Sales Hack Monday – “You are here” -- The Buying Cycle®

 

Sales Hack Monday – “You are here”

November 14^th, 2022

Five minute read

 

In the STAR Session from November 3^rd, you saw the Buying Cycle®, which describes HOW Buyers make purchasing decisions.  The framework derives from a 12-year study by the Huthwaite Research Group that analyzed over 35,000 sales interactions across 25 different

industry sectors.  The Cycle is a sort of map that helps you navigate the jungle of the complex business-to-business purchasing decision.  Like maps at shopping malls or amusement parks, this one is only helpful if you know where you are on the map.  But knowing where you are is only part of the challenge.  You also need to know what each location means to make sense of the situation and decide what to do next. 

 

For the Buying Cycle® to be useful in navigating through a sales opportunity, you need to understand what each of its phases means.  What are the Buyers thinking and what questions are they asking themselves at different points in the process?  If you don’t know how to read the map, you will have a pretty tough time using it to navigate.  This Sales Hack will set you on your way to being a sort of Indiana Jones, selling your way to a hidden treasure, only with fewer snakes or other dangers. 

 

Let’s explore each of the phases of the Buying Cycle® from the point of view of your Buyers.  Getting inside their heads is the best way to read the map.

 

Acknowledge Needs

In this phase at the top of the Cycle, your Buyers begin to recognize (borrowing from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”) “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”.  Status Quo Bias plays a leading role in the drama during this phase.  (You might remember Status Quo Bias from that recent STAR Session.  If you are curious, you can read more about it here or here or here.  But beware!  Each of these minor detours might lead to other detours.  Before you know it, you will be down the rabbit hole of human cognitive biases.  We may never see you again.  We won’t wait up.)  What were we talking about?  Oh yeah!  In this phase, Buyers move from satisfied with Status Quo to dissatisfied, and then from merely dissatisfied to hungry for change. 

 

In Acknowledge Needs, Buyers ask themselves two fundamental questions: why should we change, and why now.  If those questions get answered, your Buyers move into the next phase.

 

 

Assess Options

Once your Buyer decides that change is necessary, they begin looking for solutions.  Your Buyers ask a different set of questions in this phase.  Their questions primarily concern how to solve the problem and with whom.  What is the real problem we are trying to solve?  What does “fixed” look like?  Should we build the solution, or buy it?  What sort of supplier do we want to work with?  (As we noted in the STAR Session, this can be a vexing question when the suppliers all look the same.) 

 

But you need to be aware that they also ask another sort of question in this phase: What if the solution doesn’t fix our problem?

 

In Assess Options, your Buyers have a heightened sense of Risk.  After all, these are big, consequential decisions, with both lots of money and lots of people involved.  Selecting an Option that minimizes their Risk looms large in their thinking. 

 

Alleviate Risks

While Alleviate Risks is the next phase in the Cycle, your Buyer’s concerns about Risk do not suddenly begin in this phase.  Thoughts of Risk are present for your Buyers throughout the Buying Cycle®.  Risk – and its close cousins fear, uncertainty, and doubt – plays a critical role in human decision making.  Like scenery for a stage play, it’s always there, just not always obvious.  (Warning!  Long and academic detours here, here, and here.  We’ll see you when you come back.)  After the Assess Options phase, however, Risk moves from scenery to center stage, becoming the leading character in the story and potentially bringing the Cycle to a screeching halt. 

 

In mission-critical purchasing decisions, Buyers consider penalties they anticipate from moving forward.  How will this decision affect us?  How disruptive will it be?  Will our team revolt?  What if our preferred Option doesn’t fix the problem?  Can we trust this supplier?  These are just some of the questions the Buyers need to answer before moving forward. 

 

Act

Before deciding, your Buyers negotiate terms and conditions, finalize their implementation plans (or begin them?), and complete other administrative tasks related to their internal purchasing process.  While this is the phase where the decision happens, more goes on here than simply saying yes or no.  The closer your Buyer gets to committing, the more fear, uncertainty, and doubt creep up on them.  And even if Risk has been put down in the previous phase, it may rise from the dead, like a zombie in a horror movie (#DoubleTap).

 

 

Achieve Results

Finally, the contract is signed and your Buyers begin implementing the solution, a process which itself goes through distinct stages (something we will take up in a future article).  Obviously, their focus is on whether they will achieve the payoffs they hoped for.  Their emotions will run the gamut, from excited to frustrated to worried to angry and back again.  This phase lasts as long as it takes to answer whether they Achieve Results… or not.  Did the solution fix their problem…or create new ones. 

 

Whatever the answer, the Buying Cycle® starts again when your Buyer becomes dissatisfied with Status Quo.

 

Final Thoughts

The Buying Cycle® does not always flow in one direction.  Buyers go forward or backward depending on various factors and changes in their worlds.  Moreover, the boundaries between phases are not always clear or distinct.  We have already mentioned how your Buyer is attuned to Risk throughout the Cycle (because humans are ALWAYS attuned to Risk).  But this is also true of Results and Needs, among other Buyer issues.

 

In future Sales Hacks and STAR Sessions, we will explore some of these facets more deeply.  Hopefully, these will help you sell more effectively and earn more business.

 

Sales Hacks: Welcome

 

Monday Sales Hacks

November 7^th, 2022

(three-minute read)

 

Welcome to this first edition of “Monday Sales Hacks”, a weekly journal – más o menos – of tricks and tips aimed at helping you create Value for your Buyers… and hopefully, selling more Bizagi stuff to them.  Some of these hacks might be familiar to you, comfortable like a favorite pair of shoes.  And some of them might seem new or innovative.  But none of them will be original.  That is, they will be proudly stolen – er, I mean borrowed – from some of the best and brightest in the world of professional selling.  After all, there is nothing new under the sun.  So whether they seem old or new, familiar or fresh, we’re confident they will help you lead better selling conversations with your Buyers.

