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 is something they really have to take action on at this time? This has no doubt happened to all of us.
What goes wrong when this happens? I think we took our eye off of what we’ve been talking about here. We’re no longer focused on helping our client move through a buying process. We’ve gotten too tangled up in our sales process.
Sometimes we find ourselves ‘pushing’ a customer to move through their process faster than they want to. The primary cause of this is that we don’t have enough opportunities in our sales pipeline. We end up putting pressure on what few prospects we do have to compensate for our own lack of planning. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than having a thin pipeline is trying to get a client to commit to buying before they are ready to buy, and damaging or ruining a relationship with one of the few prospects we do have.
The better we can understand our customer’s buying process, or the things that have to happen before they can buy, the better we can stay aligned with our customer, and work with them where they truly are. Of course, we will try to help them see the value of moving forward sooner.