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Throw out the Sales Process and Embrace Your Prospect's Buying Process

Posted by Darrin Fleming on Feb 19, 2013 8:00:13 AM
Darrin Fleming

b2b buying process

The sales process (or more accurately, the buying process) has two critical stages:

  1. Awareness: Your prospect becomes aware that a problem exists, or that a product or service exists to solve a problem that he or she has.
  2. Interest and Education: Your prospect becomes interested in learning more, and seeks to become educated on what products and services are available to solve the problem.

Call them what you want, but most prospects will go through these steps. Historically, marketing would launch campaigns to create awareness of your offerings. Those campaigns would help generate leads. Those leads would then be passed over to your sales team to follow-up to educate the prospect on why your offering was the best solution to their problem.

But today, leads are typically not captured at the end of the Awareness stage. Why? Because the interest/education stage of the buying process is now largely self-service. Prospects don’t need, nor do they want to engage with a vendor, and certainly not a salesperson, during the education stage. They want to research what others are doing, what solutions are available, and narrow down their options to a manageable few.

Companies must now go beyond just lead generation (no matter how difficult lead generation is, it isn't enough today) and guide buyers well into or even through the education stage of the buying process, most likely without ever having the opportunity to talk to them. Sellers cannot rely on the assumption that their reps will get the chance to educate potential buyers. Today, education is happening online. Blogs, white papers, Webinars, and our own ROI tools are all tools companies can leverage to enable prospects to self-educate.

A common theme over the last ten years in sales was that you needed to establish yourself as a "trusted adviser" in order to be successful. The way to do that was to dole out information carefully. You never wanted to give away too much. But anyone who follows that advice today will never get a seat at the table, because it is highly likely that someone else will freely give them that information and advice.

Even if your sales rep lands a meeting before the education stage, buyers will almost certainly go online to find out what people are saying about you and your company. If you’re not putting your thought leadership and content out there, then you’re losing an opportunity to educate and engage.

Some B2B companies today -- particularly in non-tech industries -- continue to systematically block their reps from being able to engage with prospects and customers online. By default, they prevent access to social media networks and even some parts of the Internet from the office because they’re afraid of losing control over their voice in the market, or more often they believe that people are merely wasting time when on the Internet. I think these companies are limiting their ability to sell in major ways. Buyers are already doing research online. The question is, are you part of the conversation?

Thinking about the buying process exclusively from the seller’s perspective has become an exercise in futility. Customers today will not follow your selling process. You have to think about it from their perspective and how they’ll go about buying. Prospects will be most attracted to companies that can demonstrate an awareness of the way they prefer to buy, and provide them with the tools and content that they need to make an informed decision.

What are you doing at your company to cater to the new way that prospects buy? How has your sales process changed to adapt to their needs?

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Topics: B2B Selling

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