Are You Selling or Are They Buying?

This is not a trick question.

Are you selling or is your customer buying? The answer is both. There is both a sales cycle and buying cycle(s) occurring concurrently on every deal. Understanding the balance between the two is essential for every seller.Why is this important to you? Because the sole purpose of a sales cycle is to support the buying cycle by helping the customer accomplish a single task: making a fully informed decision to purchase the right product or service for their needs. If you, as a seller can also, at the same time, enable the customer to make that purchase decision in the shortest time possible then you will have created value for the buyer, established credibility, built trust, and put yourself at the head of the pack competing for their business.The Balance of Power has ShiftedIn the olden days, in the pre-Internet world, buyers of product, your prospects, were completely dependent on sellers for information about the products they wanted to buy. There were no websites to search and very few reliable third-party sources of information about products that you could use to guide your purchase decision. The result was a much more casually paced buying cycle as the customer had few options to control the pace.Then the Internet upended that whole cozy arrangement. Within a matter of years the customer was no longer dependent on the seller for product information. Brochures were replaced with websites that were usually full of more information than even the salesperson knew. Online communities provided users with a forum where they could voice their unvarnished opinions about products and services to all who were interested. Buyers had access to a whole spectrum of information that hadn’t existed before or that had been shielded from them by the sellers. Suddenly, the buyer was in charge of his or her own buying process.Do Not Pass GoThere can be some debate about how many steps there are in a customer’s buying cycle. Personally I believe that there are six steps in the buying cycle. But no matter how many steps the prospect has to complete in their buying cycle, one fact remains: a buyer won’t progress from the current step in their buying cycle to next until their information requirements for the current step are fully satisfied. This means that each step of a buying cycle carries with it certain requirements for information that must be received by the prospect before they will move forward to the next step.Sellers Control the Pace of DealsWhen sales cycles get stretched out salespeople always point their fingers at the buyer. To them it is always the customer who’s the culprit when the sales cycle stalls. In truth, the opposite is true. It is nearly always the seller’s fault when the buyer stops making progress towards an order. Why? Because the seller didn’t provide the prospect with the information they needed to move on to the subsequent step in their buying process. If the deal you are working on suddenly loses momentum, take a look in the mirror before you begin pointing fingers at the customer. Then, you must quickly determine what data the customer needs from you to satisfy their requirements for the current step of their buying cycle and get back on track to an order.We Are Not AloneAs a seller you must also understand that there is a good chance that there will be more than one buying cycle occurring simultaneously. Your prospect will have a separate buying process for every seller in a competitive deal. This is extremely important for a seller to understand. If you can be completely responsive to your prospect’s information requirements then you can gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.What the Successful Seller DoesThe successful seller is the one that most closely aligns their selling resources (i.e., their product knowledge and industry expertise) with the buying needs (i.e., information requirements) of the customer to enable them to make the optimum informed decision in the least time possible. This means that you have to place your people with the deepest product knowledge and industry expertise closest to the customer. To help the prospect move through their buying cycle in the shortest time you have to eliminate the “get-backs” from your selling. Every time a salesperson can’t answer a prospect’s question and says, “I’m sorry I’m going to have to get back to you” he or she is slowing down the buying cycle. Having the right salespeople on your team who can be completely responsive to the prospect’s need for information and help them move through their buying cycle in Zero-Time will definitely enable you to win more orders in less time.The First Seller with the Answers WinsA buying cycle is nothing more than a search for information in the form of answers to questions. How a seller conveys that information to the prospect will be the difference between getting an order and losing a customer.