Every seller has a map.
It’s called a sales process. It has stages, milestones, and exit criteria. It tells sellers where they are, what they should be doing, and where they’re headed. In theory, it’s a GPS for getting from first conversation to a closed deal.
While they have this “map/GPS,” based on their best experience, too often, they ignore it. They know a better way, they know the short-cuts, or “this situation is different. Instead of using the map, they “know better,” navigating by instinct.
Sometimes instinct works. More often, it produces a longer, less efficient path. Or the seller gets lost. And they don’t realize it until the customer has gone quiet, the deal has stalled. They don’t know what to do when the customer raises something different from what they have experienced before. Or their map is old and outdated, and the maps their competitors are using are much more current.
That’s the first challenge, it Is the challenge of how sellers navigate the process most effectively.
But there are two more challenges. Even if the seller used their map perfectly, the customer is navigating a completely different journey, something that is larger and more difficult. They are navigating a change process, and buying is just one component of that process.
Layering on this, where there is some alignment between buyer and seller, at least in the buying component of their process, they may be completely out of alignment. The buyer is at one place, the seller is at another place.
These are the three dominant failure mechanisms our customer engagement strategies. Taken separately, each can stall or delay deals. Together, they completely derail deals. Buyer change efforts fail, deals collapse, both the customer and we fail.
Three separate navigation failures. Most sales conversations, diagnostics, and training programs address none of these. As a result, we fail to engage customers in the most impactful way, we fail to create value the customer most needs..
Problem One: Sellers Have a Map and Don’t Use It
Sales processes are critical to our success. They represent our best practices in helping the customer navigate their buying process. A great sales process focuses sellers on the right deals and maximizes their effectiveness and efficiency in engaging customers through the buying process.
They not only drive individual effectiveness, but they also drive consistency of execution across the organization, enabling high-impact coaching and providing visibility into the performance of the entire organization.
But too often, when we look at how most sellers manage their deals, they use the process selectively. They may position it in a stage on CRM, not because that’s the stage the deal really is in, but to keep management off their backs. Often, the work they are doing has little relevance to that stage.
When you look at what they are doing, they tend to be reacting/responding to what the customer wants and needs (I’ll address how they are guessing later). Alternatively, they are guided by their instincts. When questioned, the responses are
- “I’ve always done this in the past, I’ll keep doing this….leave me alone!”
- “I’ve been in this business a long time. I know when something is real.”
- “This customer is different. The usual process doesn’t really apply here.”
- “I don’t want to be too structured, I need to roll with the punches.”
To some degree, these aren’t unreasonable instincts. Experience matters. No two customers are identical. Rigidity can kill deals.
But instinct that displaces process is really improvisation. People are making it up as they go. And too often, they miss things, make mistakes, get lost, or drive customer disengagement.
The GPS analogy is useful. If you want to drive to a city you’ve never been to before, using your instincts is likely to get you lost. Or it’s likely to take more time than is needed. Our “instincts” may cause us to make wrong turns and force us to backtrack.
This is exactly what happens when sellers use their instincts, rather than a proven process.
The GPS analogy is useful in another way. While it provides us with directions to our destination, how we drive it will vary based on the situation. Road conditions and weather might change. We might choose to take breaks or drive at a different speed.
A great sales process provides guidance but accommodates adjusting to the situation. Great sellers recognize the value of the process, adapting the execution of it to the specifics of the situation. But the process provides the underpinning to everything they do.
Problem Two: The Customer Isn’t on a Buying Journey. They’re Navigating a Change Process.
Here’s the assumption that underlies almost every sales process: the customer is buying something. The reason is our focus is on getting them to buy something from us.
The reality is very different. Their focus isn’t on buying something; their focus is on solving a problem or implementing a change. Buying something is only a component of what they are trying to do, and often, it’s the smallest component.
But that’s what we focus on, ignoring everything else they are doing. Regardless of how well we execute our selling process, if the customer fails with their problem or change process, we both fail.
What consumes most of the customer’s time and what represents the greatest risk is the change process, not product selection.
Most of the people navigating this process have never done it before. Not this problem or change initiative. Not these circumstances, team, or risks. While they may have addressed big problems and change initiatives before, each situation is unique. They don’t have much experience or expertise to fall back on.
They don’t have a roadmap or a GPS to tell them what to do. They don’t know how to build that roadmap, so they are figuring things out on the fly.
And just like sellers that aren’t leveraging the process, they start-stop, shift directions, change priorities, wander, often going backwards. Most of the time, at least according to the data, major change initiatives fail.
Then there is another problem: they have their day jobs. The change or problem-solving initiative is something they have to address on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.
Gartner’s research makes this visible with their famous “spaghetti diagram.” This chart shows the actual buying journey, which they call “A Long, Hard Slog.” It’s wandering, filled with starts/stops, shifts of priorities, shifts of decisionmakers, changes in the situation itself. Every one of those disruptions is a change-process problem, not a buying-process problem.
This is why deals stall without warning. This is why the majority of efforts fail or end in no decision made.
But even when well developed, our selling process map doesn’t align with customer reality. They are struggling with developing and navigating their map, and the sellers map is completely different.
