CHAPTER 8

Managing and Closing Deals Digitally

The potential for using digital assets to find and create sales opportunities is truly limitless whether we adhere to strictly inbound strategies, choose to leverage outbound, or use a combination of the two. In this chapter we are going to look beyond just opportunity creation and explore how we can employ digital assets throughout our customer’s buying process to manage and close the deals we’ve created.

Some sales environments lend themselves well to fully automating interactions with prospective customers. In endeavors such as online retail, self-service websites, or even the sale of many SaaS solutions, business can be conducted with no person-to-person communication between the buyer and the seller. In those situations, all of our selling has to be done via sales copy, graphics, audio, or video. As we move through this chapter, we will explore how we can use various kinds of digital selling assets in that scenario as well as in more complex sales environments where some amount of person-to-person selling is required.

In Chapter 1 we talked about being able to interact personally with buyers during only 5 or 6 percent of their overall buying process in some cases. As our customers move upward through that pyramid of awareness we talked about in Chapter 2, and even once they start actively looking at and exploring possible suppliers, our access to the various influencers and approvers within our customer’s organization can be quite limited. For that reason, I recommend creating a variety of digital selling assets that are designed to help customers advance through their buying process even when we are not around. A tremendous amount of selling can be done asynchronously in between conversations with our customer.

Your Customer’s Buying Process

Early on in my sales career, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a lot of really great sales training courses. They covered topics like prospecting tactics, closing techniques, and negotiation skills, but what really fascinated me was managing the overall sales process. I was committed to mastering what many of those authors and speakers purported to be the “step-by-step process” to close every sale. I became obsessed with it.

As I read every book on sales I could find and listened to hundreds of cassette tapes (i.e., recorded teachings), I organized my own six-stage process for selling the kinds of complex technology solutions my company offered. Most salespeople today have seen something like this. Figure 8.1 shows how a sales process can be organized into five, seven, or any number of stages.

Figure 8.1  Defining Your Sales Process

The sample sales process in Figure 8.1 is made up of these six stages:

1.   Identify

2.   Qualify

3.   Validate

4.   Propose

5.   Close

6.   Deliver

You’ll be delighted to know that I’m not going to ask you to adopt and use my process. Quite the contrary! I want you to develop your own process for selling what you sell to the kind of clients you serve. One thing I learned along the way is that the sales process can vary greatly based on the nature of products and services you offer, the kinds of companies you serve, and the price point of your solutions.

If you sell for a corporation, there is a good chance that you already have a defined process and a CRM system to help you track opportunities through it. It helps! Utilizing a sales process has helped me, and I’ve seen it help thousands of salespeople I’ve trained and coached over the years. Having a documented process to follow and perfect over time is a vital part of consistency in pipeline management and forecasting. A good process gives us guidance on what to do next, helps us not forget important steps, and becomes a framework that allows the entire organization to work together using a common language.

Here’s the problem. I spent the first several years in this profession so focused on the steps I was taking and what I was trying to accomplish that I was literally oblivious to what was actually going on in my customer’s buying process. This is rampant within sales organizations to this day. We tend to get so wrapped around the axle of our sales process that we never even think about all the little decisions and the steps that our customer has to work through in order to buy.

Somewhere along the line I finally learned . . .

The whole reason that we have a sales process is to help our customers work through the steps and stages of their buying process.

Success in the selling profession is not based on what we do. We book revenue, retire quota, and get paid based on what our clients do. When a customer decides to take action and buy something, then we make some money. Therefore, the steps we take to try to sell something really should be based on helping our customers take the steps they need to take in order to buy something. Our job as a sales professional is to help facilitate our customer’s buying process. To depict this truth, I created the diagram in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2  Understanding Your Customer’s Buying Process

The chevrons and the boxes across the top define the “things we do” as part of our sales process, while the chevrons and boxes across the bottom show the “things customers do” as part of their buying process. Here are the six stages of a typical complex buying process, as I have defined them:

1.   Recognize

2.   Explore

3.   Evaluate

4.   Select & request

5.   Approve & commit

6.   Implement

While many of us have already learned this, either intuitively or through previous training, I’ve found that for a lot of salespeople, looking at this diagram produces a significant aha moment.

This model represents a very generic example of what a buying process might entail. Here’s my question: “Can you sit down and write out the steps and stages your typical customer has to work through in order to buy?” It’s one thing to know this in theory. It’s another to consistently put this into practice and literally help your customer work through the steps and stages they have to work through.

