I talk about the buying and selling process all the time. Everyone knows that you have to have a sales process, some even know it has to align with the customer buying process. Our CRMs come with predefined selling processes. Every training program incorporates some sort of process.
But when I work with sellers, even working with leaders, they aren’t using the process. There’s all sorts of rationalizing and excuse making. “This deal is different, I can’t follow the process…..” “Things have changed, our process was developed 10 years ago….” (Some legitimacy to this.).
Most of the time, I see a semi random set of activities, responding to customer queries, or calls asking, “When can we expect an order, if you order by the end of the month, we’ll give you 15% off….”
When and if they update these in CRM, they arbitrarily move them from stage to stage, just to show progress, even if it doesn’t match where the customer is in their buying process.
Then there is the opposite case. The process has become a rigid script for the seller to execute, even though the buyers aren’t reading from the same script or may not have a script at all.
Both approaches fail more than they succeed.
And neither understands the full power of the process and how processes free us to really engage our customers.
So, let’s go back to basics.
What is a process? It’s simply a framework which helps guide us to be most productive and successful. It’s a series of steps, activities, shared agreements that help us and our customers navigate a change or buying initiative. We build our processes based on what we have learned in experience. What are the steps, questions, activities, that tend to produce the desired outcomes? What are the things that don’t? From this, we design a process that maximizes our ability to achieve our goals. And this process can help the customer in designing their own process for this project. Since they don’t make these buying decisions every day and don’t know how to buy, we can create great value in helping them navigate their buying process.
Why don’t we follow them? Processes feel like bureaucracy, they feel like they are restraining us. We’d much rather roll with the punches and react to the situation in front of us. Sometimes they are poorly designed or have not been updated, and they restrict us. Sometimes they are written for compliance, not creating outcomes. Often, they require us to do work that we’d prefer to skip, doing just enough to move forward.
Why are they important? Processes are based on the collective experience of the organization; what works, what doesn’t, what is most productive, how to free up time. They free us from having to figure it out and make it up for every deal we go through. They help us better understand and manage the opportunity, to better understand the risks and what we might do about them. As a result the free us up to engage our customers more deeply. They free us up to think. They enable us to more purposefully achieve the outcomes we and the customer want.
I’m going to repeat myself, processes enable us to engage our customers more deeply. It is the “vessel that carries the work,” but not the work itself. The real work is building trust with our customers, understanding their goals, helping them learn, to move forward, helping build their confidence.
It’s not about the process itself, but the work that we do in within that process.
Should we follow the process? Absolutely, it is built to help us and our customers more effectively achieve our shared outcomes. But we need to treat the process as providing guideposts that we implement intelligently. We constantly have to adjust for the specific situation or context. I liken the process to an F1 race track. Every driver is driving the same track, but each driver is driving their own line, choosing when to shift, brake, accelerate. Like the F1 track, the process provides the framework, but it’s the work we do within that framework that causes us to win or lose. Figuratively, it’s knowing when to step on the gas, when to slow down, when to shift directions and how to help the customer progress through their project.
It isn’t about the process, but the process creates the clarity for our work. It freezes us up to do the work, to connect deeply with our customers, to use our time and theirs much more impactfully.
We need to start looking at our processes as enablers in building our engagement with our customers.
Afterword: This post was provoked by an outstanding post by Chrisopher Lee Chang , Why Process Alone Is Insufficient. Be sure to read it.
Afterword: Here is a great AI generated discussion about this post. It’s great, Enjoy!
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