It doesn't pay to struggle with a prospect over whose process your going to follow. But it usually doesn't it make sense to comply fully with theirs. What should you do?
If you’ve been in sales awhile, you’ve learned to find your way through multiple sales cycles. You’ve developed a sense of process.
Your process is the series of steps you go through with your prospect to arrive at a successful transaction. It’s a mental map of the route you must navigate to arrive at a sale. Having it in clearly your mind helps guide you toward your destination.
What happens when the customer’s buying process is inconsistent with your sales process? Do you abandon your process and embrace theirs?
Good Sales Process Increases Your Success Rates
An effective sales process ensures a higher close rate than a less effective one. A properly tested sales process may tell you, for example, that you win 70% of sales where you’ve worked directly with the prospect to prepare an economic justification for your offering.
The remaining 30% of opportunities result in no decision or the customer pursues an alternative approach.
The message is clear. This component of your process is very important. To more than double your close rate, you should always work with your prospect to prepare an economic justification. It’s worthwhile for you to negotaiate that step into their evaluation process.
Why Ignore a Winning Formula for Success?
Once you have a well-defined sales process and you have data to show that it consistently produces solid results, it becomes very clear how important it is for you to follow your process. You know that by following your process consistently, you can achieve a high payoff for your investment of sales time and expense.
But as you develop and refine your process, it can be easy to forget that to succeed in a sale, you also need to navigate the space your prospect occupies.
Maybe They Don’t Want to Buy the Way You Want to Sell
As my coach Jim Camp says, you need to live in your prospect’s world. Don’t expect them to live in yours.
That’s why it’s also very important for you to understand and accommodate your customer’s buying cycle rather than focusing exclusively on executing your sales cycle.
Your customers and prospects simply don’t care that you see your interaction with them as a progression from lead generation to qualification and through presentation, objection handling, and eventually closing. What’s important to them is how they see their progression with you.
They Expect You to Follow the Golden Rule
Oddly enough, your customers and prospects focus on themselves: Their problems. Their wants. Their constraints. Their risks and concerns.
- They think about how little time and money they have to accomplish all the goals their management expects of them.
- They think about ways to get things done as efficiently as possible.
- They’re distrustful of people they don’t know.
- They don’t want to stick their necks out.
When they have to make a decision that involves a lot of money or a lot of change, they recognize they are at personal risk. The more they recognize this, the more uncomfortable they will be about making any decision.
Your prospects expect you to follow the golden rule: They have the gold, and they make the rules.
Are You Willing to Sell the Way They Want to Buy?
It’s essential for you to understand how your customers want to buy.
Once you’ve done so, your challenge is to try to align your sales behavior and activity to their decision process without compromising the key elements you need for an effective sales process.
It’s a mistake to try to force their decision process to align with the way you want to sell.
That doesn’t work so well. I’ve tried it several times and have always failed miserably.
Most companies have a preferred buying process. The bigger the company or the more money is involved in a deal, the more likely they are to follow their processes.
If a company has a very rigid procurement process that doesn’t fit with your sales process, does it mean you have to jump through all their hoops in order to win the deal?
Maybe. Or maybe you can negotiate a variance.
More next time.
Stay fresh.
– Scott Silverback
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