Optimize Your Leads: Matching Your Sales Process to the Customer's Buying Process

Optimize Your Leads:
Matching Your Sales Process to the
Customer's Buying Process
Brought to you by Jigsaw and AvitageOptimize Your Leads: Matching Your Sales Process to the Customer's Buying Process
How Do You Use Your Sales Process? Despite the talk about sales process, most sales and marketing professionals underutilize this important tool.
With the Internet changing the way customers buy, companies are re-aligning their sales process and marketing activities to the customer's buying process.
This article discusses three critical problems that can be addressed with enhanced use of the sales process:
1. To help sales gain a better understanding of where the prospect is in their buying process in order to improve sales engagement and conversations2. To help marketing create and deliver more relevant and impactful content to prospects to accelerate their buying process3. To optimize both marketing and sales outcomes
One of the important recommendations in this article is to identify ALL of the questions prospects must answer in order to buy your product, service or solution. A worksheet is provided to guide you through this process.
How do you use your sales process to direct and manage your selling activities?
For all the talk about sales process, I find most organizations use sales process in limited ways, typically as part of a weak, and notoriously inaccurate, forecasting activity. Reps and managers can both benefit from an enhanced and regular use of sales process. Consider three critical sales problems: Timing Customer Engagements: . How do you know where the prospect is in their buying process? . How do you know if you are in too early, or too late? . How can you quickly determine the appropriate engagement point for your conversation? Creating and Delivering Content: . How do you know what content is relevant and helpful to prospects? . How do you know what content to build, or how to deliver it? Optimizing Successful Outcomes: . Who decides how the buying process will proceed, customer or seller? . How do you know what are appropriate customer requests? . How do you know which activities will accelerate or derail the process?
Timing Customer Engagements While we have our sales process, it turns out most customers have their buying process. If you haven't analyzed, documented and verified your customer's buying process, this is a good place to start. Today, selling is all about facilitating a successful buying process for customers. It is the way to become a trusted advisor and to create dif-ferentiated value.
One of the most important exercises we've ever conducted is to assemble a cross functional team - sales, mar-keting, customer service -- and collectively answer the question: "What are All the questions our customers must answer in order to buy our product, service or solution?"Optimize Your Leads: Matching Your Sales Process to the Customer's Buying Process
Start at the very beginning: "do I really have a problem, what is it, how would I recognize it?" Proceed all the way through the entire buying process. Be sure to document your answers. Writing ensures everyone is in agreement. It provides a discipline for staying focused and handling changes that occur in the market. This exercise gets everyone in the mindset of the customer. It uncovers hidden issues that are often overlooked. Marketing becomes aware of the downstream questions that arise in the selling process, sales becomes aware of the early questions and customer service enlightens everyone. Then, map each question to a stage of the buying process (as depicted below). Try to determine where in the pro-cess the customer will need to get the question answered. This provides multiple benefits: For sales, the questions customers ask provide an indicator of where customers are in their process. This simplifies and accelerates the work of getting tuned into the prospect. It can help you identify if you are engaging too early, or too late, and factor that awareness into the account strategy and plan. For example, is your sales strategy primar-ily to "find" or "create" customers? For marketing, this provides a way to define content requirements. Building content to answer customer questions provides a great way to organize or tag content so sales and marketing know when it should be used. This also provides "digital body language" ... [download for more]