Designing before having a map is betting backwards

The most common question Sinh Vũ hears when starting a sales kit project is: "We need brochures, presentation slides, and service introduction sheets, when will they be ready?" This is a reasonable question. However, if you jump straight into design from there, the result is often a set of documents that are sufficient in items, printed and left in a drawer, while the sales team still drafts emails each time they meet a client. The issue does not lie in the quality of design but in the fact that no one asks: when is this used, who has it, and where is the customer in their buying journey?

The buying journey does not go straight.

According to Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey, customers do not move directly from "awareness of the brand" to "signing a contract." They loop through many buying jobs, which are tasks that the decision-making committee must complete before finalizing: recognizing the problem, exploring solutions, building internal requirements, comparing suppliers, and building consensus within the team. Each buying job requires different information, in different formats, delivered to the right people.

If the design tool is categorized by material rather than by purchase, it is easy to end up with a beautiful brochure that no one reads because it appears at the wrong time, or having nothing to send to the technical team building internal requirements even though that is a decisive moment.

The map can perform three tasks simultaneously.

• Anchor each tool to a specific moment. Each item in the sales kit must answer: what purchase it addresses, which channel the customer engages in, whether the customer reads alone or has someone presenting alongside.
• Set priorities. When budget and time are limited, a map helps identify which items are blocking cash flow today and which can be done later. It’s not necessary to complete everything at once.
• Eliminate unnecessary items. Many businesses realize after mapping that some items on the initial list do not truly address any moments or have already been handled by other channels.

Common mistakes when skipping this step

• Designing according to traditional categories: brochures, flyers, slides, capability statements. The list looks complete but lacks grounding in the actual buying journey.
• Ignore the moment customers read alone. Materials left after meetings, follow-up emails, and introductory pages on the website are times when customers persuade themselves internally without anyone from the business there to support. This is often the biggest weakness.
• Creating a complete set for a beautiful capability profile mostly remains static. The more fragmented content there is, the harder it is for customers to make decisions. Gartner indicates that providing the right support for purchasing helps customers buy much more easily compared to offering many documents without anchor points.

The viewpoint of Sinh Vũ

In the P5 process, Sinh Vũ prioritizes mapping touchpoints as the first phase of every sales kit project. The output of this phase is a strategic document that includes a buying journey map and a prioritized list of publications, confirmed by the sales and marketing team before designing anything.

The operational principle of Sinh Vũ: any item that does not solve a specific moment should not be included in the set.

You can definitely do this step yourself without hiring. The simplest form is a list detailing each moment in the buying journey, who interacts with the customer there, and what information the customer needs to move to the next step. Sinh Vũ includes this step in the project's initial phase to collaborate, not to keep it as a mandatory paid service.

The goal is not to have a complete set of materials, but to ensure the sales team always has the right tools at the right time.

Practical experience, Sinh Vũ Studio