“Yes, I scheduled the follow-up meeting, but the customer did not show. No reply to my emails or phone calls.”
The above is, unfortunately, a very common seller-sales manager conversation during sales pipeline reviews today. “The customer conversation was trending positively! I have no idea why they suddenly go dark on us?!”
Most sales organizations have some semblance of a structured sales process comprised of stages for their sellers to follow to be successful. However, if sellers are only taught to focus on what they need to do to sell, the bigger picture around the true drivers of seller and customer success gets missed. Customers quickly sniff out the sellers who are only out to benefit themselves, and they act accordingly—radio silence.
Let’s dig into that point a bit more. Take a typical multi-stage sales process. Regardless of tenure, most sellers can progress a deal well into the middle stages by following the outlined process steps to the letter. However, when the same sellers believe their deal is ready to transition from the mid to the latter stages of the sales process, that’s when most customers tend to go dark. But why? Why are customers silently opting out before the seller-perceived finish line?
The real challenge here is that sellers and frontline sales managers are narrowly focused on their sales activities, not on what customers want to achieve in their evaluation and purchase journeys. A seller may believe they have a customer ready for a proposal, yet the customer is still in the early evaluation stage of their buying journey.
Many sellers fly blind when it comes to the customer’s needs and goals. It never occurs to them to ask if the customer was tracking along.
Here’s a typical scenario… the seller runs a discovery call. Schedules the follow-up demo meeting. Schedules another consensus-building meeting with the customer. Then asks, “Does it make sense for me to put a proposal together?” Of course, the customer will say yes; there’s no risk for them.
And while that seller believes they’re in the proposal stage, the customer is still wrestling with very early buying stage questions:
If sellers narrowly focus on selfishly checking sales steps off the list, they’ll almost always outpace the customer. And if the sellers try to move at an uncomfortable pace for the buyer, they’ll box them out. They get caught speeding. The customer won’t include the seller in the group evaluating the answers to the above questions if they only perceive them as just trying to sell something.
It’s no wonder why customers disappear from all lines of communication. They’re busy doing their own evaluations of the best path forward and don’t want to be bothered by people who aren’t helpful to them.
At scale, this creates a “pig in the python” phenomenon of deals stuck in the middle to late stages of the sales process for commercial organizations. It makes accurate forecasting all but impossible as pipelines are bloated and mostly stale with opportunities that should have been closed lost months ago. This leads to “hope-casting” and not actual forecasting.
Understanding your customer’s buying journey puts you in an advantageous position. It makes selling much more natural and less adversarial as you coach your customer through their buying journey rather than “push” them through your sales process. Moreover, identifying where the buyer is in their buying journey enables you to apply the appropriate selling skills to move their purchase decision forward.
Aligning your sales process with the customer’s buying journey is essential for achieving better sales results. By understanding where your customers are in their purchase process, not where you are in your sales process, you can coach them to help move their buying decisions forward. This will lead to higher win rates, less bloat in your sales pipeline, and more accurate sales forecasts.