And too often, those maps are not focused on the same end goal. Their destination is to solve a problem or initiate a change, the seller destination is to sell a solution and get a PO.
Even if the customer has a map and a GPS guiding them to their destination. Even if we have our own, we are not going to the same place!
The challenge to sellers becomes, “Can we help the customer design and navigate their maps? We’ve been involved in similar problem and change initiatives, so we can create great value in helping them with this process.
Even in the least, do we understand the buying process part of the map and are we aligned with that part of the process?
Problem Three: Same Map, Different Positions
Now, let’s imagine the customer, and we are using the same map, our GPSs are guiding us to the same destination.
Sellers and customers have agreed on the direction. They’re using the same language, identifying the same milestones, and agree on where we are headed. We seem to be in sync with our customers.
But what happens so often, we are at different points in this journey, we aren’t in sync.
But they’re at different points on the journey. And neither knows it.
But the reality is we are in completely different places. Sellers often are moving to the close, yet the customer is still in their discovery stage. Sellers are forecasting a win because they have presented pricing and a proposal, the customer is still defining what success looks like.
Some years ago, we did a study with a large telecom company. We discovered that for every stage of misalignment between the buyer and seller’s processes, the probability of winning decreases by 15-20%. If the buyer is still in discovery and the seller is trying to close on the solution they have proposed, the probability of winning declines by at least 30-40%!
The seller, running on momentum and the optimism that a productive conversation produces, is already three stages ahead in their thinking. They’re mentally drafting the implementation plan. They’re calculating close probability. They’re setting up the handoff conversation. In their mind, the hard work is done.
The customer, meanwhile, is still at the beginning of their internal change process. The
Position/stage alignment is requires something different from destination alignment. It requires us to be in lockstep with where the customer is in their process. It requires us to focus on where they are, not where we want them to be. It requires us to help them navigate to the next step and stages successfully.
It requires us to resist the internal pressure to close the deal this quarter, but to help the customer navigate and complete their process.
Interestingly, maintaining that lockstep alignment produces interesting things. The customer sees us co-creating value in helping them navigate the process. This builds customer confidence and trust. Win rates will at least double. No decisions made, reducing by more than 20%, buying/selling cycles reduced by 30-40%.
Ironically, aligning with the customer, using their roadmap, being with them in the same car creates higher levels of success for the customer and us.
What It Actually Means to Navigate Together
Put all three problems together, you start to see that deals we thought were on track to close, may not be/
The seller is navigating by instinct rather than using the map that is based on how the organization has successfully navigated the process.
This map, even if they are using it, is likely to be very different than what the customer is using. Different maps, different destinations.
And if there is alignment on the map and destination, if the customer and we are in different cars, going at different speeds, we are still not aligned.
Solving this requires changes to both process and behavior.
On the process side, sales processes need to be rebuilt around the customer’s actual journey, not just the buying portion of it, but the change process underneath. Every stage should answer two questions, not one. It’s not what sellers focus on, “What should the seller do next?” rather, “What does the customer need to accomplish in their change process and how does the seller help them get there?”
That reorientation focuses on customer success. It is only through their success that sellers achieve success.
On the behavior side, navigating together requires the discipline to stay present to where the customer actually is. That means curiosity over activity. Understanding the customer change process will hit friction, and having customer centricity to understand how this happens helps the customer navigate the process.
It also means helping customers who have never navigated this kind of change before to understand what the journey actually requires. Most customers don’t know what a good change process looks like. They don’t know what internal work they need to do, in what sequence, or what will derail them. A seller who can help them see that, sharing the experience of working with other customers. It means creating value that has nothing to do with the features and functions of our solution, but helping the customer navigate the change process.
That seller isn’t better at the buying conversation. They’re the person a customer calls when they’re trying to navigate something they’ve never done before. Because they’ve proven they understand what the customer is seeks to achieve, their destination, not just what they are buying.
It Was Never Just About The Map
Most sellers think the alignment problem is about having the right map or process. It isn’t, or at least, it isn’t only that.
Some sellers aren’t using a map at all. They’re navigating by instinct, by habit, by whatever worked last time. They’re improvising through engagements that require more discipline, and customer centricity.
Others have their map. It covers the selling process. But that process is irrelevant to the customer. Even focusing on the customer buying process isn’t sufficient. The customer isn’t on a buying journey. They’re navigating a change, something they may have never done before, in an organization that doesn’t know how to chart it. The buying decision is the smallest part of that work. The seller focused only on their selling process is solving the wrong problem.
And even where seller and customer share a map and agree on a destination, they’re often miles apart on the road, the seller focused on the close while the customer is still figuring out where they’re going.
Three different failures. All of them common. Any one of them is enough to slow things down. Together, they explain why so many deals end in no decision made, or why we have such low win rates.
The sellers who figure this out stop asking how to advance the opportunity and start asking how to help the customer succeed at what they’re actually trying to do. When you help someone navigate to a successful conclusion, the deal takes care of itself.
Afterword: Here is an outstanding AI generated discussion of this post. I always enjoy the slightly different perspectives in these discussions. It adds new ideas to what I am writing about. Enjoy!
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