I want to challenge you to carefully define a typical buying process for the kinds of products and services you sell. You might need to lay out more than one if you have a variety of offerings, especially if you sell some inexpensive products, some big-ticket products, subscriptions, professional services, etc. The key is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see the buying process from their point of view so you can help them work through it a step at a time.

The Missing Stage of the Buying Cycle

What these various steps and stages represent is a process your customer works through to get from Point A—where they recognize some kind of a problem or need—to Point B, where they commit to buy something, then through the implementation stage as they work toward Point C, where they hopefully obtain their desired result.

One interesting observation I like to share is . . .

The instant your customer arrives at Point C, it becomes the new Point A. What was once the desired future state is now the new current state, and the whole process starts all over again.

What I want to spend some time on now is understanding how it starts over. What we’d like, of course, is that once we help our customer derive some kind of desirable outcome, they would want to delve into the next project with us. If we help them achieve their goals and objectives, why wouldn’t they want to work with us again? Great question! What we have to think about is: “Once we get to Point C, what happens after that?”

Notice that the buying process, as I have laid it out here, is a series of steps and stages our customer works through to get from one place to another. I’ve seen hundreds of diagrams depicting the sales process like this over the years, and they all share this same characteristic: a process has a beginning and an end. But to turn this six-stage buying process into a repetitious cycle, where the customer buys from us again and again, we have to add a seventh stage. I call this the missing stage “Assess & Measure” as shown in the customer buying cycle in Figure 8.3.

Figure 8.3  The Missing Stage of the Buying Cycle

Thinking back to my enterprise software sales days, I recognized the incredible value our clients saw in having our help to establish project milestones and key performance indicators—before a project ever started—that they could use to track their return on investment over time. We helped them assess their current performance using a variety of business measures to create a benchmark at Point A. This actually functioned as a terrific justification for why they should buy from us and undertake the project in the first place.

Once we had a scorecard or a yardstick of sorts, we could use that to assess and measure their performance again at specific intervals as they progressed toward their desired future Point C. This practice not only helped our customers stay focused on ensuring they got the payback they had envisioned when they made their investment, but it quite often became the way they would recognize a new dissatisfaction at the new Point A, which led to the next project with us!

I’ve lived by this philosophy since the day I opened the doors at Sales Excellence. From the beginning we developed an entire framework that helps our clients establish benchmarks and track their progress on a variety of vital performance measures. I want to encourage you to do the same thing!

If you want to drive customer satisfaction and repeat business at the same time, learn how to help your customers assess and measure themselves against their own past performance and, even better, against similar companies in their space. I have found time and again that helping customers gauge their performance naturally reveals opportunities for improvement. Assessment and measurement drive recognition of the next business problem to overcome and the next goal to pursue!

This means that . . .

Helping your customers assess and measure their performance isn’t always the seventh stage in their buying cycle. In many cases, it can actually be the first stage!

I encourage you to invest some time and energy to come up with one or more creative ways to help your prospects assess themselves and their business even before they ever become your customer. You can do it for free, you can make it a mini-offer for which you charge a little, or you can make it into a robust service offering and charge a lot. Thousands of companies are “in the business” of helping clients assess and measure their performance in variety of ways. It can be an entire business model in some industries.

I think almost any company could potentially offer some form of assessment and measurement that would help drive the recognition of customer needs and gaps between where they are and where they’d like to be. This could be as elaborate as a three-month paid needs assessment project or something as simple as a slogan: “Got milk?”

Facilitating the Buying Cycle Asynchronously

If we had unlimited access to the key decision makers and influencers within our customer’s organization throughout their buying process, we could help facilitate every step firsthand. We could offer information and guidance in each phase of the process via telephone, videoconference, or face-to-face meetings. However, because our “face time” is more limited these days, we should think about how we can take much of what we might share in person and capture that in one or more digital formats that we can use to advance the buying process even when we can’t arrange a real-time conversation.

As I mentioned in Chapter 3, some of these assets can be broadly distributed for public consumption. Others should probably be reserved to share only with qualified prospects. And only at the specific time that they need to use them as part of their evaluation, selection, approval, and purchasing processes. Certain proprietary information and videos need to be shared only privately to minimize exposure to our competitors or prospective clients who simply aren’t ready to understand and assimilate them yet.

