Your sales process is irrelevant

I get a dozen calls a month from clients asking me to help them document and coach sellers to follow a sales process. My answer is always a big fat “No”!

Why, you may ask? Because your sales process is irrelevant to your customer and even less interesting to your customer’s customer.

I read a great book a number of years ago called The Mind of The Customer, in which authors Richard Hodge and Lou Schachter enlightened my thinking about this topic.  They believe, and I agree, that when sales professionals are trained to focus on their cycle, they are spending all of their time checking off the boxes of their own steps – prospecting, product pitches, proposals, and presentations – with dismal results.

This is not baseball. Times at bat only work for transactional sales.  If you are “selling value,” then you need to understand not just your customer but your customer’s customer and adapt your selling to their buying cycle.

Who are your customer’s customers? What is important to them? What is going on that is impacting their business/industry?

That is WHY your customer is buying anything at all!

After you understand that, ask yourself, how does my customer buy? They recognize a need, evaluate options, resolve concerns and make decisions, most critically with their customer in mind.

So, before investing or shall I say wasting, a lot of time and money training your sellers to follow a routine sales process,  focus instead on your customer’s  customer and your customer’s  buying process.

Invest in sellers who are curious and nimble enough to adapt their selling behaviors to the customer’s buying process. That is where the real deals are made.