Empathy: Understanding Your Prospect's Buying Journey

Setting out to evaluate software solutions with the goal of making a buying decision is a daunting task. There are significant implications and ramifications for both the company and the individual driving the process and making the solution recommendation. You have to balance making the correct and most informed decision with making a timely one to drive business outcomes.

Phase Zero: Define the Problem (and the Budget)

It's important to define the problem you are trying to solve before engaging in any evaluation process. You should also be able to define the measurable impacts on the business a solution will provide to your organization. Make sure this is done collaboratively by the main stakeholder group who will be part of the evaluation process. In a later stage you'll have to show ROI of the prospective purchase so having this early in the process sets you up for a successful evaluation. Ensure you have an idea of the available budget the company is willing to allocate to address the problem.

Phase One: Research/Build a Manageable Vendor List

My preference is to evaluate three different solution providers (no more). To narrow down the list I leverage the following sources: sites like G2, Google searches, recommendations from colleagues, industry associations (e.g. Presales Collective), and any vendors I'm currently working with.

Phase Three: Meet the Vendors

Be clear on your goals and what's important to you. I'm extremely transparent throughout the process, but not all buyers are. My goal is each vendor understands my problem and/or my objective so they can focus on highlighting a solution. Being coy and holding things back harms this process. See if you can get a free trial or hands on access.

Be sure this phase includes the right stakeholders at the right time. You'll want to be sure the team you identified in Phase One is involved and gets enough information/exposure to develop an informed opinion. You'll have multiple meetings/conversations with each vendor and different people will be involved In different sessions.

As part of this process you'll obtain pricing to help you determine the ROI and comparative cost.

Phase Four: Rank the Vendors

At some point you need to determine which solution is most aligned to your needs. It's highly unlikely you'll find a provider that checks all the boxes or completely addresses your use case. While gut feel and your intuition are important, you need to be more objective in your evaluation. I started using a template to drive the ranking of each vendor by listing out all the features/capabilities the team was looking for. I determine the importance of each one (must have, good to have, nice to have) and then score all vendors on a scale of 1-5. You'll end up with an aggregate score for each bucket and an overall score for each vendor.

Phase Five: Make a Recommendation

Once vendor ranking is aligned across the core evaluation team, it's time to make a recommendation and secure the budget. Your overall goal in this stage is to educate the final decision maker/budget owner (if it isn't you) with all the evidence to validate and support your recommendation. If you are the ultimate decision make/budget owner, this step provides context and air cover as to why you made the vendor selection. Some items to consider in this phase:

• ROI plays a big role here: You may very well run into a situation where the highest ranked vendor is priced in a manner that drags down the ROI. You may decide the #2 ranked solution provides enough value for the cost to be the better option for your business
• Build a business case to highlight the evaluation process so leadership and the budget owner have a full picture of how you arrived at the decision

Takeaway for Solution Sellers

The days of a one size fits all sales motion are behind us. Be flexible. Don’t force a process on prospects they don’t want. Adjust your presentation flow. Give them some more opportunity to drive. Show them what they want to see, not what you want to show them. Give more opportunities for self-evaluation tools. Essentially, meet them where they are. It could very well be the difference between a signed contract and a lost deal.