To help with planning out what kinds of digital assets and selling tools might be most important to develop for your purposes, I offer the following four steps:

1.   Map out a typical buying process for the types of customers you work with. I just issued this challenge a few pages ago. As I mentioned, you might need two or more of these depending on how many different kinds of products and services you offer. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just pick one for now and define the steps and stages your typical customer has to work through, so you can think about what kind of digital assets might be helpful to them at each stage. In my workshops, I provide a really handy worksheet to use for this called Understanding Your Customer’s Buying Cycle. You can download a copy at: www.salesexcellence.com/handbook.

2.   Determine which buying roles might be involved at each stage. Think about the actual personas who will play a part in each of the major steps. For example, you might have a technical approver involved at some point in the buying process. Think about what he or she might want to hear or understand if you had unlimited opportunity to meet with them. If you know that you’ll have a financial approver involved in some aspect of the purchase, give some thought to what that person might need from you to streamline and even speed up the funding and purchasing process.

3.   Think about what guidance and information you and your company could provide at each step. According to the Gartner study I referenced in Chapter 1, the average customer spends 45 percent of their time in a complex buying process doing online and offline research. Wow! They spend another 22 percent of their time meeting with other members of the buying group. We should think about—and even talk to some of our friendly customers to learn about—the nature of that research and what is usually discussed in those meetings.

What sources are they going to for information? What kind of information is the most helpful to them as part of their research? What are the topics of some of those internal conversations, and what could we provide in terms of insight and knowledge that would make those meetings more productive? Once we know that, we can create assets and resources to serve that exact purpose.

4.   Decide what format or platform to use to share your guidance and information. You can capture your expertise and deliver your knowledge asynchronously in many different formats. You might even want to offer something like Five Tips to Eliminating Delays in Purchasing as both a PDF checklist and a video for some who prefer to read and others who might rather watch or listen. Some of the tools I’ll mention later lend themselves nicely to one format or another. I’ve discovered clients appreciate seeing a variety of formats for these kinds of assets. If, on the other hand, every single digital asset you share is a PDF document, all those documents can become a little monotonous and uninteresting after a while.

When to Insist on a Synchronous Conversation

Some of what we need to share with our customer throughout their buying process can be packaged quite effectively as asynchronous communication. Likewise, some of the questions we need to ask can be handled quite easily via email. But there are certain points in a selling/buying process—especially where larger transactions and more complicated solutions are involved—where a real-time conversation is required. I’ll go so far as to say that trying to facilitate some of these steps asynchronously can be a recipe for disaster.

As you map out your typical sales process, you may identify several steps that are best handled live. There are three major reasons why this might be best:

1.   We might need them to confirm that we understand them correctly.

2.   We need customer feedback, confirmation, or agreement with what we recommend or propose.

3.   We need to close on the next step in the buying process, such as one of the following:

   Introduce us to some other key person in the organization

   Approve our recommendations

   Agree to take the next step in their process

   Sign the contract

Here’s what we all need to remember . . .

The one huge drawback to asynchronous selling is that you forfeit the opportunity to ask for a commitment and wait for them to agree in real time. You lose the ability to truly close!

If you’re like me, you read this and think, “Well, then I don’t want anything to do with asynchronous selling. I don’t ever want to lose the ability to close!” But we have to remember that for every critical step that requires us to obtain a commitment from the buyer, there are six or seven other steps the customer needs to take that can be supported quite beautifully using digital selling assets.

Once again, I’ll say that some sales environments demand more real-time interaction than others. But for more complex selling/buying processes, here are at least four major steps where a real-time conversation is absolutely crucial. Notice that in each of these cases, we need customer confirmation and feedback to deem this step a success and advance to the next step in the buying process.

Discovery and Needs Assessment

In recent years, I’ve seen some of my clients having great success with online surveys and questionnaires to help assess a customer’s needs prior to a live discovery call or a demonstration. These can be akin to the type of questionnaire that you might fill out at a doctor’s office prior to being examined, just to document and expedite the transfer of information.

But if you sell big-ticket solutions in a competitive market, you’re going to want to insist on a live discovery call. There’s just too much at stake to step into a product demonstration—or especially into a solution presentation or a proposal—without being able to ask some questions to make sure you are presenting or proposing the right thing. And, just as importantly, the discovery call is one of the best opportunities to earn trust, build rapport, and justify meeting key decision-makers. If you’re selling complex solutions, a live discovery call (maybe multiple calls with multiple stakeholders) is an absolute must!

