In evaluating the various courses of action available, your customer will have many new variables to consider. Note that some of these questions relate to the six Action Drivers, but there are also several additional criteria. I like to refer to these as Choice Drivers, because they are the factors that buyers use to differentiate between options and that ultimately drive the choices that they make.
In answering the question, ‘What should we buy?’ the following factors and their questions may come into play:
- Delivers Result: ‘Will this course of action enable us to achieve our desired results?’
- Feasibility: ‘Are we certain this solution will work for us?’
- Proven: ‘Has it been done successfully before?’
- Make vs. Buy: ‘Is this something that we could do or make ourselves?’
- Risk: ‘What are the chances of success or failure if we follow this course of action?’
- Time to Benefit: ‘How quickly can we start seeing results?’
- Prioritization: ‘Of all the possible courses of action, which one is the best?’
Sometimes business managers get confused. They end up focusing more on ‘What they’re going to do’ than ‘Why they’re going to do it.’ Anyone can fall prey to this. What starts out as an objective to increase customer retention, repeat business, and top-line revenues, ends up as an initiative to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. I always get worried when I hear a customer start to refer to a project or an initiative by the name of a solution as opposed to the name of the goal or result they are trying to achieve. An example would be when the objective of increasing gross revenue becomes known as the ‘CRM Project.’
When the customer loses sight of the reason for taking action-their ‘C’-and instead becomes fixated on ‘B,’ they begin to focus on the wrong decision. They sometimes take their eye off the Action Drivers that are really driving the initiative and start to focus on the subtle choices between vendors and their products and services.
This kind of thinking is what causes them to produce multi- hundred-page RFPs (requests for proposal), and engage in a long, drawn-out selection process. This is never a good thing, because a nine- to-twelve-month selection process isn’t good for anybody. It costs both the customer and the vendor enormous amounts of time and money, and they delay any results that the customer might hope to achieve. The bigger problem is that our customers begin basing their choices and decisions on the wrong criteria; features, functions, and slight differences in products become paramount; pricing becomes the central issue. When this happens, no one benefits.
If I’d had three days of free time, and I was worried about saving a few bucks, I could have driven around to a dozen different stores until I found just the right barbecue grill with all the features I wanted. Then I could have played one store against the other until I got the best possible price. But the opportunity cost (the value lost by not using that time in a more productive way) would have been enormous. The same is true for many of your customers.
When you start to see your customer behaving like this, there is usually one of two reasons: it is either a bottom-up initiative that doesn’t stand much chance of ever being funded, or it’s a top-down initiative that has gotten bogged down under its own weight. Either way, we have to find out if the people who will make the final Action Decision and the Course Decision are focused on the right things or not. If they aren’t, we might be wasting our time. In Elevating the Buying Process we will address how to reach and engage these executives who make the higher-level decisions.