Buying process - Evaluate business environment
Selling process - Understand your client’s business and product environment.
Step 1 is the big planning stage.
This step enables you to identify new opportunities.
The KEY OBJECTIVE of step 1 is to prove to your client that you are worth speaking to – even if you are not going to sell anything on this occasion.
This is the beginning of the relationship, so it has to be good!
Buying process - Develop Strategy & Initiatives
Selling process - Create plans linked to your client’s business plans
At the end of step 1, you should know if there is business there for you or not.
If there is, step 2 will see you create curiosity and interest in the mind of your client, and you will start speaking about a specific solution or area or interest – that is in line with their business priorities!
If you do steps 1 and 2 well, you will win and your competitors will lose (most of the time).
Buying process - Recognize Needs
Selling process - Establish the buying vision
This step is critical – as for some sellers it will be their first contact with their client, which means they will have to change and adapt the client’s existing vision.
If we have already been with the client for steps 1 and 2, we can build a buying vision together that matches our products.
The key to step 3 is having a buying vision that the client believes in, and identifying the key decision maker.
Buying process - Evaluate Options
Selling process - Articulate capabilities and qualify the opportunity.
After building the vision, we can finally start speaking about our products!
We will need to move from the business conversations to IT speak, and in doing this; we will design a draft proposal.
This gets put in front of our decision maker and we will get the go-ahead to move on to actually doing the serious work in step 5.
At the end of this step we need some real commitment, as we will now have to justify this to our departments and sales managers.
This is where we QUALIFY the opportunity.
Buying process - Select Solution Option
Selling process - Develop the solution with the client.
This is where we build the proposal.
In order to do this well, we need full client support, maybe some pre-investment, we need experts to do the work, we need to negotiate all the ins and outs of the solution, we may need project managers to help us and check whether our great ideas are really going to work.
We need to proceed with one goal in mind – the successful implementation of the solution.
Buying process - Resolve Concerns & Decide
Selling process - Close the sale.
This is the formal negotiation stage. This is the moment when their people and your people sit around a table and argue, until you give them the discount.
In the ideal world, this step doe snot exist.
In the ideal world, “closing” happens during step 5 or step 7, but it is seen as just a formality, a small detail that needs to get cleared in order to continue working.
However, be prepared to go through the formal negotiation process, if necessary.
Buying process - Implement Solution & Evaluate Success
Selling process - Monitor implementation
The most important thing to the seller about step 7 is that it leads directly back into steps 1 and 2 for a new project.
Reference stories, relationships, conditions of satisfaction processes, troubleshooting, working with the project teams, looking for new opportunities: these are all the seller’s responsibility in the final step.
Selling process - Generate leads
By putting this step at the END of the sales process, we highlight several important points. In a successful sale, we create reference stories in step 7, and now we can use them to generate leads for new business.
Step 0 is also independent of the other 7 steps, as it does not focus on a specific client. Step 0 is critical. It is the key activity that differentiates a good sales organization from its competitors.