09
Sep 2014
0
Buying cycle insights improve sales performance

Buying cycle insights improve sales performance

Do you realise that every individual goes through the same mental stages before making a decision to buy?

Buying cycle insights improve sales performance

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Performance

Suppose your company is ready to make its next investment. You might be planning to change your ERP system, start e-commerce, re-do the website or even buy new office premises.

eBook 7 Criteria for a Sales Process your Sales Team will actually use

There are various milestones to take into account when considering where you are in your buying process:

  • Are you 100% sure you want to change the existing situation?
  • What will your new purchase enable you to do?
  • Have you already calculated the costs and ROI?
  • What criteria will you use to compare suppliers?
  • Have you compared the differences and benefits of the various options?
  • How can you guarantee that your future supplier will not disappoint you in the long run?
  • Have you checked if the new solution will cause any new problems?

You’re probably not the only person involved in this buying process: do you think your CFO and other colleagues will give the same answers to the questions above?

Everyone goes through the same mental stages in the buying process

Keep the future investment in mind for a moment. Do you realise that all your colleagues, like any individual, go through the same mental stages before making a decision to buy? Scientific research shows that every buying process follows the same sequence of mental stages. This ‘buying clock’ is a good tool for working out the readiness to buy of everyone involved in the decision-making process.

This doesn’t mean that everyone’s buying clocks are synchronised, however; the speed at which people go through the various stages depends on various factors:

  1. Experience of buying a similar solution
  2. The extent to which we can differentiate the impact of the various options
  3. The importance and impact of the decision on ourselves and/or the organisation

The mental journey through the whole buying cycle can take seconds, months or even years before all relevant decision-makers have completed it at their own pace and a contract can be signed.

Increase your company profits with these insights

The next stage: apply the ‘buying clock’ to the sales process in your company. Are your sales and marketing personnel aware of clients’ mental buying clocks? Wouldn’t it be great if your team could detect your clients’ readiness to buy correctly, and then act accordingly? For example: no sales person with good knowledge of the buying cycle will talk about a product’s specific features until the client is convinced they need something even similar to your solution. The client will feel better understood if you address them in a language that matches where they are in the buying process.

More sales with higher margins at a lower cost

At an organisational level, your company will develop a common language that helps to align sales activities and vastly increase efficiency and effectiveness. If you want to be able to achieve the following, consider making the readiness to buy the reference point for every action you undertake for individual clients. You will gain various benefits from applying these insights:

  • A common language to improve the sharing of experiences and improving team performance
  • Accurate timing of actions, resulting in a lower cost of sales and higher ROI on marketing
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Less margin erosion
  • Predictable, objective forecasts
  buying cyclebuying processconversion ratehigher readiness to buysales cycleselling cycle
27
Aug 2014
0
Buyers today want less risk

Buyers today want less risk

Consider risk management and look at all conditions that can impact sales to improve sales performance.

Buyers today want less risk

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Customer Journey, Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Performance

Buying behaviour has fundamentally changed over the past ten years. But there are still lots of companies approaching buyers of today with outdated best practices and mindsets, or continuing to advocate the old way of selling.

Until recently, it was still possible to achieve reasonable B2B sales results by simply highlighting solution benefits. Clients had no alternative but to take the sales person’s advice when making their buying decisions. People who still have this mindset should beware: buyers have taken over the sales process, and now they have the power. And they want to avoid risk as much as possible.

How can we adapt to today’s buyer?

A lot has already been said about the switch from product sales to solution sales, or from transactional into consultative selling. But we still see that neither has delivered on its full potential, and results remain far below expectations. This is why:

  • Both aim to implement a repeatable, linear and mechanical step-by-step process (not a ‘real’ sales environment!)
  • The sales support environment is not upgraded simultaneously; bonuses, product training and literature, events, CRM and even reporting remain largely unchanged
  • Management tries to resolve this with sales skills training and there is no change programme

You can fix this by focusing on the buyer, and learning about your clients and their markets.It’s also important to factor in risk mitigation. The ‘customer trust equation’ by David Maister, one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service companies, is an excellent formula for clarifying the idea of risk mitigation:

T = (C+R+I) / S

T: trustworthiness (or perceived risk of working with you)

C: credibility = words (I can trust what he says)

R: reliability = actions (I can trust him to …)

I: intimacy = emotions (I feel comfortable discussing the subject)

S: self-orientation (I can trust that he cares)

The denominator of this fraction is (of course) what has the biggest impact here. You have to convince your clients that you really understand their requirements and objectives. The conversion rate will be lower if the client thinks the seller is focussing on themselves, regardless of the quality of your products or your sales person’s knowledge. In this case the seller is not being driven by the client but by a bonus that depends on the deal being struck, the internal pressure of a forecast, the special offer they want to sell, management’s desire to sell more of these solutions, or the belief that they’re an expert and want to prove it to you.

