Unpacking Risk: How Overgeneralizing Will Sabotage Your Sales

To make sense of B2B sales, we use concepts designed to make sense of selling and buying. These concepts are supposed to help salespeople succeed, using things like a buyer’s journey, a linear sales process, and an ideal client profile (ICP). These conceptual tools may be helpful in understanding sales in general, but they also oversimplify things. Overreliance on these concepts can lead salespeople to use an approach that isn’t client-centric when that is critical to your success.

Unpacking the Risk

When you overgeneralize a buyer’s journey or an ICP, you can sabotage your sales results. Consider the following example. Imagine two people. They are both in their seventies and both have been divorced. Both of them live in a castle and both are rich. One is Prince Charles and the other is Ozzy Osbourne. If you believe these two people have the same concerns and needs, you are likely to fail them both.

When you rely on conceptual tools that oversimplify things, you open a risk. These concepts provide little more than a general map of the terrain, but that is far different than helping you understand actual conditions on the ground at a certain point in time. If you believe a general picture is all you need to sell, you are likely to treat all your clients the same way. In reality, what one contact and their team needs is not the same as what another contact and their team needs. The risk here is that you fail your prospective clients by not meeting their particular needs.

You increase the risk that you provide a poor sales experience when you use things like a buyer’s journey, ICP, or linear sales process. It’s not that you don’t need these conceptual tools. Rather, it is more important that you are able to recognize what each different contact and their task force needs to pursue better results.

There Is No Buyer’s Journey

There is no single buyer’s journey. No matter what your buyer’s journey looks like on paper, that may not represent the needs of your contact and the stakeholders engaged in the sales conversation.

Suppose you are meeting with two different prospective clients. The first contact has worked in the industry a long time and has made the decision the company is facing five times before. This contact has the advantage of the experience and their needs from the sales conversation will reflect that. The second contact is making the decision for the first time. They lack the experience to make a good decision, so they must acquire information and insights that will help them understand how best to make an important change.

Regardless of what the buyer’s journey looks like on paper, you are responsible for discerning what your contact and their team need to succeed. When you can tailor your conversation to the specific needs of each client, you are being client-centric. Instead, most reps treat each potential client the same, herding them through the same set of stages in the same order and in the same way.

The Linear Sales Process

The linear sales process was not designed to be client-centric. Instead, it ensures salespeople check off a series of boxes to prove they produced some important outcome. Sales leaders and sales managers once believed that every salesperson could win a deal if they followed a prescribed set of steps. Unfortunately, even those who did their best to follow the linear sales process lost deals.

The idea that, in the third decade in the 21st century, your clients are interested in being targeted, being qualified, or being punished by a commoditized discovery is folly. When you go through the motions of solution design, presentation, proposal, and a clumsy ask, your prospective clients want to escape as soon as possible. One survey suggests that close to 60 percent of buyers feel that salespeople pursue their goals rather than the client’s.

You need not remove your opportunity sales stages, but you need to recognize that they are a fiction. You might believe you have had certain conversations with your contacts and that you reached a certain point in your sales process, only to discover your sales champion and their buying task force is nowhere near where you believe you are.

Conceptually, stages can be useful, but you must remember that your client may need something very different from what your sales process requires of you. Forcing your way through a set process and expecting your contacts to follow you in lockstep is not a client-centric approach.

The Unideal Client Profile

The fact that one person shares a title or a role with another person in a different organization doesn’t tell you much about either of them. Even though these two people may have the same client profile, they may have wildly different wants and needs. Each may have a different problem and different goals they are pursuing.

While it is fine to use an ICP as a starting point, it is important that you don’t rely on it alone. Instead, you must elicit the information you need to better understand your prospective client individually.

Every day, your ICPs are overrun with emails and phone calls from salespeople or, increasingly, automated messages, that use a brute-force approach to acquiring a first meeting. To be different, you must not do what everyone else does. No client wants to feel like a number, even though many salespeople are regressing back into transactional sales strategies.

How Overgeneralizing Will Sabotage Your Sales

Concepts that overgeneralize and oversimplify are typically designed to make selling easier. In practice, they lead to a poor sales experience that doesn’t provide what clients need.

Instead of trying to make sales easier by investing in fictional buyers and processes, we should develop, train, and coach salespeople to recognize what their clients need from them to change. Most importantly, salespeople must be able to instill confidence and certainty so the client can take the next step toward the outcomes they need.

Sales will continue to regress until sales organizations and sales leaders build a better sales force, one that is better enabled to create value for their prospective clients in the sales conversation. Until sales leaders give up on the promise of technology and excessive pipeline coverage, sales effectiveness will elude them.