The 3 stages of understanding your buyers

Telling stories is important in sales.

But, not when you’re telling them to yourself.

And, certainly not when you’re telling them to your boss about your forecast. (Fiction doesn’t strengthen a forecast.)

As humans, we hate ambiguity. We feel a burning need to make sense out of uncertainty.

So, in situations where we don’t have a complete understanding of the facts, we have the tendency to take the limited information we have at hand and weave it together into a narrative that tries to make sense of uncertainty.

In short, we tell ourselves stories.

Like about that big sales opportunity you need to close this month.

You want to convince your manager that you’re on top of the account. So, you attempt to create certainty about that big deal by taking a limited understanding of a limited set of facts and stitching them together into a narrative that attempts to create logic where none exists.

And, then you compound the problem by buying into the fake logic of your own made-up story. I’ve seen it a million times.

Here’s a simple way to avoid the ‘believing our own BS’ habit to develop a clear view of where you stand with a buyer.

Use this simple 3-step framework to evaluate your qualified opportunities based on YOUR understanding of where the buyer stands in their decision-making process.

It’s based on the fact that there are three stages of understanding that sellers all pass through on every deal. (Yes, buyers go through the same three stages of understanding from their own perspective. But that’s a different newsletter.)

The probability of winning a deal is pretty low until you’ve gone through all three stages.

So, go through your pipeline and assign each deal you’re working on to a specific stage of understanding. It will help provide clarity about where you stand and what you need to do next to help the buyer make progress towards making their decision.

The Not Knowing Stage: “I really don’t know what’s going on yet.”

This is your data gathering stage. Opportunities at this stage haven’t earned a spot in your forecast yet.

Yes, you may have BANTed the hell out of the buyer with your scripted discovery questions but those tell you just a bit more than nothing.

Certainly it’s not enough useful information to truly understand the buyer, their goals and the outcomes that are most important to them and the help they need from you to make a decision to move forward.

The Uncertainty Stage: “I think I know what’s going on. But, I have to be honest with myself and admit there are factors at play with the buyer that I don’t fully understand yet. Factors that could change the outcome of the deal.”

This stage is frustrating because you want a clear path to success. You want certainty about how you can and should help your buyer across the finish line.

But you haven’t yet asked the right questions of all the right stakeholders. So, that understanding hasn’t completely materialized.

Be careful. Don’t rush. This stage is where sellers, feeling pressure from a Sales Boss to convince them they know what is happening on their opportunities, begin weaving together an internal narrative to convince themselves that they know what’s going on. When, in fact, they don’t.

The Understanding Stage: “I believe I’ve worked through all the alternatives with the key stakeholders and now I have confidence that I understand exactly what’s going on. I understand exactly what I need to do to help the buyer make their decision and to win the deal.”

Odds are you don’t know everything.

However, you understand enough to have an informed sense of confidence about the buyer, and the help they need from you to make the decision to choose you (to enable them to achieve their desired business outcomes.)

At this stage of understanding, you should have a fair assessment of your chances of closing and winning the deal.

In short, instead of analyzing the opportunities in your pipeline based on how far the buyer has progressed through your sales process, use this Understanding framework to assess them based on your understanding of the buyer and what they need from you to complete their decision-making process.