digital world and the contact center, calls often feel like the most impersonal part of their experience. Without visibility of online interactions, you get:

1. Inefficient call routing: Without access to digital buyer journey data such as the ad, campaign, or webpage that drove the call, it is more likely that the call will be misrouted, will have to be transferred, and the customer will be put on hold. This increases AHT and creates a bad experience for the customer.  
2. Impersonal service: When customers call to complete a purchase, make an appointment, or get a quote, they may have already done a lot of legwork on your website. If they had items in their cart or entered their information online and had to repeat it all to the rep who answered the phone, it will feel like starting all over again.  This frustrates your customers and reduces conversion rates.
3. Excess call volume: If the contact center can’t figure out what’s driving calls automatically and at scale, they have no efficient way to improve call deflection and marketing and CX teams don’t have the data they need to improve the digital experience to help customers self-serve online. 

How Revenue Execution Platforms Help Unify Marketing, Sales, and the Buying Journey 

To gain a full understanding of the buying journey, your marketing and sales teams need access to the same data to serve as a source of truth. Both teams need visibility from the first click to the final sale — not just the parts that come before or after the handoff. This data and visibility doesn’t just end arguments about what parts of the process may be failing, it gives both teams a common understanding of the buying journey and a common language to speak in. It provides a clear path to optimizing the buying journey to reach your common goal — driving revenue growth.

This is why leading B2C brands use AI-powered revenue execution platforms like Invoca to connect teams with shared data to optimize the entire buying journey. Revenue execution platforms connect customer buying journey data across the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals. 

By using a comprehensive revenue execution platform, revenue teams can finally connect their marketing investments directly to revenue, improve digital engagement, and drive higher-quality leads. 

It also enables sales teams — whether in the contact center or at distributed business locations — to access information from the customer’s digital journey to provide the best call experience possible. This makes customers happier, helping them close more of the deals that marketing spends money on to send their way.

Read this blog to learn more about how revenue execution platforms work. To see what leading analysts are saying about revenue execution providers, check out The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms, Q2 2024 report.

‍