The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Your clients and prospects are on a predictable journey to making a purchase. You have a much better chance at success if you understand their buyer’s journey. The model we present to clients expands on the traditional Awareness-Consideration-Decision stages. This helps us look at things from the mind of your client or prospect.

B2B sales professionals must understand the buyer’s journey. It’s an important framework for strategy, but a common question is, how do I know where my prospect is on the buyer’s journey, and how do I get them from step one to closing?

Whether they realize it or not, consumers travel through a series of steps before purchasing an item. For the consumer, this journey is not something they think about; they’re simply trying to make a decision.

The process consumers follow to purchase a product or service has changed significantly over the years. To truly understand the consumer journey today, we must look at the past relationship between the brand and the consumer and how it has evolved over time.

From sales and marketing to service interactions, gender defines the way a message is perceived. Women crave connection more than men, and perception is ultimately her reality. When it comes to perception and seeing, feeling, hearing, and sensing things, there is no such thing as objectivity.

The golden rule to treat others the way you want to be treated is long gone. It’s now the platinum rule, treat others the way they want or need to be treated.

If you want to increase your retention rates, referrals, and ultimately improve your top line, change the way you deliver the consumer brand experience.  

Some say that the holy grail of sales is consistent and predictable revenue. Many are on this seemingly never-ending quest, but find it both elusive and always just out of reach. A strategic sales process is the only thing that will help you reach your goals.

As sales professionals, we are trained to listen to our prospects’ needs and then create a tailored solution based on the products we have to sell. As managers, we coach our team on this daily, and as salespeople, we continually work to evolve and better this process. We present a solution, and then explain why these products make sense. But in today’s complicated world of marketing, there is a key piece we often forget — consumer behavior. What does your target persona do before making a purchase decision? 

Sales superpowers? Yes, really. To understand what I mean, please take a step back from the world of selling and focus instead on the process of buying.

The easiest way to wrap your mind around this is to consider a few common business-to-consumer (B2C) purchasing processes like buying a car, remodeling a kitchen, or selecting a college. Looking through that lens, it is easy to see how different the process of buying is today than it was only 10 years ago. I’m sure you would agree that the most notable difference is the amount of time the consumer spends researching in advance.

This sort of pre-purchase work is just as prevalent in the B2B world! Whether an individual is shopping for office space or office supplies, or selecting a bank, an accountant, a lawyer, or an insurance agent, chances are they will do a lot of pre-work before they ever engage in a significant conversation with a representative from any company. And when they do finally begin that conversation, they will come loaded with information and expectations.

The perspective from which we look at our world dictates our expectations and our behavior. As our points of view change, so too will our attitudes and our actions. As the great philosopher (and comedian) George Carlin once said, “Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”

Buyers and Sellers See Things Differently

Buyers and sellers obviously have different perspectives, and they see the buying/selling process very differently. In fact, according to HubSpot’s Q1 2016 Sales Perspective Survey (see chart below), there is a significant gap between how each group views salespeople. Salespeople like to think we’re not pushy, we listen to our prospects, we provide value, and we help our prospects succeed. Unfortunately, our buyers don’t always agree.     

You may have heard it said that the best way to approach selling is to make buying easier for the buyer. That saying has been around a long time. But a new twist on that is the notion of helping buyers navigate their journey. The journey in B2B buying has greatly changed over the last several years.  

Smart salespeople think about the “things” along the buyer journey—and consider how they can help the buyer navigate that journey.