Mapping the Buying Process

When working mid- to long-cycle complex deals, it is imperative that you understand your prospect's buying process. You'll need to know the steps that are involved and the stakeholders' expectations and timing for moving through those steps. You'll also want to map the stakeholders involved, their role in the organization, and their influence on each step of the buying process.

Nailing down and mapping the buying process isn't easy or cut and dried.

• Stakeholders may obscure the process because they feel doing so gives them a negotiating advantage.
• Sometimes stakeholders don't have access to the bigger picture and you may only uncover isolated slices of the process, leaving out vital steps.
• In other cases stakeholders have a difficult time walking you through their buying process because they don't view it as a process.

It is imperative that you ask about the process and keep asking. This is a foundational part of qualifying. Once you understand how your potential clients buy, you'll begin the hard work of bending their buying process to align with your sales process.

The Danger of Getting Out of Sync

When I took over as vice president of corporate accounts at early childhood education company La Petite Academy, aside from an existing book of managed accounts, the sales team hadn't sold a new account in more than five years. If that wasn't shocking enough, there was a fully staffed bid desk that responded to several new requests for proposals (RFPs) each month.

On-site child care is a complex sale. Installing an on-site child care facility on a company's campus involves a big risk for the prospect and a big risk for the vendor. Sales cycles are long and the costs are in the millions of dollars. The buying process includes surveys and studies, employee committees, RFPs, tours, vetting of the vendors, risk assessments, and approval at the officer, and sometimes board, level.

La Petite ran on-site facilities for a wide cross section of employers and government facilities. It had a great reputation and the capabilities to design, build, and manage early childhood education programs on corporate campuses. It had the credibility and the staff to provide any variety of curriculum. Yet, the sales team was getting beaten by competitors on every deal.

Our CEO was frustrated, the board was asking hard questions, and I was on the hot seat to fix the problem quickly.

I spent the better part of a month analyzing the requests for proposals submitted and lost over the previous two years. Everything seemed to be in line, but something kept nagging at me—it didn't make sense that we'd lost every bid for five years running. Then a new RFP landed at the bid desk. As I observed the process from start to finish, the answer to why we were losing every deal became obvious.

On-site childcare facility RFPs are thick, four to six inches thick. They are complicated and complex, and require a team of people to complete. The process takes several weeks and sucks up significant resources. In our case, it was a significant waste of resources.

Potential clients were defining the buying process via a formal RFP and we had become their puppets. Through our RFP responses we were helping the buying committee (almost always made up of stakeholders who were parents with small children and human resources professionals) do due diligence and build their case.

Our responses were just filling columns on their spreadsheets so they could make a recommendation to the executive team for a vendor that, the majority of time, they had already chosen. We were providing free consulting and expending precious resources, and our probability of winning the deal was essentially zero. We'd have been better off going down to the convenience store on the corner and buying lottery tickets.

The RFPs came to us randomly and without any influence on the front side before they were issued. We'd ceded influence to our competitors, who often helped the prospects build their RFPs, giving our competitors a decided competitive advantage.

Because our competitors started their sales process well before the RFP was issued, they'd had the chance to build relationships and align their sales process to the buying process.

We, on the other hand, were starting our sales process deep into the prospect's buying process. This essentially meant that we were forced to skip the connecting and discovery steps, putting us at a decided disadvantage.

We had no relationships, no insight, and very little qualifying information (we didn't even know if it was worth our while to submit the RFP). We had zero influence in a complex, high-risk deal with a large array of stakeholders. Yet, like robots, we consumed precious resources responding to RFP after RFP.

Average Salespeople Dance

I realize that most salespeople are not getting RFPs. Many, however, are being pulled into the prospect's buying process late in the game and being told to dance. And the average salespeople dance.

They rush headlong into these deals, producing proposals, pitching solutions in the absence of information, challenging before understanding, blind to the influence of other stakeholders, and asking without earning the right. Because the buying process and sales process are out of sync, they skip steps, allow disruptive emotions to drive their behaviors, and push situational awareness aside. In the process, win probability plummets.

The outcomes in this paradigm are almost always bad. Deals stall and resources are wasted on low-probability deals. Salespeople are frustrated because they spend time on deals that never close, leaders are frustrated because pipelines are unpredictable, and stakeholders are exasperated because they waste time in shallow, low-value conversations with average salespeople.

The only group of people winning are ultra-high performers (UHPs), who are shaping the buying process to both align with their sales process and disrupt the sales process of their competitors.

Shaping the Buying Process

At La Petite I made an immediate change. We would no longer submit RFPs unless and until we were first granted an audience with the company's CEO. I made it clear that spending three weeks and a massive amount of company resources on an RFP with a zero win probability was going to stop.

