Sales Hack Monday – “You are here”
November 14th, 2022
Five minute read
In the STAR Session from November 3rd, 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.
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