The Problem With The Selling/Buying Process

Recently, sitting with a sales management team, we started discussing the “Sales Process.” They displayed their sales process. As you might expect, the process was divided int a number of stages. Things like prospecting, qualifying, discovering, proposing, closing. (Theirs actually had different labels and a couple of additional stages).

As is typical of most sales processes I look at, this process described all the things they needed to do to the customer to persuade them to buy their solutions. They included the usual things, understanding budgets, understanding who is involved, identifying the key decisionmaker and influencers, determining their needs, demoing their solutions, providing references, and so forth.

The thinking is that if we do those things well, we are highly likely to get them to do what we want, buy our products.

In the last 8 years, we’ve become more sensitive to the customer buying process. This team displayed that sensitivity to the customer buying process. In their display of that sensitivity, they had added a column to the right of their selling process. It was called the “customer buying process.” It identified the stages and activities the customer was going through.

As you might expect, it precisely mirrored all the activities the sellers were inflicting on, I mean executing with the customer. When sellers were determining needs, the customer were also determining needs. When sellers wanted to identify the buying team, the buyers were identifying the buying team. When sellers wanted to do demonstrations, the buyers were asking for demonstrations.

Every single activity identified in their selling process was mirrored in the customer buying process.

The team was proudly displaying their sensitivity to the customer buying process and how they were supporting the customers in buying.

The problem is, what they designed was what they wanted the customer to do–the things that would maximize their ability to win. But they hadn’t really identified the customer buying process.

Everything they designed into the customer buying process focused on solution selection. But solution selection is just a small part of the customer buying/change management process. In fact the majority of their concerns and their challenges with buying have absolutely nothing to do with product/solution selection.

And it’s these things that create the biggest challenges for the customer. It’s these things that tend to cause them to fail–resulting in no decision made.

These activities include things like, have they defined the problem/change issue well? Have they identified the need to change and the consequences of doing nothing? What support do they need from the organization, from management? What are the questions they should be asking them selves, what do they need to learn about successfully implementing the change or solving the problem? What have others done, what can they learn from others? Where have others failed, how do they avoid those things? What are the risks, what do they have to do about? What are the issues in successfully implementing the change, how to they make sure they will be successful? Are they doing the right thing for the organization and for themselves? And……

None of these issues have anything to do with selecting a solution. And, as I’ve mentioned, these are the issues the customers struggle with the most. Ironically, because we’ve been involved with hundreds/thousands of customers doing similar things, we actually have a lot of knowledge about how these customers have dealt with these issues. As a result, we can create huge value in helping the customer address those challenges, developing confidence in what they are doing, as well as the solution they are selecting.

We create much greater value–and shared success–when we help the customer with the “whole problem,” not just solution selection.

When we focus on and help the customer focus on the big picture, magic happens. Our win rates skyrocket. In the process of working on the whole problem with the customer, we develop deeper levels or trust and understanding–both with the customer and for ourselves. We engage the customer in a collaborative effort in this process.

No decisions made plummet. As we build the confidence in the customer’s understanding of the whole problem. we are helping them develop confidence that they are doing the right thing–both for their organizations and for themselves.

And because we helping them identify these issues and manage the process, we help them navigate it more successfully and more efficiently. As a result, the buying process is significantly shorter than if the customer was left to figure it out themselves. Absent our support, they start/stop, shift directions, shift priorities, shift team members, and wander. We tend to assume customers know how to buy, the reality is they don’t. They do is so rarely, things change so much between buying opportunities. And buying isn’t their job! Running the business is their job, so they shouldn’t know how to buy.

Action steps: What do you do about this? How do you adapt your view of the selling/buying process to be more helpful to your customer and produce higher levels of results for yourself? Some thoughts:

1. Make sure you have a selling process in the first place. Too many organization don’t or don’t use it.
2. Expand your activities beyond focusing on product selection, to looking at the customer change management process and how you can help them with those aspects.
3. If you have identified your selling process and the customer buying process, and each activity mirrors the other, that’s OK. Focus on the buying side of that list. The critical activities will always outnumber, by far, the selling activities. It’s OK not to have a selling activity that mirrors what the buyers are doing, we just have to help the customer in those activities they are conducting.
4. Look at your past wins/losses. Don’t focus just on what you and the customer did together. Identify the activities they did independently, those activities that had nothing to do with product/solution selection. Add those into your list of critical customer buying activities and help the customer in understanding those.
5. Do the same with deals that ended in no decision made. Try to understand what paralyzed the customer. Make sure you incorporate those into your list of buying activities and you help the customer with those.

The amazing transformative thing about shifting our view of the buying/selling process, is that it drives much higher levels of success for both the customer and us. And isn’t that our ultimate goal?