So consider risk management and look at all the conditions that can have an impact on sales when deciding how to improve your sales performance.

  buying decisionconsultative sellingproduct benefitrisk managementsales process
25
Jul 2014
0
Is Solution Selling outdated?

Is Solution Selling outdated?

It’s no longer the sales process that counts. Say hello to the Empowered Customer.

Is Solution Selling outdated?

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Sales Content, Sales Performance

Solution Selling is very common jargon used in many sales organisations. Companies that have introduced this method have gained a competitive advantage as a result of the way in which their sales people are successful in formulating the value for their customers.

Watch Webinar – How to Move Stalled Sales Opportunities?

This is how you sell solutions:

  • Discuss client needs using open questions, creating a vision and a solution together with the client. This gives the seller the greatest possible impact on what the client will ultimately buy.
  • The packaging of products and services in such a way that a total solution is created to satisfy client needs. A classic example was Apple with iPod and iTunes in contrast to a normal MP3 player.

Trend reversal: more power for the customer

The internet and social media have brought about an important shift in the way people are informed and how they make their purchase decisions. Since a a couple of years we have seen a trend reversal which has undermined the impact of Solution Selling. The customer now has the power. It’s no longer the sales process that counts; the purchasing process (customer journey) now has the upper hand. Welcome to the Digital Era. Customer interaction and sales discussions have to be different now to achieve good results.

Not just information, but conversation

You can still achieve a sustainable and competitive advantage in this new digital era. But now your customer knowledge forms the basis for the development of new products and services to satisfy the increased needs of better informed customers. Your marketing and sales don’t provide information so much anymore; instead they go into a conversation to improve the customer relationship with more engagement. A better experience and the proven impact of your solution will result in a higher margin and lower sales cost.

3 answers that every Sales rep needs to know

Blog & Benchmark

Difference between Solution Selling and Buyer-Aligned Selling

SOLUTION SELLINGBUYER-ALIGNED SELLING

What is the starting point?

As a ‘consultant’, make it possible to discuss requirements and guide the customer in their thought process until the specific solution is bought.Ability to question the customer’s beliefs and provide new insights to complete the picture.

Which process is required?

Your entire sales organisation using a proven sales process. All your activities and measurement systems must chart and improve its effectiveness and application.A dynamic buying process based on customer experience. Enable sales & marketing to adapt to the buyer’s mental phase of purchasing at any moment. Internal processes and measurement systems are designed to take the right action, at the right time and involving the right people.

What’s important?

Ask the right questions to discuss the challenges that can be resolved by the solution you are offering. The strengths must be explicit and demonstrable from the structure of the approach.Empathy with the customer situation and for everyone involved the use of language specific and adapted to the role and industry. This demonstrates an attitude which shows that helping the customer is the highest priority.

What knowledge is crucial?

Knowing the relationship between the customer’s challenge and the strengths of your products and services.Broad understanding of the customer situation: environment, challenges, aspirations and requirements.

What skills are crucial?

Prospecting, questioning techniques, listening skills, diagnosis, and persuasiveness.Customer focus, relationship-building, ability for concrete visualisation of your offer’s value and impact as well as the capacity to influence the willingness to change. Social Selling and the right mix of digital and human touch points are crucial elements in this.

What is the relationship between sales and marketing?

Marketing supports sales, and the two are aligned. Marketing ensures that both the customer and the seller are informed. Marketing generates leads for sales.Both are integrated and fully designed to match the customer’s buying process. As well as generating leads for sales, marketing is also responsible for the conversation with the customer and increasing engagement with the customer target audience.
Perpetos WebinarHow to Move Stalled Sales Opportunities?

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  Procrastination comes in different guises. 3 steps to avoid procrastination
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  buyer alignedbuyer journeybuying processconsultative sellingsales processsolution selling
21
Feb 2014
0
Improve your sales with a better understanding of the buying cycle

Improve your sales with a better understanding of the buying cycle

Meet a powerful tool to help you detect the readiness to buy of your prospective customers.

