Literature/202603010858 buying journey aligned with messaging

• Source: [[@ghanadan2025Not Buying It: The Art of Selling to Scientists, Doctors, and Other Professional Skeptics]]
• Tags: #sales #sales-books

Piling onto the 202603010944 Technical buying journey, one must decide what type of messaging is appropriate at every stage.

A common pitfall of marketing campaigns is that they live in the bottom quadrant of the 202603010948 Hypothesis Curiosity Validation Filtering Matrix, targeting the skepticism of the scientist.

In this case, you either believe what it's being told or you filter it out, and there's a high likelihood the filtering will be activated more often to any commercially-driven piece of information.

Therefore, the optimum messaging should align with the stage of the customer.

The first stage of the messaging is to trigger curiosity in the audience. Focusing on benefits is not going to help, focusing on the problem your customers experience is the right way to go. This is called "leadership" type of content. What is wrong, where are the opportunities. It is messaging that does not relate to your offering directly, but rather to the idea of understanding your customers at a deep level, even if your solution is not what they need.

Second stage: education. This is the stage where subjectivity shifts to objectivity. Scientists will seek answers by themselves, we can help them. At this stage, a commercial team's best effort is finding proxies: papers done by others, for example. Importantly, the education material is not about the product or offering, but about the topics that substantiate the leadership message.

A webinar risks being perceived as a vailed product demonstration. Not a valuable source of information for the person seeking answers to their problems.

Finally, persuasion. This is clear messaging developed from the customers' perspective, showing intimate knowledge of their pains and what they have to gain. We should not fall in the trap of targeting only the rational side of the decision making, nor the pitfall of empty claims: "faster", "more reliable", etc. This is the moment when we need to articulate how our offering actually solves the problem they have finally realized they have. The better the alignment, the better the persuasion.