Sometimes a buying decision originates deep within an organization. Perhaps there is an engineering manager or a worker out on the shop floor who says, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this.’ A grassroots initiative like this may or may not ultimately tie back to supporting or enabling the organization to achieve [...]
Monthly Archive for December, 2008
We can see what I am going to call a ‘top-down’ buying process. Now, this model doesn’t begin to illustrate the intricacy and all of the interrelationships of the four decisions, which happen both intermittently and simultaneously. But in the spirit of grounding this concept in some mutual understanding, I’ve found this model to be [...]
Of all the things we need to learn when we discover a new opportunity, here’s the most important: ‘Is there a goal, a problem, or an initiative that can drive a decision to buy?’ In What Customers Really Want we introduced the word disparity to describe the ‘gap’ between where our customer is now and [...]
Before you or I, or one of our customers, can buy anything, there are at least four things that have to be considered, and four decisions that have to be made. Sometimes, one person makes all four of these, but in medium to large businesses it’s not unusual to see three or four different people, [...]
The next two chapters are dedicated to better understanding how customers buy and to using that knowledge to develop a sales process that supports and facilitates any buying process. One of the things that is vitally important in developing a solid process is looking closely at the things you are doing now. What are the [...]
If you deal in complex solutions or big-ticket items, your customers probably don’t have a defined process for buying what you sell. They don’t do it often enough to develop a process, so you will actually be helping them to discover their own internal buying process as you go. Sometimes, we know the things that [...]
Have you ever found yourself diligently working through a sales campaign-holding meetings, giving presentations, delivering proposals, and maybe even providing references-only to discover that the people within your customer’s organization who have the authority to buy are still mentally back at the very early stages? Or they are still trying to decide whether this purchase [...]
If you choose to believe and internalize what has been said here, this has the potential to completely change everything about the way you sell. Everything we do should be done with the specific intent of helping our client to do something they need to do in their buying process. Any action we take, or [...]