How to use buying triggers to build a better aquisition machine

What made your customers start shopping for a product like yours?

In your GTM, you must know that.

You must find out the triggers for your target customers.

This way, you can build an effective & relevant acquisition machine.

What’s happening in their company?

Is it a website redesign? New CMO joining? Did the CEO decide to give an order to launch a new product?

What’s happening in their heads?

Are they stressed from all the workload? Are they afraid of presenting the new insights report?

What’s happening in their day-to-day work?

Are they falling behind on the pipeline quota? Are they swamped with writing-enabling material?

Is their Hubspot hygiene nasty, and do they have to do a lot of things in spreadsheets?

You must know that because then you can optimize your sales & marketing around that:

Sales

Messaging: you can customize your outreaches, pitches, offers, etc. to fit those scenarios. Where there’s relevance, there are conversions.

Timing: you can reach out precisely at those times when these situations are happening. (If you figure out a way to get this data)

Marketing:

Content: you can create long-tail and broader content that’s tied to those triggers.

Besides relevant education, content helps you to be easy to find during those moments. How could you show up in a way that it's hard to overlook you?

Performance marketing: Can you reach (almost) “in-market” buyers through paid advertising (usually less than 5% of your TAM)? This is one of the few effective ways performance marketing can work in an ROI-positive way.

Brand marketing: you can create stories around those triggers and advertise to ALL of your category buyers. When they finally get to the trigger moment, they’ll think of you.

This is a massively underrated yet effective always-on play. They might not consume the content if they aren’t already looking, but they’ll consume a great story. It's like compound interest. Warren Buffett approves.

Messaging: you can customize your marketing messaging to fit those scenarios. You can be more relevant. If the messaging resonates more, it will convert more.

Of course, as a cool long-term plan, you can totally come up with those triggers yourself, market them, and create your own trigger points from scratch. (Some long-lasting B2C brands like Coca-Cola are masters of that)

Two key ways to find out these triggers:

Existing customers: ask them, read chat logs, listen to sales calls and do interviews. After all, something made them buy you.

Surveying category buyers: this way, you might find non-obvious triggers.

Also, they are less biased about you and can give you insight into earlier times in the buying journey.