Some methodologies survive the training room by a few weeks. Others become the way a team thinks.
Catherine Bataille went through a Perpetos programme around 12 years ago, when she was at Zetes. She has since moved on to different professional challenges. The buying clock moved with her.
Since 12 years, this is my favorite sales tool. So I can really encourage you to use it.
We asked her what made it stick. Her answer had nothing to do with the model being clever, and everything to do with it being usable on a Tuesday morning in front of a real customer.
1. It made a complex business easy to talk about
Catherine has spent her career in IT sales. This means: long cycles, many stakeholders, and solutions that take real effort to explain. The hard part is rarely the product, but getting a team to describe, in the same words, where a deal actually stands.
The reason it was such a major trigger, for salespeople but also for sales managers, is that it gives you a very easy way to speak about complex things… by referring to a clock.
Everybody understands that when it is midnight, it is midnight. When it is 3 o’clock, it is 3 o’clock. It’s a very easy way for salespeople to position a buying cycle.
The complexity does not disappear. It just stops being an excuse for vagueness.
Whatever sales domain you are in (transactional or complex) it is an easy-to-use tool. And I have always worked in IT, which is quite complex.
2. The pressure moved off selling and onto alignment
The second shift was in how the team saw its own job. This is the part Catherine describes as a relief.
The first awareness was: I’m not selling anymore. I’m getting continuously aligned with buying people.
For me and for my team, it was a kind of relief: the pressure is no longer on selling. If you are capable of aligning with the buying people, you will be successful. And that is the reality.
It is a small reframe with a large effect on behaviour. A seller under pressure to sell pushes. A seller whose job is to stay aligned with the buyer asks better questions and finds out sooner when there is nothing to align with.
3. Every stage tells you what to do next
A model that only describes where you are is a reporting tool. Catherine’s third argument is that the clock also tells the team what to do.
Every stage of the buying clock is described, with the key analysis points that go with it. And at every stage you have actions to do, that also very well described. It’s an easy methodology, and at every stage you know exactly what to do.
That is where the benefit stops being a sales benefit and starts being a company benefit:
It doesn’t only help you win deals because you qualify them much better. It’s a benefit for the whole company: you invest your resources precisely on what you have qualified and you can prove that you have qualified.
Presales, delivery, product, management… everyone downstream of a qualified deal pays the price when qualification is a feeling instead of evidence.
4. One language, all the way into the CRM
At Zetes, the clock did not stay a sales team habit. It went into the system.
Throughout the company, you speak the same language. At the company I was working for at the time, we even customized the CRM based on the buying clock.
And into the weekly rhythm:
The first thing we did in a pipeline review was ask the salespeople: what time is it? And why? Why is it 3 o’clock? Why do you say it is 9 o’clock?
This is the part we recognise most in our own work. A CRM built around reporting gives you fields to fill in. A CRM built around the commercial way of working gives a team a question worth answering and a pipeline review that produces decisions instead of updates.
5. The proposal, at the right moment
Finally, the clock answers the question that quietly costs complex sales teams the most margin: when do we put a proposal on the table?
A very powerful moment is 6 o’clock on the buying clock: that’s when the buyer makes the decision to change. And then, from 6 to 8, or even to 9 or 10, you talk about capabilities and features. It’s also a powerful way to make your proposal at the right moment.
You are no longer in proposal, answer RFP, submission V1.1, V1.2, then V2, and in the end V9… and still you lose. You start doing the right thing at the right moment.
Why this story matters to us
Catherine is not describing a programme she attended. She is describing a way of working she still uses, at a different company, twelve years later.
That is the only real test of this kind of investment: not whether teams like it in the room, but whether they are still using it when nobody from Perpetos is around.