Improve your sales with a better understanding of the buying cycle

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Performance

Scientific research has shown that every buying cycle is a sequence of the same mental processes; almost as certain as a law of nature. Our Buying Clock is an easy way to see the willingness to buy of everyone involved in a potential sale.

eBook 7 Criteria for a Sales Process your Sales Team will actually use

You can work out where the client is on Buying Clock by asking questions such as:

  • Are you 100% sure that the current situation has to change?
  • What will the impact be of the new solution?
  • Have you calculated the cost and ROI?
  • What criteria will you use to compare suppliers?
  • Are you trying to understand the differences and benefits of the various options?
  • How do you guarantee your future supplier won’t eventually fail on your expectations?
  • Have you checked whether the new solution won’t bring new problems?
Perpetos Buying Clock

The buying cycles are far from always synchronized

You know ‘what time it is’ in the buying cycle when you’ve got answers from everyone who is influencing the decision. Everyone goes through the same mental processes in a purchase, and it’s very plausible that different people are in different stages.

The speed at which we go through the various stages of the buying cycle depends on various factors: experience of buying similar products or services, understanding the various options’ impacts, the decision’s importance and impact on us and our organization. A buying cycle can last from a few seconds to months or even years depending on these factors. Being able to detect and influence buying readiness and helping to synchronize the buying clocks will not only shorten the buying cycle. It will also improve conversion rates and decrease discounts.

Understanding the buying cycle leads to better results

Do your sales and marketing teams know what time it is on every client’s Buying Clock®? Wouldn’t it be great for your team to discover how ready your client is to buy, so they could approach them in the right way? Then sales would never start talking about product features before the client is ready to even consider buying that type of product. And marketing wouldn’t overload anyone with too much information about all the benefits. Clients will feel better understood, and make a decision faster, when approached with messages that match their buyer readiness.

When everyone in your organization can detect the client’s buying cycle, you can develop shared terminology to align your sales and marketing activities and increase your efficiency and effectiveness. To maximize your organization’s potential, make your client’s readiness to buy the reference point of your sales strategy and process. This can lead to the following impact:

  • Shared terminology for sharing experiences will improve the whole team’s performance
  • Precise timing of your actions, resulting in lower cost of sales
  • Higher conversion
  • Less margin erosion and discounts
  • Objective, predictable forecasts
  • In summary: more sales with higher margins at a lower cost

Curious how to prepare your commercial team for the empowered customer?

  buyer alignmentbuying cyclebuying processmore salesreadiness to buysales marketing alignment
09
Feb 2014
0
Boosting Core Sales Skills

Dump your sales process. Focus on the buying cycle

Get rid of your sales process asap and sell more at a lower sales cost.

Dump your sales process. Focus on the buying cycle

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Sales Performance

Does this sound familiar?

  • The customer is interested but the criteria for making decisions keep changing.
  • You sound out prospective customers for information – such as their current way of working and associated challenges – so that you can design your sales pitches accordingly, but they don’t bite.
  • You work with the same contact person throughout the entire sales process, and they are really interested, but suddenly replaced by a reluctant colleague in the final stage.
  • You have to send several quotes for the same sales opportunity
  • A deal gets called off just before it’s concluded. Subsequent inquiries show that the customer never even made a purchase order request.

Perhaps in all the above cases you are the victim of your own sales processes, which don’t take the customers’ readiness to buy into account. Too many companies fall into this trap, often lured by companies selling marketing techniques, training courses, CRM and marketing automation, consultants and software suppliers. They did a one-off analysis of a buying cycle, which was then converted into a sales process and uniformly applied to all customers and sales opportunities.

Navel-gazing leads you down a dead end

People who use sales processes as their guide instead of the customer’s buying cycle often find themselves down a dead end. This is just plain logic, because you are ignoring the customer’s reality in favour of your own reality. But it’s the customer who ultimately decides if and how much to buy.
You’re also asking your sales and marketing departments to convert all their external interactions into a linear and company-internal process. This never corresponds with the customer’s situation, by definition.

Briefly consider the following (and perhaps decide to get rid of the sales process):

  • There’s no such thing as one sales process for every sales opportunity. Each individual has their own dynamics and insights.
  • A sales process shifts the focus from the customer to the seller. A lack of focus on the customer leads to the right actions being taken, but at the wrong time.
  • Sales-oriented processes don’t offer any scope for sales to adapt their speed and communications to the customer, or to coach the customer according to their situation.
  • Someone who assumes their own processes can rarely make an accurate forecast: they only consider their own logic, and not the customer’s readiness to buy.

Copernican revolution

Another way is possible. There are models and tools that focus on the customer’s buying cycle rather than the sales cycle. Scientific research has shown that everyone goes through the same mental phases for every decision we make. It’s a mental phase that is not related to gender, age, job or nationality. Placing these mental phases in a model enables us to make this buying cycle predictable and so design a company’s actions to match it.

