Easy Selling: Focus on Decision Points

Decisions

The sales cycle is a sequence of decisions. Sales people often talk about ‘closing’ business, and this puts their focus on the final stage of the sales cycle. This is a mistake. When you set out on a journey, you can imagine the destination as much as you like, but if you don’t think about your next immediate step, you won’t get very far. Of course, you need both, otherwise each step takes you - who knows where? Having a destination enables you to measure your progress, to reassure you that at every step you’re going in the right direction. However, whilst your mind can daydream about the destination, your body can only act on the very next step, and in the end the only thing that changes the world is the action that you take.

In order for you to make a decision about anything, you need these three things:

• Information
• Outcome
• Need

So that’s like a decisION then.

Think about something you bought recently. You needed Information, about what was available, you had a Need to solve a problem and you had an Outcome in mind, so you imagined that your purchase would solve your problem.

Sometimes your problem is more tangible, such as running out of milk or facing a huge repair bill for your car, and sometimes your problem is more conceptual, such as the problem created by advertising which makes you think you need something only because you don’t already have it.

Earlier, I talked about the balance of risk, and actually this takes place at every decision point.

You buy milk on the way home because you have run out of milk (Need) and you want to have a nice cup of tea this evening (Outcome). You pass a shop (Information) so you stop to buy milk. At this point you are balancing the risk of the milk not meeting your expectations with the cost, so you check the ‘best before’ date before paying for the milk, because the most likely risk is that the milk will be off, or is ‘short dated’ so that it will be off before you finish using it. The risk will be that you think you can have milk on your cereal, but you can’t because it’s gone off.

If your lifestyle means that milk frequently goes off before you’ve finished using it, you might mitigate the risk by buying long life milk and keeping a stock in your kitchen cupboard.

Every decision you make edges you closer to a purchase. Do you want milk? Do you have milk? Do you have time to buy milk? Will you pass a shop on the way home that sells milk? Will the shop have milk in stock? Will the milk be within its ‘best before’ date? Will you have enough money?

You’re not aware of this sequence of decisions, yet they influence your behaviour. With a bigger purchase such as a car or house, or your decision to change jobs, you’re much more aware of the decision points and the risks that have to balance out at each decision point in order for you to move forwards.

This reveals an absolutely critical point about sales in general – that at any point in the decision process, your objective is not to sell, it is only to move the customer to the next decision point.

No matter how hard I try to sell you milk, or a new car, or a house, if you don’t currently need one, you won’t buy it. That doesn’t mean that you’ll never buy those things from me, it just means that you won’t buy them now.

If you have Information (you know what the product is) and you know the Outcome (how it will be useful to you) but you don’t need it right now then you might make a mental note in case your situation changes in the future. You might do this when you come across handy shops that sell interesting and useful things, just not things that you need to use right now. You might spend a few minutes browsing around, but you don’t buy anything.

If you have a Need (right now) and you know the Outcome, but you don’t have Information then you can’t make a decision because you feel uncomfortable. You might need a spare part for your washing machine, and you know what you want the solution to be, but if you don’t feel certain about the right part number, you’ll put off making a decision.

If you have a Need and you have Information but you don’t know what the Outcome is then you won’t feel compelled to make a decision. You might need more space at home, and you might have all the information required to put your current house on the market, but if you don’t know the end result - your new house - then again, indecision creeps in. This seems to be a common problem for estate agents - people put their houses on the market and then take them off after a few months because they ‘don’t find anywhere they like’.

Sales ‘experts’ and trainers generally simplify this, saying that the customer or prospect doesn’t have a need. That’s not true. You do have a need for milk, a car and a house, but if those needs are currently met then you won’t make a decision to move on in the buying process. However, you might make a decision, right now, to make a note of the new convenience store that’s opened around the corner, or the car you saw yesterday that you like the look of, or the new housing development by the river that might be worth a look in the future.

Sales targets make salespeople artificially focus on what they can win before their next bonus, but this usually comes at the expense of developing a pipeline of future business.

When you think in terms of moving your prospects to the next decision point, you’re no longer focusing only on the prospects who are ready to place an order.

I’m sure you have a friend who you only hear from when they want something. You might also know someone who is only nice to you when they want something. How do you feel about them? That’s how we feel about salespeople who only call when we’ve got money to spend.

When you’re supporting your prospect through the series of decision points, you’re only focusing on moving to the next decision point. So when you’re just starting to think about a new car, a salesperson rambling on about financing or their fantastic extended warranty is irrelevant, and will quite likely put you off, because you’re not at the point where you can consider such things.

I’m sure you’ve experienced such a pushy ‘hard sell’, and it feels pushy because the salesperson is trying to jump ahead of where you are in your decision process. No matter how much I ask a bag of flour if it’s ready to place an order yet, it still takes 2 hours for my breadmaker to produce bread.

There are ways that some salespeople and retailers try to push the prospect ahead of their decision process. They might include anything from time-limited discount offers to outright threats, such as, “Today is the last day of this opportunity, if you think about it overnight then tomorrow will be too late, you have to go ahead now!” Yeah, right, I’m sure you will still be happy to take my money tomorrow.

While we’ve seen the concept of the ‘sales cycle’ to show the general stages that the sales process will progress through, in fact what we really have is a much more intricate series of decisions which either lead to a purchase or not. At every stage, the ultimate decision is to continue or not, and that’s a decision as much for you as it is for your prospect. After all, you don’t have to do business with everyone you meet.

____________________________________________

Peter Freeth is an expert in modelling high performers - revealing the hidden innate talents of the very highest achievers in all walks of life. This article is an extract from his book Plain Selling which is moving over to the excellent corporate learning library at Bookboon.

genius.coach