How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? I called him the ‘pull’ customer before myself and when we look at how he behaves online, we talk about his ‘digital footprints’.
Another nice way of looking at the digital behavior and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based marketing automation and lead management vendor Eloqua.
The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.
In brief Eloqua says in the report that in B2B sales the face-to-face contact always was very important and that such a sales contact consisted, besides the ‘talk’, of a lot of body talk. The best sales persons were those that were able to read the ‘buying signs’ and body language of their buyers.
When the buying cycle moves online
However, Eloqua continues, these skills are no longer enough because the buying cycle (in B2B) has moved online as you of course know, so sales people in fact spend less face-to-face time with their customers. That’s where the concept of Digital Body Language™ comes in. You could see it as the online equivalent of the face-to-face body language.
The first question that arises is of course how you can ‘read’ that digital equivalent. The answer is obvious: by looking what your customers do online, whether it concerns email interactions, searches, information downloads, whatever.
All these actions say something about what your customer is doing and thinking and where he is in the buying process. One of the challenges is to get all that information through to sales. And that’s one of the domains where Eloqua’s solutions come in the picture, with a focus on the changes in the buying process and closing the gap between marketing and sales (and between marketing automation and CRM).
Digital Body Language by Eloqua CTO Steve Woods
Surely an interesting way of looking at how Internet has changed the rules in the (B2B) sales domain. If you want to download the report click here and then go to the Resource Center where you can find it under ‘white papers’ and can also find a lot of information about it under ‘eBooks’.
The information is free but of course you will have to leave some data. After all this is one of the things Digital Body Language™ is about.
There is also a blog, called Digital Body Language, by the CTO of Eloqua, Steven (Steve) Woods.
If you want to know more about the whole idea (and other B2B marketing topics) you can pay Steven a visit, of course starting with this blogpost: What Exactly IS Digital Body Language?