The Buyer Journey in the Age of AI

John Jantsch (00:01.622)

Hey, guess what? I'm going to talk about AI today. But before I get into that, I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with you, the human, as a buyer. Think about the last service you bought or hired, something you've never bought before, bookkeeper, lawyer, contractor, ad agency. Where did you actually start?

John Jantsch (00:26.456)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. No guest today. I'm going to do a solo show. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I think the buyer journey needs to be rethought in the age of AI. So back to my original question where did you start as a buyer when you decided you needed to buy something? My guess is some version of two things. You ask Google, maybe a chatbot.

Or yes, to friend, and then you went and checked online to see what was what. Now, here's what that looks like from the other side. I ran a prompt the other day. I typed in something like I run a 40 person commercial HVAC company in Ohio. our marketing's a mess. Who should I hire? And presto, three names came back in about 10 seconds. a real buying decision, not just awareness, but literally a real

Buying decision narrowed to just three finalists. And here's the thing: not one of those companies got a visit, a form filled out, a signal really of any kind. A short list got made and nobody on it knows it happened, and nobody who got left off is ever going to know as well. Now, I've been saying for 25 years that the thing that's changed the most about marketing is how people get to choose to become customers today.

And that line is held up through search, through social, through content, through I don't know, reviews, and is holding up now. And I think this is probably the biggest version of it yet. Back around 2008 or so, I created something that I called the marketing hourglass. And for longtime listeners, you I have talked about this forever.

I again, I realized that the traditional marketing funnel, the idea that you get somebody to know you're out there and maybe like your offer, and then a small number of those you kind of squeeze through that that little part of the funnel. And one of the things that that I've just constantly had challenges with was the fact that it kind of that was the place where people gave up on it. That was the end. And what I saw was keeping a customer.

John Jantsch (02:45.442)

Getting repeat business, getting referrals, having advocates out there that that want to talk about you was really where it got exciting. that's where the momentum in business happened. And today, AI has has completely changed that. and what I mean by that is it's always been important. That that idea of retention, getting more buyers, keeping them, getting more orders from the existing ones, getting referrals, that's always been important.

But now the experience that your current customers are having and they're leaving in reviews, you're building case studies around them, you're getting put on on somebody's Facebook page talking about you, those are the signals that AI is actually using now to create that short list. In fact, if you if you do any of these searches on AI or or using AI tools or AI overviews that Google gives you, you'll see that a lot of the sources

Are not actually the business's website. The st the pr the only thing that the business actually controls. They're coming from Reddit, they're coming from expertise.com, they're coming from industry sites, they're coming from LinkedIn. and so consequently, many of the the things that actually get us on that short list are completely out of our control, but they are actually the things that are creating

The the the early stage in the marketing hourglass. So as a refresher, the marketing hourglass has seven stages. No like trust. That's where people get to decide if they're going to buy from you. try, buy, repeat, and refer. And those seven stages, you know, the buyer kind of runs in a straight line. I mean, or at least we we hope that they do. that we kind of move them along that path. and that every the every

Person that goes through the buy stage is then a potential for repeat and refer. And what's happening now is the things, the the artifacts that people are leaving, based on the fact that they are a happy customer, are the things that are actually now looping back to try, or I'm sorry, to know. And so, in a lot of ways, our existing customers have become extremely important.

John Jantsch (05:08.906)

in informing the the and citing us and in and getting us mentioned in those ai searches. so the stages still exist but in many ways they've they've really changed. So no, you know how a buyer finds you. It used to be those 10 blue links, right? We we wanted to just get on page one and at least you know we had a shot there. Somebody would go through and they'd maybe click on three or four of the links.

But now the shift has really gone from ranking to being cited. And that and that's frankly, that's all the way into the answer that's on your site. it's gotta be everywhere else, too, in reviews, in roundups, in forum threads, other people's podcasts, somebody else's case study that that you're named in. Being found and being chosen used to be two different jobs. They're kind of just one job now.

you know, you think about the searches you've done looking for something, and all of a sudden you show up on that AI search or that AI overview. You might actually just get chosen from that based on or dependent upon what the search is for. So what actually gets a business named? I think this is the part that that has changed in a lot of ways, but it's kind of funny because getting named by other people on pages you don't own seems kind of weird, right?

Reviews with substance, reviews that are recent and specific, like about the work. You know, reviews like great service. I mean, this it's just noise, right? But they fixed our scheduling mess. Now that's a signal, a category that you can state in one plain sentence and saying it in the same way everywhere you appear. You know, we've always said that, having those those citations like in the

in the the the directory listings, having names all the same. I mean, AI uses those as well. if you're if you're listing your name four different ways, and believe it or not, I've definitely seen that, you are really running a risk of of AI skipping over you. So like. Now that's always the stage that sometimes people had trouble with is like I don't care if they like me, but but let's just say about how they warm up to you. two years ago, a well written post

John Jantsch (07:29.262)

Proved that you knew something. But now it proves, I don't know, that you have a subscription to AI. Competent content is very cheap. So competent is really not setting you apart anymore. What survives is the stuff only you could have said. Show your work, including maybe the parts that didn't go so well, the dead ends. put a person in your business on camera because a voice and a face are the cheapest proof.