Sellers more important than ever

In this new model the role of the seller is more important than ever before. Every customer has their own way of indicating which phase they are currently in. The more important the purchase for the company, the longer the decision-making process can be expected to last. Only sellers who can correctly detect the buyer readiness of everyone in the buying cycle will conclude the majority of sales opportunities successfully. Because they are keeping their finger on the pulse, everything will run smoothly, as long as the customer allows. This doesn’t just improve your win ratio; it also keeps the buying cycle as short as possible.

Lower sales costs

So get rid of your sales process as quickly as possible and change your way of working, reporting and coaching to match the individual buyer readiness of all concerned. And sell more at a lower sales cost.

  buying processlinear processlower cost of salessales opportunitysales processsell more
12
Nov 2013
0
Customer is king

Is Telenet putting the customer first?

Telenet proves that marketing communication hasn't yet been adapted sufficiently to suit the Empowered Customer.

Is Telenet putting the customer first?

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Customer Journey, Sales Performance

The advent of social media has given consumers a more powerful voice. Even though we’ve already known this for some time, it’s difficult to lose old habits, as Telenet discovered with its iPad campaign. The Facebook group criticizing this campaign now has 150,000 likes, which is much greater than the number of new customers Telenet will attract with a free iPad mini.

It proves that marketing communication has, despite everything, not been adapted sufficiently to suit the better informed and more involved customer of today. Telenet must now lie in the bed it has made for itself, but it could have happened to many others too. What three mistakes were made here?

Firstly, working with temporary campaigns is becoming less and less effective. In a saturated market with subscribers for an indefinite period, it comes down to the fact that your customer will also look at what’s on offer from your competitors, who are also trying to win regular customers with even stronger promotions. This results in smaller margins and there are no winners, except for the occasional individual who is happy with a new iPad.

Secondly, it appears that Telenet has too many latent unsatisfied customers who don’t fully realize their service provider’s added value. This is remarkable, particularly because the launch of King and Kong was otherwise a masterful success. The technical specs of what Telenet is offering are certainly not inferior, but customers apparently prefer an iPad mini to the ‘Internet 120’ from Telenet (because it’s easy to imagine what you can do with an iPad mini, but not why you’d need 120 mbps).

Finally, the customer is not central to the external communication. Otherwise you wouldn’t run campaigns that give new customers a very nice gift and existing customers simply nothing. Perhaps Telenet has to consider building up a community of customers and communicating in a language that a standard customer can understand (translate ‘Internet 120’ into the number of users that can surf simultaneously without experiencing any delay). Members of the community could also be tempted with gifts, of course: find a new quad-play customer and you receive credits for buying music online, or get two new customers for a smartphone, or three new customers for a tablet, for example.

  customer expectationscustomer experiencecustomer loyaltymarketing campaignretention
31
Oct 2013
0
Competence development

Fire your best salesperson?

Every employee should be an ambassador for your strategy. Otherwise you’re better off without them.

Fire your best salesperson?

Pascal Persyn Pascal Persyn  |    Sales Performance

The figure in your spreadsheet doesn’t lie: 13%. Your best salesperson accounts for about an eight of your sales, but you still have major doubts. His beliefs don’t fit in properly with your new business strategy, and even after lots of meetings, training and supervision, he’s still holding firm to his convictions.

He is still the technical salesperson who speaks most to your clients about how good your products are, but he doesn’t really listen, and is always boasting about his experience and skill. He still believes that selling to technical teams who can then defend their choices internally is the way forward. He doesn’t really help you think about the business as a whole or work out concrete ways your products can help clients move forward with their business strategy. But he’s still the best salesperson when it comes to sales and margins.

One of our clients struggled with this dilemma a few years ago. They ultimately decided – hesitantly and fearing a negative impact – to end the collaboration. And sales didn’t fall by 13%; indeed they didn’t fall at all. It seemed the salesperson was actually an obstacle when it came to capitalizing on the sales growth within the sector. In fact his departure even had a positive effect on short-term sales, and now – a few years later – it’s left no negative trace whatsoever. That’s the relative worth of your best salesperson. Other employees have noticed a positive impact on the internal operation too.

This mainly illustrates the importance of permeating company values and beliefs throughout all your business activities, including the HR policy. Every employee is an ambassador for your strategy. If this isn’t the case, there’s no getting round the fact that you’re better off without them. This might be a very unpleasant thing to do, but it’s essential for your department or company future.

  company valuessales repsales teamstrategy execution
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