Buyers in Fortune 1000 organizations say the challenge facing professional sales teams is to adapt how they sell to how buyer’s are going to buy.  They have told us that high value buying is developing into a science around the allocation of scare recourse to major projects and purchases.

Now as sellers we need to sit up and pay attention. We need to ask ourselves what impact this will have for our standard sales process and the traditional sales techniques we have used for years. A massive impact I hear you say.

Now we all know how important a well defined sales process is, but in our heart and souls we know it is not as important as the buyer’s buying process. We need to do a bit of soul searching and ask ourselves how well we really know our customers buying process.

As professional business people it is incumbent on us to understand what steps are involved in our customer buying process, what activities will take place in each step and who will be involved across the process.  That all may seem like I am stating the obvious but when we asked 20 senior managers to map out their customer buying process in a recent workshop only one person was able to articulate the process clearly.

So the question is How well do you know the buying process involved in your major sales opportunities?  Here is a usefull checklist to apply to your sales opportunities.

We all know modern buying has changed. It is undergoing a revolution, once ad hoc and unstructured it has become sophisticated and process driven. One senior buyer described it as the allocation of scarce resources between competing projects. He went on to say “the challenge is not to select a supplier it is to navigate through a strict process”. Food for thought.

John O Gorman is a sales trained marketer focused on effective selling and buying. Currently working with sales teams and buyers to develop skills, processes and activities that benefit both the buyer and seller.

Tags: B2B sales, Direct sales, procurement, Sales, Sales articles, sales cycles, sales ebook, Sales Processes

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.