That something is human-made. I know there are going to be video fakes out there, but I think it's pretty easy to tell if something's an authentic video. So take a position that a competitor would argue with. I've watched businesses spend a year producing perfectly good content and go completely invisible because there was no reason for a person or a machine, quite frankly, to prefer their version of the content. Now, trust has always been, I think, in some in many ways, the most important.

element. but anything can be fake now. So I think buyers really doubt almost by default.

So you've got to actually be able to do things that rise above what can be faked. Reviews on platforms that you don't control instead of just testimonials on your site. Named clients. I mean, a buyer could go call instead of trusted by hundreds of companies. Real faces, real names instead of polished team photography, or worse yet, stock photography. pricing needs to be published.

instead of pricing on request. I know a lot of people are still fighting that, but I think we're in we're in that that we're in that window, I think. having results with a date on them, and and putting everything in text on your website. a lot of these JavaScript tools and a lot of the images that people take, you know, an image of of say a Google review and run it on their website. Well, the AI tools

John Jantsch (09:35.104)

aren't very good at reading those. So make sure that anything that you're claiming, even the awards and and things you're being cited for, if you're going to put them on your website, make sure that you are putting them in text on your website. So we're up to try. how a buyer takes the first step. This has always been, it's interesting. This has always been the hardest one for businesses. and I sort of knew this anecdotally, but we now have a

a tool that we use and people rank themselves on the you know where where they have gaps in the hourglass and by far and away the try is the biggest gap because I don't think a lot of people think of what they do today as really a try. And in fact most businesses I think already have a try, but nobody really designed it. I mean f they leave it as a phone call or as a fill out a form or as get a quote and think of that as a a as a try. And and

Fact the matter, it is a try, but is it an effective one? Could you actually design one that that that actually could be built as an effective try? And what I mean by that is somebody could experience what it's like to work with you. All right, bye. You know, today many businesses actually have a buyer. Once somebody actually schedules an appointment, they've probably

probably made a decision. I mean, you think about the amount of information that's available to us before we ever have to schedule what we think of as a sales call. So a lot of folks show up actually have made a decision. So a proposal deck doesn't need to actually help persuade them. In fact, I think in a lot of a lot of ways that's going to cause some friction. a pricing page, friction, you know

The pr price should already be published, right? So the buy stage is actually just assuring them that they've made the right decision, helping helping them understand that you get what they do. So

John Jantsch (11:46.104)

The last two stages, repeat and refer. These are two stages that I have seen gone missing so often. so repeat retention, you know, obviously it's so much easier, you know this, it's so much easier to actually get somebody who already trusts you to buy more than it is to go out and get that, convince that new person that you're right for them.

and yet so many people leave this one to chance. And here's the reason that that's going to be doubly costly. is that the right term? Doubly costly? I don't know. But the point is, not only are you not getting that repeat business you deserve, you are actually not getting the review volume volume and the you know the recent case studies, you know, as signals which are then turning around and reinforming.

the AI tools and the AI overviews to actually send new people to you. and of course re referral is the exact same thing. I mean, we've all had experiences with somebody showing up and say, hey, Bill said you were the greatest. I did a little research online. It does seem like you're a great fit. I mean, they're not going to argue over price probably. The the the sales cycle is going to be much, much shorter. I mean we all know how valuable that is, but there again, we don't

Do anything about it. It sort of happens accidentally. And that is actually going to cost us again doubly because word of mouth is now indexable. In other words, the search engines and the AI bots are actually finding what people are saying about you out there in all the places that people leave these artifacts. So, in many ways, we have to think of this now.

The customer journey, which our version is the marketing hourglass, we have to think about this as certainly a straight line that the customer walks in, but the business has to think of it as a loop. everything that we're doing in the bottom half of the hourglass is now actually creating demand in the top half. So it's always been important. It's always been something that.

John Jantsch (14:06.77)

that that when I have worked with businesses over the years and shown them where they have gaps in these, they get it. but I think it's become much more important. And I do think that is, you know, if you were gonna ask me the best way to rank an AI, it's not some, it's it's not schema, it's not an LLMS.txt file or some other hack. It's doing the things that always made you rank to begin with. Those are still important.

But now adding a greater focus on all of these places that you don't control and getting cited in PR, getting mentioned in communities, participating in your industry, participating in your community and focus on actually getting cited in those places is going to be extremely, extremely important.

If you're going to go through those stages that I just described, no, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer, where's your biggest gap? Where do you realize, hey, we're not doing anything that would actually move somebody here? And you know, if you try to skip steps, you want to go from no, like you run an ad, you know about us now, come by. You're going to actually find

That you're going to get more price resistance. it is you're going to be compared against others. But when you can run people through stages of know, like, trust, and even try, all of a sudden they are so they are so convinced that you are the right solution, the price goes way down the list. So if nothing else, if you are competing today solely on price, then you absolutely

need to think about this idea of the marketing hourglass or of creating a full customer journey. Figure out your lowest score because you can move people through stages pretty quickly, but you cannot skip any of the stages. You know, a lot of people may think of this as a philosophy, you know, this idea of the marketing hourglass, but it isn't a philosophy. It's never really been a philosophy. And I think guiding

John Jantsch (16:24.622)

Customers all the way through the customer journey, past the sale to the point where they'll say your name out loud, somewhere public, is now the practical mechanism by which anybody finds you, perhaps at all. Do that well enough. And the machines are going to notice too. All right, that's all I have to share today. Thanks for tuning in. Love that you listen.

Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.