Over 50 years ago, Peter Drucker said; "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer".
A common mistake made in selling is to focus internally on what you do and how you do it, when the most important thing is to understand what the prospects and customers want you to do. You need to understand how they might behave, how they might re-act to you, and what will matter to them most when selecting a supplier.
Individual and consumer buying bears some similarity to business buying, in that the final decisions will eventually be made by an individual - the decision maker, who will also be influenced by ambition, position in the company and education. The business world however, is a complex place and has a large number of markets and it is inevitable that the companies within these markets will have their own cultural differences in the buying process. In this environment the products and services bought may be complex and expensive and a group of individuals are usually involved in the decision making.
We undertook a research project to look at the way organisations buy and while this topic will be looked at in more detail in a subsequent article on Opportunity Pursuit, it does start to become important when creating customers. The customer creation stage is the ideal time to gather information in preparation for the time when you will get to bid for actual opportunities. There are five main stages in the buying process:
* Stimulus – recognising an issue and triggering the desire or need to buy a solution
* Specify the desired solution
* Search for and select a supplier
* Substantiate the selection
* Sign-off and sanction the decision
The buying process provides a simplified view of a complex business world. Each buying situation is unique and an organisation’s culture will impact on the length of time spent on each stage of the process. It is important for sales people to know which members of the decision making team are most involved at each stage in the buying process.
Every organisation will have its own strategies, policies, procedures, structure and systems which will affect the buying process. The sales person will need to understand what type of organisational structure and culture the buying organisation has.
So, part of the process of developing a prospect into a customer is to use some of the time to understand their buying habits and processes using the above stages as a framework for collecting and organising what you discover. You will find people more open and communicative on many subjects, than they might be when you are actually bidding competitively for a piece of work. For example, at this stage you will be able to find out the way budgets are created and allocated, and how deals are actually signed off, whereas customers are often cagey about this topic at bid time.
Considering the five stages in the buying process, the further down the list the prospect is when you arrive on the scene to bid for the opportunity, the less control you will have and the less chance you will have of winning. If you have created a healthy customer relationship then you can be there at the beginning and in some cases you and your ideas can be the stimulus. If you are the source of the stimulus, you will have a significant lead over your competitors, as you will be helping to shape and define the need.
Tips:
* Understand the power structure of the organisation; centralised or decentralised, authoritarian or empowered, hierarchic or flat, …
* Understand the drivers of the customer’s market; creators or integrators, commercial or social, niche or multi-purpose, …
* Identify the decision making team and their individual roles and drivers
Copyright © Performative plc 2001-2006. All rights reserved.
Creating Customers – understanding the buyer - To learn more about this author, visit Phil Shipperlee's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
 |
Related Articles |
|
 Nine Hidden Buyer Questions
|
| |
Do you need to build a telesales script or a sales presentation? Here is an easy to follow plan to build your script or a presentaion;
|
|
Salesmanship and Empathy
|
| |
Increase sales production by tuning in to your prospect's point of view.
|
|
How Greed Can Cost You The Sale
|
| |
I can't tell you how many times the "Buyer" has set the ultimate test in motion just to see if the salesperson is greedy or really sincere.
|
|
Know the Buyer's Food Chain
|
| |
Knowing that you have, or will have, a winning product does not give you time to rest. You have to grease the skids by making your buyers aware that you have a product that solves an important problem that they have...
|
|
Value Over Price Preserves Profitability
|
| |
One way to add value inside of this business equation is to buy a customer's business by offering the lowest Price. You already know that may get you a short-term sell at the expense of short-term and long-term prof...
|
 |
Related Businesses - Evan Elite Authors |
|
Dave Kurlan
Dave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development.
Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit.
He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine.
He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball.
He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
|
The Evan Elite Authors program is currently in beta phase. For details please contact us.
|
|
|
Phil Shipperlee
(Visit Phil's Website)
Phil Shipperlee, CEO and Founder of
Performative, started in sales with
Olivetti in 1969 and progressed to senior
roles in Sales & Marketing in the Software
& IT Services sector; UK country manager,
head of global sales & marketing based in
the USA, head of European operations (UK,
France, Benelux, Germany and Italy). Phil
was instrumental in creating a selling
process integrating 12 acquisitions and
used throughout operations in North
America, UK, Europe, Australia, Japan and
India. Since 1980 he has built and run
several successful businesses.
Performative provide business performance
improvement solutions to companies across
the UK. There is an indisputable link
between the overall performance of the
whole business and the performance of the
sales operation, hence, our core focus
commences in the sales operation but also
looks upward to the Board and its
strategy, and outward at the integration
of the selling operation with the rest of
the organisation.
Special areas of knowledge: the creation
of high performance selling operations
within any corporate environment, solving
the business issues of SMEs, using and
selling offshore solutions, M&A,
post-acquisition integration.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
