The sales process is critical to navigating our way to winning each deal. We have carefully crafted stages, each identifies critical activities and exit criteria. All targeted to the close and a PO.
Each is carefully structured, focusing on our activities and our progress. Did we qualify them? Did we conduct the discovery call? Did we do the demo? Did we provide them a proposal? Are we handling their objections? Are we conducting the right negotiations to win?
We have metrics measuring our progress. How much time in each stage? What is the deal velocity? We associate our probability of winning with progress through our sales process. A deal in the discovery stage is 50%, in the proposing stage it’s 70%, in the closing stage it’s 90%. We are thinking about how we should spend our commissions.
We have tools and methodologies that help us navigate the process effectively. Even tools that help us do the work itself.
Everything about the sales process focuses on us and maximizing our success.
But there’s a problem with this. It’s the customer.
We don’t execute our sales process with the customer blindly complying with it, answering our discovery questions, sitting in the demo, carefully studying our proposal.
The customer has a whole lot of different stuff on their mind. Our sales process is meaningless to them They don’t care if they are in the qualifying or discovery stages. They don’t care how long they stay in a certain stage of the pipeline or if the deal has the right velocity.
The customer has a completely different agenda that doesn’t fit our neatly arranged stages. They are trying to solve a problem or make a change. They are trying to navigate within their own organization, understanding the problem, getting alignment, assessing the risks, getting management support, even considering whether they should be doing this at all. At the same time, they are busy doing their day jobs.
And in complex B2B buying, the customer has probably never done this before, at least for this issue. If they have, it was years ago and things have changed. They don’t know what they should be doing, what questions should they be asking, who should they involve, what are the risks, how do they implement the change, how do they get management support? And, how do they fit this effort into their already busy schedules? They’re trying to make sense of a complex problem.
And they are trying to do this in organizations that may be shifting priorities, needing to respond to competitive or market shifts, or just busy doing the work. So there’s a high probability the work they put in on “buying” might be deferred and the focus shifts.
We know all the research about how customers struggle, wander, start/stop, change people in the buying group. The Gartner “Spaghetti Diagram” mapping their journey is ingrained in our memories. We know the data around No Decision Made and how customers suffer from FOMU.
Yet with all this going on with our customers, we design our sales processes focusing on our success and efficiency.
We like to think the customer has a buying process. Sometimes we map the customer stages and activities against our stages and activities. Usually, they mirror each other precisely.
But does the customer really have a buying process? If they buy so infrequently, do they have a structured approach to looking at how they buy?
The reality is they are making it up as the go.
They have gone through similar efforts, they have gone through change or problem solving projects, so they can start to put some structure to their project initiative. They know they have to define the problem and it’s impact on the organization. They may think they should get others involved, they will struggle in learning more about the problem and how others have solved it. They know they have to get organizational and executive support, look at implementation, and all sort of other things.
But how do they structure a plan? How do they make sure they aren’t missing anything?
This is where we can create great value with the customer. We’ve been through this with thousands of customers. We’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work, roadblocks that arise and where projects fail.
What if we took that experience and helped our customers develop their project plan (buying process)? What if we helped them develop the steps to define and understand the problem? What if we helped them assess their readiness to address the problem and make the change? What if we showed them how they might assess the risks of change, of doing nothing? What if we helped them identify the things they need to do–independently of us–to gain support and alignment through the project?
Rather than making it up as they go, and probably failing, we can help build structure to their process and help them navigate it effectively.
Our sales process provides a starting point. Presumably, it’s built on what we’ve experienced in our past wins/losses. Just as it helps us navigate the deal, we can use this as a framing to help the customer develop their project plan. We don’t seek to have them mirror our process, but use it as a starting point in helping them develop their project plan.
Our focus in doing this shifts, rather than focusing on our success, we focus on the customer’s success–both in this project–and the subsequent implementation. Rather than focus on our activities, we help the customer define the activities critical for their success in their project–and those activities include a huge range of things they must do independent of us. In that process we convert the relationship. Rather than doing things to the customer, we are working with the customer.
Rather than focusing on our process, we focus on the customer project and their success.
And when they are successful, we are more successful.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. There are small hallucinations, but it’s a good discussion. Enjoy!
Leave a Reply