Filling out RFPs was not an accomplishment. We needed to close deals. To do that we had to increase win probability.

How did this move change the game? First, the only person at a company who can make the decision to spend upward of $20 million on an on-site child care facility is the CEO. If the company agreed to allow us to meet with the CEO, we would:

1. Know they were serious and the RFP was worth our time and effort (an engagement test).
2. Gain the insight to build a stakeholder map.
3. Slow down the buying process and align it to our sales process, thus disrupting our competitors.

This was simple enough. Yet my team resisted. It put them in the emotionally uncomfortable position of using leverage to get what we wanted. In our case, this meant reshaping the buying process of potential customers.

“What if they say no?” “That's too aggressive.” “They'll never agree to that.” “We'll lose all of our opportunities.” Fear, uncertainty, and doubt—disruptive emotions that leave average salespeople working on low-probability deals.

Ultra-high performers control these disruptive emotions in pursuit of higher win probabilities. They never waste time filling out a blind RFP or delivering a Hail Mary proposal because of a fear of missing out (FOMO). Hope is not a strategy or a good investment of time.

UHPs don't scratch lottery tickets. Instead they put themselves in position to win by shaping the prospect's buying process to align with their sales process. There are two primary ways UHPs shape the buying process:

• They get there first. UHPs are fanatical prospectors. They begin working with prospects far ahead of an open buying window. This allows them to influence the prospect's buying process on the front end.

  In this consultative role, they teach buyers how to buy, shape and even write RFPs and bid specs, lay land mines for competitors, and add, subtract, or change steps in the buying process. In doing so they increase their win probability while lowering the win probabilities of competitors.

• They use leverage. When UHPs are unable to get in the deal ahead of competitors, they use leverage to shape the process. Leverage is derived from something stakeholders want or need: information, comparative pricing, peace of mind, competing bid. When they don't have leverage, UHPs move on. When they have leverage, they never give it away for free.

Get There First

It was early on a spring morning. Tony was in his small office. Perhaps “office” is too kind a description. It was, in truth, a former broom closet. The walls were covered in dark, cheap wood paneling. The room was no more than four and half feet wide and six feet long. A small desk had been shoved into it, and that's where he sat each morning making prospecting calls and setting appointments.

On the wall in front of his desk he'd taped motivational quotes and his sales goal for the quarter. On the wall behind him were the sales ranking report for the region and his quarterly sales projections. It was cramped and windowless, but Tony loved it because it was his space.

Nick, his sales manager, sat on the other side of the paper-thin wall, an arrangement that had its pros and cons. Nick could easily hear and critique Tony's prospecting calls without ever getting up from his desk. Tony could overhear Nick's conversations, which kept him in the know about what was going on around the region and the company.

That morning Nick was on the phone having a conversation with his boss about a new regulation that would begin impacting the electrical and power-generation industries. They were discussing strategies for engaging potential customers before their competitors made a move. Tony's ears perked up.

One of those electrical utilities was headquartered in an open territory. Open territories were free-for-alls, and the first person to put his or her name on a deal got to keep it.

Tony didn't waste a minute picking up the phone. With no more information than what he'd overheard from Nick, he called the prospect's environmental health and safety (EH&S) department.

Through some miracle, he managed to bluff his way past the receptionist. When the department head, a guy named Casey, answered the phone, Tony's only goal was to set an appointment. He prayed that Casey wouldn't ask any questions.

Tony introduced himself and asked, “Casey, I'm curious—how do you plan to comply with the new safety regulation that's going into effect next month and will be impacting your line crews?”

Casey responded in a relaxed Southern drawl, “Well, that's a good question. We're just starting to talk about that now. We're not exactly sure what we are going to do, but we know we'll need to do something soon.”

Not wanting to sound overly anxious, Tony did his best to slow down and relax. “Casey, that's exactly why I called. We've been watching this thing play out for a while now and have a number of options available that I thought you and your team might want to kick around while you figure out your next steps. How about we get together on Friday and I'll show you what we've been working on?”

“What time are you thinking?” Casey responded.

“How about 10:00 AM?” Tony smiled.

“Great, see you then.”

Fist pump!

Tony strolled into Nick's office just as Nick was hanging up the phone with his boss. He did his best not to smirk as he gave Nick the good news. “I just booked us an appointment with the head of EH&S at the biggest electrical utility in the state for Friday at 10 AM. I'm going to need you to come along on this one because I don't know a thing about this new reg.”

Tony recalled, “The look on Nick's his face was priceless. Like ‘how in the hell did you do that?’ priceless. I lived for that look.” Tony laughed as he told the story. “Then we both panicked. We had three days to become experts on the regulation, understand the impact to electrical utilities, and develop a strategy for our meeting.”

