MIS-Improved Sales: buying vs. sales process (1)
Sales managers usually base the sales processes on experience and/or good practice. They might even draw a nice flowchart to visualize every possible step and person involved. In doing so they happily forget that the (potential) buyer will follow his own steps: the buying process
Each step in the buying process has only one function: to eliminate suppliers by using increasingly tougher demands in order to get the best possible deal. So, as the sales is pushing his merchandise through the sales tunnel, the buyer will push back with increasing resistance!
Buyers use criteria to weed out suppliers. These criteria will be rated to importance and might even have a weighting factor. To make it more complex, the importance and factors tend to change during the process and criteria are added or dropped. This is caused by the simple fact that buyers get more and more information.
Sales usually perceive the setting up of criteria by buyers as a ‘black box’ operation that they can hardly influence or get information about. In my opinion, common sense and general research will give you 80% of the information you need. Unfortunately the final 20% will make the difference between getting or losing the deal. More often then we like these will be subjective criteria. Hard to identify and influence.
A simple buying process will be unruffled in next blog item.
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