What are the key phases your prospects are likely to go though in their decision making process? What initiates the buying process in the first place, and what are the key checkpoints they go through along the way? How can you sure that you have accurately identified the stage they have reached in their buying decision journey?
When B2B prospects are in the market for high-value solutions to complex problems, their decision making process evolves through a number of critical phases. Progress is rarely steady, and at each phase they face the choice of moving to the next stage, staying where they are, revisiting a previous stage or abandoning the journey.
Key phases in the buying journey...
Many of the most significant pipeline management and forecast accuracy challenges stem from tracking sales activity rather than looking for evidence of prospect commitment. If we have one key recommendation, it is this: vendors must always base pipelines and forecasts on observable prospect behaviour, and not on the activities or aspirations of their sales people.
Although no individual project is ever identical in the way it pans out, a growing body of research suggests that the phases prospects go through when deciding if and how to solve a complex problem are remarkably similar, and the broad sequence of these phases and checkpoints is equally predictable.
Here's how the process typically unfolds...
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At first, current reality prevails. The prospect is either unaware of the issue, or unconcerned about its potential impact on their business...
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The prospect is alerted to the issue, and people who are likely to be affected start to recognise the need for change...
If the consequences are significant enough, they will start to investigate the options that might be available to resolve the problem, including both internal and external solutions...
- If cost -effective solutions are available, someone will commit funding - even if provisionally - to the project...
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A project team is typically formed at this stage to explore potential solutions in more detail...
- And as a result of their investigations they start to define their decision criteria...
The team move to formally evaluates credible potential solutions against these criteria...
- Assuming the criteria can be satisfied, the team selects their preferred vendor...
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Their recommendation is then subject to a formal justification process in which the project may have to compete against other investment priorities...
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But the prospect's buying journey is not complete until the solution has been implemented and shown to address the original issue...
As we've already observed, whilst this overall sequence is generally consistent, at any stage the decision makers driving any individual deal can choose to move forward, revisit a previous stage, simply stay as they are or drop out of the process altogether.
The most common and frustrating - but avoidable - sales challenges come from misinterpreting the true stage of the buyer's journey. For example, many sales people find themselves responding to requests for proposals for projects for which no compelling need (or power sponsor) has been identified.
Even if an enthusiastic champion appears to be promoting the project, an objective analysis usually demonstrates that these deals have a slim-to-none chance of success. Better to qualify them out or nurture them until a compelling need is acknowledged, and to reallocate resources to more promising opportunities.
Our approach...
First, we'll help you collate the information that already exists within your organisation about typical buying behaviour using a combination of interviews, surveys and workshops. We'll validate this through structured customer interviews spanning recent wins, losses and "no decisions".
Then we'll equip you to adapt the generic process of buying model to match the typical behaviours on your core target markets. We'll pay particular attention to identifying the evidence you need to look for to establish the true status of each opportunity, and the actions you could most productively take to help facilitate the buying process.
We often conduct this as part of an accelerated discovery exercise that can help you quickly home in at the same time on your most valuable prospects, their most pressing problems, their key external influences and the trigger events that are likely to signal a change in their circumstances.
If past experience is anything to go by, these insights could enable you to significantly sharpen the focus of your marketing and sales efforts, and eliminate wasted effort - why not give us the chance to prove it?
How we help...
Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners help promising B2B organisations to realise their full potential by equipping them to build scalable sales and marketing machines that reflect the way their most valuable prospects prefer to buy.
We like to think of ourselves as practitioners, rather than consultants. We can point to decades of collective experience in achieving demanding revenue and profit targets, quarter after quarter – and of helping organisations stand out from the crowd and be acknowledged as market leaders.
Our systematic, evidence-based market leadership methodology
helps clients to bridge the gap between strategy and execution by enabling them to identify their most valuable prospects, understand their most urgent problems, and know how and why they make buying decisions.
We apply this learning to help our clients to craft compelling visions that resonate strongly with their prospect’s concerns, to implement practical programmes which serve to facilitate their prospect’s decision making processes, and to re-architect and re-align their sales and marketing processes in line with today's buying behaviour.
To find out more please contact us here...