People in the sales trade from Gartner CEB to Hubspot, to Marketo, to Miller Heiman, to Pardot and others recommend defining your customers’ buying journey as a way to sell to them. I’ve designed and implemented for clients my company’s BuyCycle Funnel customer buying journey model for selling for the past 20 years, so I couldn’t agree more.
But how does having a customer buying journey-based sales process improve sales coaching and leadership?
Here are 3 ways:
1) Focusing on customer buying journey creates “authentic” movement.
Too often I hear sales managers and their leaders say the “pipeline isn’t real”, or “deals aren’t moving.” But when you talk to salespeople they can give the impression that they’ve been busy, busy, busy doing stuff. The problem is, sales activity and busy-ness doesn’t define sales deal movement. Rather, customer commitment defines movement. No customer commitment in the buying journey, no movement.
Sales managers can use the customer buying journey to coach salespeople to seek customer commitment. This could be as simple as asking a stakeholder to set up a meeting between your rep and another stakeholder. It could be asking a stakeholder to collect information that builds the business case for change. It could be getting help to set up a “top to top” executive meeting. When customers commit through the buying journey, deals will move.
2) It gives the manager credibility with the salesperson.
For a sales manager to have a coaching impact on his or her salespeople the manager needs to be seen as credible. This can be hard when the manager is new to the position or young in tenure. “You’re going to tell me how to do this job I’ve been doing for 25 years?”, thinks the veteran rep.
What veteran reps don’t always see – and what new, young managers don’t always communicate well – is the customer buying journey is changing, and therefore selling needs to change too. I can’t imagine an industry where buying hasn’t been dramatically affected even in the past 5 years, maybe due to technology, channel, product, regulation, geo-political, mergers, or many other influences. The one thing that can be “neutral” ground for th4e manager and rep is the customer buying journey. The most effective way to sell is to understand it and sell through it. The veteran rep can’t pull the “you don’t know this business like I do” card, and the manager can stop trying to say “do what I’m telling you to do because I’m your manager.”
3) Provides a platform for asking, not telling.
With the customer buying journey as “true north” the manager can engage reps by asking questions, not telling. Questions help the reps through discovery. Questions challenge the assumptions the reps make about how a decision will be made, about the roles that stakeholders are playing, about who really has authority vs influence, and more. Questions are a “teach to fish” approach, not a “here’s your dinner” approach, which can be used again and again by the rep.
Good selling,
Mark Sellers
Author, Blindspots: The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching Buy the book Blindspots here
and The Funnel Principle: What Every Salesperson Must Know About Selling Buy The Funnel Principle book here
Creator of the BuyCycle Funnel customer buying journey sales model, the most time tested, proven customer buying journey model on the market
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