After meeting with Casey and his team, Nick and Tony realized that they had a monster deal on their hands. Over the next 60 days they met with Casey seven times and helped him with the information he would need to formulate his strategy.

By getting to the table first, Tony and Nick influenced, guided, and shaped the buying process to give themselves the highest possible win probability. In the end Tony and Nick won the account because they took control from the get-go, built deep and trusting relationships with the stakeholders, and pushed their competitors into a reactive mode.

Getting there first is the best position to be in when it comes to shaping the buying process. While other salespeople are being brought into the deal 50 to 80 percent of the way through the prospect's buying process (and made to dance), you are there from the very beginning, aligning the buying process to your sales process, guiding your prospect, building connections, and becoming a valuable resource.

Leverage

In La Petite's case, our leverage was the information being requested in the RFP. There were a limited number of early childhood education companies capable of setting up and managing an on-site child care facility. Few companies would be willing to move forward with such a complex project without researching all the options.

The company issuing the RFP needed our information and cost data for leverage in negotiations with its preferred partner (the one the committee had already chosen). Our demand was straightforward: we will provide the information once we have an opportunity to meet with the CEO and the buying committee.

A few companies outright refused to honor our request. Their refusal told us that they were on a fishing expedition and did not have executive sponsorship. We ignored those RFPs, saving time and money.

Most companies balked at our request and responded that we would have to submit the RFP first. When we politely refused, they almost all relented and set up the meetings. They needed our information.

These meetings allowed us to reshape and reset the buying process. Once it was aligned with our sales process, the game changed and our win probabilities soared. Within 120 days of implementing our new strategy we closed a $16 million deal and closed 12 more new accounts over the following 18 months.

Average Salespeople Become Buying Process Puppets

If you've been in sales for more than a month, a prospect has said these words (or something similar) to you in person, on the phone, or via e-mail:

• I'm too busy to meet now, but we are interested. Just send me your proposal. I'll look it over and call you back to set a meeting.
• Send over your prices; we're always looking for a better deal. Make sure you sharpen your pencil.
• I'm gathering all the information from vendors. Once we get it all in, we'll start scheduling meetings.
• We're going to be making a decision this week, so we need to get your information fast. How soon can you send us your proposal?

Ultra-high performers use leverage to gain control in these situations. Average salespeople with low Sales EQ become buying process puppets.

Take the last example. It's the old “speed you up to slow you down” play. The prospect indicates that they're interested and about to make a buying decision. “If you want in, you need to move fast.”

Average salespeople stop what they are doing, spend an afternoon (or an entire day) putting together the perfect proposal, push their leaders to approve lower prices, deliver the proposal, put the deal in the pipeline, add it to their forecast, and hope.

Why did this happen? The failure to manage disruptive emotions—desperation, lack of confidence, fear of missing out, overconfidence effect, and false hope triggered by the optimism bias.

• Becoming a buying process puppet begins with a depleted or empty pipeline.
• Empty pipelines make you desperate.
• Desperation blinds you to the obvious clues that you are being used.
• This opens you up to false hope because hope feels better than desperation.
• In your heart of hearts, you know it is a low-potential deal, but you fear that using leverage to test engagement will cause the prospect to walk away.
• Overlooking win probability, and with hope as your strategy, you make a long-shot promise on your forecast.
• You give away your leverage and the prospect disappears.
• You miss your forecast, feel like a loser, and your confidence dies.

Ultra-high performers with high Sales EQ respond to these requests with confidence, reserve leverage, and test engagement by asking for a micro-commitment:

“John, my competitors will be happy to just throw a proposal at you. It's easy for them. They've got a generic box and expect all their customers to fit into that box.

“This is where we are different. At my company, we build the box around you.

“All I'm going to need is a little bit of your time to ask some questions so I can understand you better. Then, I'll tailor a proposal around your unique situation. That way you'll have the opportunity to make a true apples-to-apples comparison and choose the solution that you feel is best for your company.

“How about we get together tomorrow afternoon at two o'clock?”

UHPs know they'll get one of three possible responses:

1. “That makes sense—when can we meet?” At this point they've gained control, reshaped the buying process, and obtained the power to align it to their sales process—most likely disrupting a competitor rep who believed he or she had the deal wrapped up.
2. “How much time will this take?” or “Is there any other way we can get you that information?” In this case the buyer is negotiating (read engaged). The UHP learns that there is urgency and only needs to negotiate how and when discovery will occur.
3. “Look, we really don't have time to meet. If you want a shot at this, send us your proposal.” The UHP knows that there is no deal and no chance, so they walk away, preserving their precious time for a higher-probability play.