 

For this first one, let’s revisit the Value Equation we discussed in the STAR Session from last week. 

Value results when the Benefits of a decision outweigh its Costs.  This is a deceptively simple formula, but it has profound implications for how you sell.  Let’s unpack the equation by examining the “minuend” and “subtrahend” (remember your primary school maths?).

 

In Selling, Benefits – the minuend – are determined and defined by the Buyers exclusively.  Only Buyers get to decide when something is a benefit to them.  While Sellers can influence their perspective, it is the Buyer’s perspective that rules.  Benefits, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.  But what about Costs, our subtrahend? 

 

For the past two decades, I have been asking this question of very smart salespeople around the world.  Who owns the Costs side of the equation?  Invariably, salespeople tell me that the Sellers own the definition of costs.  This is reasonable, given that Sellers own the “purchase price” of the solution, and the purchase price certainly forms part of the Costs.  But only part of them.

 

For the Buyers, Costs comprise not only the purchase price, but also a range of other factors, such as training, staffing, business disruption, and a host of other contributing factors.  Moreover, in complex sales, part of the perceived Costs of a decision to change are risks attached to uncertainty and the potential for failure.

 

When including all the factors that comprise “Costs”, the Seller’s purchase price is really only a small component.  So who owns the Costs?  Buyers do, just as they own the Benefits. 

 

If both Benefits and Costs are defined by Buyers, then Value is also defined by Buyers.  Put another way, the Value Equation is owned by the Buyer.  (One of the reasons that the phrase “value added” is so irksome is that it begins from the Seller’s point of view, rather than the Buyer’s POV.)

 

So, here’s the Monday Sales Hack for this week: the Value Equation is entirely Buyer-centric.  If you want to lead better selling conversations with your Buyer, start by being Buyer-centric.  Probably nothing new to see here, but maybe it’s a good reminder.

 

Thanks for reading this Sales Hack.  Happy selling!

Sales Hacks: the Trusted Advisor

 

Sales Hack Friday
The Trusted Advisor

May 27, 2022

 

On my mind today is David Maister’s classic book, “The Trusted Advisor”.  The book did not coin the term, but it popularized it in the same way that Mack Hanan’s book popularized “Consultative Selling” (a now-out-of-print book).  Maister and his co-authors published theirs in 2000, and it’s still in print.  It paints a substantive picture of what a Trusted Advisor looks like and how to become one, based on their experience and research among clients and consultants.

 

With the term now in vogue in CE, it’s probably helpful to take a peek at what the words mean, less to us as the advisors in question than to our clients who will be the beneficiaries.  Make no mistake: our sales team will also be the beneficiaries.  But getting inside the head of the Client to understand what they are looking for is probably a more reliable path to becoming one than merely asserting that we are. 

 

The TL|DR is this: if we truly aspire to be our Client’s trusted advisor, we do not become one simply by claiming the title.  We must earn it by the way we interact with them.

 

 

What is a Trusted Advisor?

 

Maister describes of progression of business relationships along two axes.

 

 

The research around these Trusted Advisor relationships is that they are RATIONAL and EMOTIONAL.  This should resonate with any of you who have been through CE’s Sales Onboarding (e.g., look at Daniel Kahneman’s research from “Thinking Fast and Slow” and how our brains are designed to make decisions). 

 

The book is worth the read, both because of the theories behind what trust looks like and the practical application of how to earn and keep it.  But for me, what makes the book so worthwhile is a simple way to measure how trustworthy you are in your advisory role.  Trust can be measured by four factors: three of them trust-building (they form the numerator) and one trust eroding (it forms the denominator).  Maister calls this the Trust Equation (again, if you have been through our Onboarding over the past two years, you have seen this). 

 

TRUST	=	CREDIBILITY	+	RELIABILITY	+	INTIMACY
		SELF-ORIENTATION

 

 

The book spells it out in some detail, using research from clients and advisors.  And those definitions elaborate the concept quite helpfully.  However, they are also fairly self-explanatory. 

 

Imagine this as a scoring system, with each factor rated on a 1 to 10 scale.  Add up the numerator score, divide it by the denominator score, and you have a Trust score.  As a self-assessment, the Trust Equation – imagined through the perspective of someone whose trust you value, such as an important client stakeholder or even a colleague or friend – can give you an enlightening (or unsettling) jolt.  Even more powerful would be to ask someone else to rate you!

 

Do you want a simple trust hack?  Let’s look at how to improve your Self-Orientation score (which means to lower it). 

 

Ask yourself: why do we see anyone as self-oriented?  What do they do to give off that vibe?  For one thing, they talk about themselves…a lot.  They turn every story back to themselves, every narrative arc is about them, and they are the protagonist – the hero.  Selling Narcissists have a slight variation to this theme: they talk incessantly about their solutions and company.  Chances are, Selling Narcissists are doing this with good intent: they want the Client to LIKE the solution.  And they want to persuade the Client to BUY the solution.  They might even be successful in selling stuff.  But the chances of a Selling Narcissist becoming a Trusted Advisor are very slim.

 

Here’s a sales hack you can use to avoid a high Self-Orientation score: listen more; talk less.  And how do you do this?  This simple sales hack is:

 

Ask more – and better – questions.

 

Think about it for a second.  Where is the spotlight shining when you’re asking questions?  It’s on your Client and their issues, not on you and yours.  By shining the spotlight on them, not you, you inevitably give off an Other-Oriented vibe and improve the Trust Denominator.

 

In a future post, we will look at how this works and what you can do to ask more and better questions.  But for now, remember this mantra: ASK, don’t TELL.  Do this more habitually and