Sales Process vs. Buying Process

In my previous post, I lambasted the structure of the traditional “vendor-centric” sales process.  Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time ANY process is better than NO process, especially for novices who don’t always know what to do next. However, traditional sales processes fall woefully short because they try to drive the sale through milestones that are meaningful to the seller, but not to the buyer. And ...that can cause problems if the customer doesn’t want to play along.

Here’s a very basic example. Suppose your sales process assumes the sales pro will have a conversation about “customer needs” to help the customer define those needs in a way that favors your firm’s products. Suddenly, you run into a customer that wants to do business using a Request For Proposal (RFP) that already defines those needs and the solution that they’d like to buy.

If you really believe in your sales process, you'll assume that another vendor helped the customer write the RFP (i.e. had the “customer needs” conversation) and consequently now has the inside track. As such, the typical response is either to pass on the opportunity or to try to badger the customer into having another “customer needs” conversation in order to reopen and rewrite the RFP.

But the truth is that customers, especially in Internet era, are perfectly capable of doing their own research and writing an RFP from scratch. If so, the customer probably did that extra work because the decision-makers want to drive the buying process according to their own rules and at their own pace. In that case, an attempt to reopen the RFP will only annoy the customer and probably get you ejected from the short list.

Viewing the situation through the lens of a “vendor-centric” process blinds you to the real opportunity, which is to figure out:

• What the customer needs to see in your proposal in order to feel that your firm can best fulfill the requirements in the RFP?
• What actions you can take to influence decision-makers so that, all things being equal, they consider your firm a better choice?

Neither of these activities is well represented in the “vendor-centric” sales process, which becomes at best a distraction to productive sales activity. Worse, if the “vendor-centric” sales process is ossified into a CRM system, then it creates a counterproductive paperwork burden. A sales pro can end up wasting hours of valuable selling time trying to cram information about what’s really happening into a set of fields and forms that bear no resemblance to the real situation.

In my Friday post, I’ll explain how to adapt your sales process to your customer’s buying behaviors.