Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John R. Holland is cofounder and principal of CustomerCentric Selling(R). His articles have been published in Sales and Marketing Executive Report, Selling Power, and American Salesman.

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Align your selling methods with theirbuying habits for a win-win relationship!

“The digital age has dramatically changed the selling profession.John Holland and Tim Young will bring you up to date on their newrules for a customer-centric approach.”
—Al Ries, bestselling coauthor, War in the Boardroom

With the proliferation of social networking and other online platforms, you are nolonger in control of customers’ perceptions of your products or services. Only byfocusing on buyer behavior can you keep your competitive edge fresh and sharp.

Rethinking the Sales Cycle reveals how buyer behavior has changed and explains why traditionalsales approaches don’t work. You’ll gain critical insight into:

• The unprecedented power customers wield forbuilding—or killing—your business
• The psychology of buyers and how it changes throughoutthe buying process
• Developing an organization-wide strategy that aligns yourselling techniques to buyer behavior

With Rethinking the Sales Cycle, you will enjoy not only increased sales but, moreimportant, provide superior buying experiences—the foundation of a healthy, lastingseller-buyer relationship.

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RETHINKING THE SALES CYCLE

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

A buyer and a seller make for a really odd couple. When you think about it, buyers and sellers should be highly compatible. After all, their relationship should exist solely because each party can help the other to get something it wants. A buyer may want something tangible—a new phone system, perhaps. A seller of phone systems wants the buyer to have the phone system, because the act of satisfying that need consummates a sale. Ah, and, conveniently enough, it is through this transaction that the seller earns her paycheck in the form of a commission. It's also through this transaction that the seller's company realizes revenue, which leads to increased earnings and, if well managed, increased shareholder value in the form of rising stock prices. And all of that can reflect positively on the seller, who may earn herself a trip to President's Club or some other incentive program that her company has in place for top performers.

But something is wrong in the relationship between buyers and sellers, and has been for a long time. While both parties appear to have a common agenda, they are inherently focused on different outcomes, and each is suspicious of the other's agenda. Buyers want to achieve goals, solve problems, and satisfy needs. Most sellers want (or are perceived by buyers to want) to sell something. Anything. Generally, they want to deliver the best combination of high price and quick sale so that they can move on to ... the next sale. And they have an entire company behind them encouraging (pressuring?) them to do so for all the financial reasons mentioned earlier.

Why the disconnection between the two? The answer in this case is simple. Stereotypical sellers are perceived as putting the sales first and the buyer's needs second. Repairing the relationship, of course, will prove to be more difficult and will take a lot of work. And this is not one of those relationships where both parties share equal blame. In this relationship, the seller is largely at fault and, as a result, must shoulder the responsibility for treating buyers in a more honorable way. Actually, we'll go further than that and suggest that sellers' organizations should accept responsibility for having fostered cultures focused on "driving sales" rather than on ensuring "great customer experiences." After all, there are no incentive trips (to our knowledge) for salespeople who ensure great customer experiences.

In the buy/sell transaction, only one party's compensation is tied to the transaction, and that's the seller's. And this is at the heart of the disconnection in the relationship. The seller has to make the sale, or she doesn't eat.

Abraham Maslow, in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation," described five levels of human needs (see Figure 1.1). The theory is that humans must satisfy each level of needs before they can progress to the next level. Naturally, the most fundamental level relates to surviving. Can I breathe? Do I have food and water? Where can I find shelter?

In our modern business world, we meet many of our physiological needs by earning a paycheck. For better or worse, gone are the days when we lived off the land, built our own homes, grew our own food, sewed our own clothes, and generally provided for ourselves. Today, our paychecks allow us to pay rent or a mortgage (shelter), buy groceries (food), and pay the heating bill (warmth). This allows us to meet most of our physiological needs, so naturally we turn our attention to the next level, safety. Again, in our modern world, this is less about physical protection than it was a hundred years ago and more about protection of the things we have that allow us to meet our physiological needs—the house we rent, the ability to buy food, the clothes we wear, and so on. And what's the one thing we must have in order to protect all of those things? Job security and a paycheck. If you're a seller, you get that only if you are successful in making sales, and that's not at all likely to change. Nor do we propose that it should. What we will propose in this book is a way to achieve an increased awareness of the needs, wants, and roles of each party and a set of behavioral changes, both individually and organizationally, that will result in not only increased sales, but, much more importantly, more positive customer experiences. And that's the foundation of a healthy and mutually rewarding relationship.

The Buyer's View of the Seller

Buyers' relationships with salespeople run the gamut. A small percentage of sellers display extraordinary sincerity and competence. Buyers value their opinions and view them as respected advisors. In these situations, the buyer's experience is outstanding, largely because the buyer feels that buying rather than selling is the focus. Unfortunately, the majority of relationships are more stereotypical, with buyers feeling that sellers are trying to push offerings onto them. They view salespeople as following the old adage of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Buyers have to deal with sellers who conduct themselves in this manner.

You can get a sense for a typical buyer-seller relationship by considering that many terms used by sales organizations are also used during military engagements: win, lose, campaign, beachhead, and so on. Sun Tzu's The Art of War is required reading for some sales organizations and is referenced to devise selling strategies. Trite phrases are passed along in sales meetings that show blatant disrespect for buyers. The implication is that not only can buyers be manipulated, but they should be manipulated! Some typical phrases:

"Selling begins when the buyer says no."

"Buyer objections are selling opportunities."

"Winners never quit and quitters never win."

"Don't confuse the sell with the install."

"Selling is learning the ABC's: Always Be Closing."

These attitudes and approaches contribute to the fact that for the last several decades, the buyer-seller relationship has been at best strained, and at worst broken. Contrary to common belief, salespeople are not entirely responsible. It may be in retaliation for having been "wronged" in the past, but there are occasions when buyers manipulate salespeople. One example is inviting sellers to bid on RFPs that they have virtually no chance of winning, yet that they will have to invest a lot of their time and their companies' resources to respond to. The sole purpose of soliciting these bids is for buyers to gain negotiating leverage with the vendor that wired and will almost certainly be awarded the RFP. When asked, buyers tell other salespeople: "This RFP is wide open. Whoever has the best offering will win. If you can get your foot in the door, there are many upcoming requirements. We've heard good things about your company and look forward to seeing your bid." Buyers suffer no pangs of regret when they lie to salespeople. Turnabout is fair play.

Through the years, buyers of business-to-business (B2B) offerings and services have controlled the beginning and end of sales cycles. Buyers decide whether or not they are willing to meet with or take a phone call from a salesperson. When issuing an RFP, the vendors that can bid are by...