The Customer-Driven Sales Process

As explained in my previous post, traditional vendor-centric sales processes are ineffective because they don’t reflect the way that customers want to buy.  As such, they can get in the way of a sale as many times as they help move the sale forward.

The solution is to base your sales process on how the customer wants to buy, rather than how you think you ought to sell.  To find out how to do this, I contacted sales proces...s guru Mike Bosworth, co-author of the bestselling books "Solution Selling"  (McGraw-Hill, 1994) and "CustomerCentric Selling" (McGraw-Hill, 2003). He recommends building sales process around the mental states that a customer goes through while moving towards the buying decision.  Such a sales process might look something like this:

1. SUSPECT.  The potential buyer has become curious about your offering after learning (via your demand creation efforts) how you have helped a similar buyer achieve a goal or solve a problem.
2. PROSPECT.  The potential buyer has shared a goal or admitted a problem to you, with the clear implication that the buyer would like your help moving forward to a solution.
3. CHAMPION.  The potential buyer has visualized how your offering will help achieve a goal or solve a problem and has agreed to give you access to the other decision-makers in the firm.
4. OPPORTUNITY.  The champion and other decision-makers have agreed as a group to evaluate your offering and collaborated with you on a written series of events with go/no go checkpoints.
5. CUSTOMER. The potential buyer has actually bought one of your offerings and expressed a desire for an ongoing relationship.
6. ADVOCATE. The customer is actively promoting your offerings to similar buyers and referring them to you for future business.
   

Note that this customer-driven sales process is worlds away from the old vendor-driven “engage, present, close” process model. Because the focus is entirely on the customer’s state of mind, you’ll naturally hone your sales behaviors to facilitate the change from one state to the next, rather than trying to follow a predetermined playbook.

For example, since you’ve defined the start of the sales process with the customer taking the action of contacting you, you’ll never waste time cold calling customers who ultimately won’t be interested.  Instead, you’ll work with marketing on demand creation efforts that have a clear “call-to-action” message that feeds the pipeline.

Similarly, as you try to help the customer move from "suspect" to "prospect", you’ll not be tempted to give a product-oriented presentation.  Instead, you’ll naturally spend time asking questions and actively listening to the suspect.  Then, once the "suspect" has shared and thus become a "prospect," you’ll bring to bear whatever tools are necessary (such as a highly customized solution-oriented presentation) to help transform the "prospect" into a "champion."

In other words, with a customer-driven sales process, it's the customer, not the sales rep, that moves the sale forward.  The job of the rep is to facilitate that movement and to remove roadblocks.