How to help your sales team understand (& profit from) the buyer's journey

If you're serious about taking your sales team's results to the next level, it's vital to have a clear sales process.

The BIG caveat is, having a sales process won't help if it doesn't align with your ideal potential customers' process for buying.

If there’s one crucial question to ask your sales team, it’s this:

“What process do your buyers follow?”

In other words, how well does your team’s sales process map to the buyer’s purchasing process?

Part of a sales leader’s job is to make sure your team’s selling process aligns closely with the buying process favoured by their ideal client or customer.

That means you must understand your buyer’s process. Regardless of your contact’s title, your product, your service, or the industry in which you operate, there are almost always four predictable stages of this journey that you can analyse, quantify, and adapt to — starting today.

The stages of the buyer’s journey that matter most to salespeople are:

·?????Awareness

·?????Engagement

·?????Consideration

·?????Decision

·?????Advocacy

The tables below give a preview of the buyer’s journey. The process starts with a prospect becoming aware of a salesperson's (or company's) solution:

Whether this awareness leads to an inbound or outbound enquiry, things may move to initial engagement. The potential customer may or may not be aware they have a problem while the salesperson's needs to focus on establishing rapport and effective communication.

If the potential customer is convinced the problem is sufficiently important, things may progress to the consideration stage. The buyer wants to understand the real nature of the problem and the possible options for solving it. The salesperson needs to focus not on presenting a solution but on qualifying the overall opportunity to establish whether there is potential for a good commercial fit.

If the opportunity is qualified in terms of pain, budget and decision-making criteria, it may progress to the decision stage. While the buyer wants details of the solution, including likely costs (both financial and non-financial), the salesperson should focus on securing a decision.

The final stage of the buyer's journey is, from the salesperson's perspective, handover of the opportunity to the delivery and/or account management teams.

These are the predictable stages of all major purchase decisions. Note that the three stages?in the middle may repeat multiple times before the buyer implements a solution that works.

Our job as sales leaders is to help our salespeople understand their buyers’ journey so they can meet their potential customers where they are. That means helping our people understand the questions they’ll be asked before they get asked them.

And it means asking ourselves the right questions at each stage of the journey. The table we’ve put together for you breaks down the modern buying process. Read it. Remember it. Drill down on it. Customise it. Make it unique to your market. Then share it with your team!

One of the critical steps when it comes to aligning with the buyer journey is finding out about the backstory. Specifically:

·?????What has happened thus far – from the buyer’s perspective?

·?????What pain or problem do they have –?and how do they describe it?

·?????What (if anything) have they already tried to try and fix it?

·?????What have the results of those efforts been from the buyer’s perspective?

The answers to these sample questions are critical pieces of business intelligence but, all too often, salespeople make no effort to collect that intelligence. At Sandler, we’ve codified 52 rules for sales success, each of which connects at some point to the buyer journey. Among the earliest that we share with salespeople is...

People don’t argue with their own data.

This rule is all about asking questions that not only uncover critical information, but also help buyers reach their own conclusions. This is crucial because people love to buy — but they hate being sold.

Buyers don’t really care how much salespeople know. They care about the problem or pain they face in their world. And whether a salesperson understands that problem.

If they do, they start to care whether we can possibly fix it or not. Salespeople’s job is to ask questions that help prospect’s connect their own dots, so they can decide if it makes sense to talk to us about making that pain go away.

How your salespeople ask questions matters. Have you ever noticed that when people ask you for advice, they tend to lean into recommendations that confirm their own assumptions?

That’s only natural. When salespeople are trying to find out about a prospect’s backstory, we want them to ask questions that get prospect’s to draw their own conclusions about the real-world dimensions of the problem they face, especially any aspects of that problem they have not yet taken into account.

Once they come up with their own answers to those questions, the salesperson may be better placed to lead a conversation about how they can help the prospect get where they want to go.

Here’s the point: If a salesperson tells someone they have an issue, they tend to deny the issue or minimise it. On the other hand, if a prospect says they have an issue, the issue is real for them.

They stand behind what they’ve said and will invest the resources to fix the problem. Their ears need to hear what they say, not what the salesperson says. If a salesperson says something, it’s suspect. If a potential customer say it, it’s true.

David Sandler shared a powerful sequence of questions that has been helping salespeople uncover the backstory, and get buyers to connect the dots, for decades –?and it’s just as powerful today as when he first shared it. We call it the Pain Funnel. Take a look:

You and your team can use these Pain Funnel questions to shine a spotlight on the surface-level problems, begin to uncover the possible reasons that problem exists, and to quantify the impact the problem is having on the buyer’s world.

By doing this, you’ll get a much clearer sense of the buyer’s backstory, and a clearer sense of what stage of the buyer journey they’re in now. Once you know that, you’ll be in a better position to support them as they move forward on that journey.

Tom Mallens is training director at Birmingham-based Sandler Training, Heart of England*.

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*He's also somewhat obsessed with exercise. You can get his book 'The Lean & Mean for Life Formula' on how middle-aged men can lose 10kg and get jacked within 90 days >>> here .