Selling: Its not about you. It’s the buying motivation that counts
Of course a Sales manager wants to know if various opportunities are progressing as intended, ideally building competitive advantage as they go. The accepted way to achieve this is to build a sales process, in other words simulate the ideal approach and evolution, and then track real opportunities against it. Most CRM systems include some functionality, and others such as Membrain® are built around the process. This brings useful management insight and some appreciation of the health of your sales pipeline. So far good!
So why do so many companies produce comprehensive “sales processes” only to find that their sales remain unchanged in any significant way? Is the process encouraging the science of navel gazing instead?
Here we will look at some possible causes and take a deeper diver into one of them.
The Sales Process:
1. Is built to reflect current practices and NOT the optimal way of working. As such any poor habits or bad practices become enshrined in the process.
2. Is mis-aligned with your business objectives, and favours one sort of opportunity over others. For example, your strategy may be to develop specialized niche markets, but your process reflects price-driven markets.
3. Ends too soon. Instead of ending in a full workscope the process may infer that securing a test installation is considered as success.
4. Is perverted by milestone bonuses intended to focus effort but end up with only easy wins being captured at all.
5. Becomes a generic checklist followed blindly ignoring the individual needs of a customer.
6. Is skewed towards late-stage activities.
Whilst there are many more causes to add to this list, we will look at this last point in more detail in this blog.
All too often Sales Processes only really kick into gear towards the end of the customer’s buying cycle. In large part because the actions are fairly obvious and need comparatively little effort compared to uncertainties in the early stages. So, what do you miss out on with an inversed sales process? The answer…A lot!
Probably at the top of the list is the ability to identify the “Buying Motivation”. Or to describe it correctly, “Motivations”; for there is never a single need, because as humans we always look at a challenge via our own priorities and preferences.
As part of the Buying Cycle, at some point in time a person or group will be charged with translating the business needs which may be varied, into “Requirements” that can sourced. If your interaction starts after this milestone you have just lost the opportunity to differentiate your offering.
This conversion is often considered the time at which the early-stage activities move to late-stage, signally the end to easy access, and your ability to influence the tendering process if that happens. As possible solutions are presented and discussed within a customer organization, technical considerations give way to business factors such as budget, alignment with procurement, ease of convincing partners and authorities. Along the way they are passed to people with considerably different priorities and Needs. Same problem, different solution. Just like the children’s game of Chinese Whispers. Establishing your differentiation before this happens is a significant achievement. Following it through the changing priorities and reiterating your differentiation in terms each person can relate to is a major key to success.
Now you can see how this relates to the other common failings of sales processes that reflect current practices, end too soon, or encourage corner-cutting.
Industry demographics has often made this even more precarious. Domains such as Oil & Gas have seen many experienced middle managers laid off or retired. Often these people are key to convincing budget holders of the merits of a technical solution as they had the credibility and knowledge to present a business case internally. The resulting gap represents a risk to your success. This cannot be captured in a process. An experienced sales person will be sure to identify the key stakeholders all of the way to the decision maker(s), and provide supporting proof for the less experienced person to use when making their internal sale.
Validating the nature of a compelling need in business terms and identifying who to leverage, are all early-stage activities even if they are implemented later, and as needed.
Instead of relying on an inversed sales process, train and motivate your team to invest the time and effort to continually validate the need and identify your customer’s buying motivation(s) as they evolve.
