Choosing Your Sales Process Instead of the Buyer’s Process

Mistakenly, some salespeople (and sales organizations) believe that their buyer’s process is actually their sales process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of their prospective clients have a buying process that is inherently transactional—and inherently bad for value creation.

Choosing the Buyer’s Process

The buying company determines what they need on their own. Then they develop their own idea of what a solution should look like. After they’ve done this work, they ask salespeople the salesperson to respond to a request for a proposal. The buying company evaluate the bids, often selecting the lowest bidder, and then they make a purchase.

This process eliminates the ability for a salesperson or sales organization to create value for that buyer. By doing so, the purchase is “arm’s-length” and transactional.

This is not a sales process. It’s not. It’s a buying process.

Choosing a Value Creating Sales Process

The sales process begins when a salesperson helps their dream client discover and determine their needs together. This is part of what a salesperson does to create value. The salesperson then helps their dream client develop an effective solution, creating even more value. In a larger, more complex sale, the salesperson works inside the organization to help build consensus around that solution. This creates a tremendous amount of value for the salesperson’s prospective client.

If the buyer does evaluate options, and many times when you follow a process like this is that they don’t, by creating value the salesperson has positioned themselves to win the opportunity. If it ever goes to purchasing or a pure economic buyer, the salesperson has the ability to combat a pure price discussion by leaning on the value that they created throughout the process.

This is a sales process.

The Difference Is the Difference

By mistakenly believing that a buying process—especially a transactional buying process—is a sales process, the sales organization and salespeople who subscribe to this belief end up competing on price in what is a pure transactional purchase. By believing that the buying process is a sales process the salesperson eliminates their ability to create value as well as any opportunity to capture value.

As it turns out, you cannot capture value unless you create value first.

The right answer is to push very hard to follow a sales process that allows you to create value instead of following the buyer process that eliminates the ability to create value.