CHAPTER 3

Balancing Selling and Buying

This is not a trick question: Are you selling, or is your customer buying?

The answer is both. On every deal that you work, both a sales cycle and buying cycle(s) are occurring. Understanding the balance between the two is essential for every seller.

Let’s start at the beginning. What is buying? Buying is simply an organized search by a prospect for the specific information she needs to make an informed purchase decision to buy the right product(s) to fit her needs. The customer gathers that information in the form of answers to the questions she asks you. How a seller conveys that information to the prospect will be the difference between getting an order and losing a customer.

So buying, like selling (see Chapter 1), is really about two things: questions and answers. Your customer asks questions, and you have answers. It’s how you provide the answers that will be decisive in your ability to win the business. And as I’ll show you in Chapter 10, the first seller with the answers wins.

As mentioned, in every sales opportunity there is both a sales cycle and at least one buying cycle. There are two essential points for you to remember about this:

1. A seller cannot control the customer’s buying process. The customer is in charge of their buying cycle. Despite the hundreds of books and articles published by sales authors who purport to teach you the importance of controlling your prospect, it can’t be done. You can only hope to influence it.

2. The only way you can influence the course of the customer’s buying cycle is through the one thing over which you have complete control: your selling process and how you sell.

Why is this so important to you? Because the sole purpose of a sales process is to support the buying cycle by helping the customer accomplish a single task: making a fully informed decision to purchase the right product or service. If you, as a seller can also, at the same time, shape how you sell to enable the customer to make that purchase decision in the shortest time possible, then you will have created value for the buyer, established credibility, built trust, differentiated your offer and your company, and put yourself at the head of the pack competing for the business.

The balance of power has shifted to the customer. In the pre-Internet world, the buyers—your prospects—were almost completely dependent on sellers for information about the products and services they wanted to buy. When I began my sales career for a big computer company (both the computers and the company were big), there were no websites to search and very few reliable third-party sources of information about products that a customer could use to guide and shape a purchase decision. My customers had one source of information about the products and services I was selling: me. In those days, customers could buy only as fast as salespeople were prepared to sell to them. The result was a much more casually paced buying cycle because customers had few options to control the speed of the process.

Then, to the initial consternation of buyer and seller alike, the Internet upended that whole arrangement. However, buyers quickly realized that the Internet could be a tool that reshaped how they evaluated products for purchase. Within a matter of years, the customer was no longer dependent on the seller for product information. Brochures were replaced with websites that were usually full of more information than even the salesperson could provide. Buyers suddenly had access to a whole spectrum of information that hadn’t existed before or that had been shielded from them by the sellers. Online communities provided users with forums where they could voice their unvarnished opinions about products and services to all who were interested. Now customers were in charge of the buying process.

This information explosion has taken from the sellers’ hands what little control of the buying process they had. No longer are customers waiting for you to sell to them. In fact, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 11, your customers will have moved through a substantial portion of their buying process before they first speak with you, and when they do, you’ll have to be prepared to sell to them in a different fashion.

Here are a couple of key points to remember about buying cycles:

   Your prospect will have a separate buying process for every seller she is talking to in a competitive deal. As important as understanding what buying is, as a seller you need to be aware that more than one buying cycle will be occurring simultaneously on every sales opportunity. Again, your prospect will have a separate buying process for every seller in a competitive deal. Even if you believe that you are the only supplier bidding for a customer’s business, you have to assume that your prospect is evaluating the value of your offer against the value of making no decision and doing nothing. In that case, doing nothing is your competition—and it has a buying cycle too.

   Each buying cycle moves at a pace that is all its own. If you can respond more quickly and completely to your prospect’s information requirements, then their buying cycle for your product may move forward more rapidly than it would for your competitors. How efficiently and effectively you provide information and answers to your prospect can be the difference between getting an order and losing a customer. If you, as a seller, empower your prospect to make a purchase decision with the least investment of time possible, in order to move more rapidly through the buying cycle, then you’ll successfully create real value for the buyer, lay the foundation for a trust-based relationship, and truly differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Successful salespeople are those who can most closely align their selling resources (product knowledge and industry expertise) with the customers’ buying needs (information requirements) to enable them to make the optimum informed decision in the least time possible.