Custom Solution Demonstration

Some products lend themselves nicely to being demonstrated via prerecorded video. If it’s a product that has a fixed set of features and you can showcase enough of them to make a sale on video, that’s great. But if what you offer has extensive capabilities or can be configured and implemented in a variety of ways, you’ll want to do a custom demo live, and you’ll need to have held a good discovery call ahead of time so you know what to show.

You could do a prerecorded, screen-movie demo based on your discovery, but you’d ideally like to be able to get real-time feedback from the client and help them work through any confusion that may come up. Many of the questions that are asked during product demonstrations provide great opportunities to draw differentiation between you and competitors or to really help solidify your customer’s choice decision.

I also always use the custom demo as the justification for meeting with more of the stakeholders involved in the decision process. My thinking is this: “If we’re going to put in the time and energy to provide a custom demonstration, then you (Mr. Client) need to bring all the right people who need to see it into the room or on the videoconference.” At the end of the meeting, I want to be able to close by asking, “Are there any other outstanding questions, or are you ready to make the commitment to move forward with the purchase?”

Presenting Proposals and Pricing

As I already mentioned, there are times when real-time feedback is just flat-out required. It’s especially important when you present pricing. There are several reasons for this. First, you need to always make sure the customer understands exactly what they are getting for the money. If you just email a proposal, there is a good chance they won’t even take the time to read it properly. Oftentimes, they’ll just flip to the last page where the pricing is listed and give themselves sticker shock. And even if they do read it all, the probability of misunderstanding at least part of it is nearly 100 percent.

If the size and scope of what you are proposing is significant enough to warrant it, go see your customer in person or at least get them on videoconference to walk them through the entire proposal. Make sure they understand exactly what they will get and quantify the value and the payback before you get to the price. Then you can ask a closing question like this: “Based on everything we’ve discussed, are you ready to move forward with the project?”

The biggest mistake I see salespeople making today is sending proposals and pricing via email and waiting to see if the customer calls them back. Stop doing that! That is not digital selling. That’s just throwing a price in their direction and expecting them to close themselves, which very seldom happens. Get ahold of them live, explain everything, and ask for their feedback. Then you can address any questions they may have, clear up misunderstandings, and help them work through any concerns or heart attacks that may arise related to pricing.

Negotiation and Closing

It is possible to go back and forth with your customer to negotiate pricing or other terms and conditions via email, but it’s not ideal. As part of our Closing and Negotiating for Maximum Profitability™ workshop, we stress the importance of asking questions to determine the nature of any request for concession that a customer might make. Is it a simple misunderstanding? Is there some condition of the sale we need to work around? Or are they just “fishing for profit?”

It’s impossible to really get to that level of discernment outside of a synchronous conversation. To drill to the motive of their request, understand their perception of a mutually beneficial resolution, and gauge their receptivity to your recommended trade-off, you have to be talking to them live.

Keep in mind that your customers are attending seminars on negotiating with suppliers (like you) and are being taught a myriad of techniques and tactics to throw you off balance, including trying to avoid a live conversation. Don’t fall for it! If they want to do business with you, assure them that you’ll do the best you can for them but insist on talking to them to do it. My habit is to propose something like, “I’m confident we can come up with an agreement you’ll be happy with. I’m available to work it out on videoconference Thursday at 2:00 p.m. or Friday at 10:00 a.m. Which is best for you?”

Using Digital Assets in Every Stage of the Buying Cycle

I strongly believe there are digital assets we could create that would enable us to better facilitate the buying process at nearly every step through all seven stages. Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these seven stages of your customers’ buying cycle as well as the kinds of conclusions your customer will need to draw and the decisions they’ll have to make in each of them.

I will offer just a few examples of sales assets that could be used in each stage. In some cases, I will recommend a format. In others I might just throw out a title that could take the form of a free guide, a video, a checklist, or whatever you think would work best.

As you read these, I want to encourage you to grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down whatever comes to your mind about the kinds of tools or assets that you could employ in each of these stages. Even go so far as to imagine what format might be best and write down some possible titles or descriptions that are appropriate for your business.

If you work for a larger company, you can probably find a ton of sales collateral and tools that already exist, if you ask around a little bit. If you don’t have anything and you just aren’t ready to build a set of digital assets of your own, search the web to see who has already published something like what you have in mind. You could even use some of the sample assets you find until you have time to create your own!

I’m convinced that if you’re willing to make even one of these, you could immediately start using it to close more business. That would be a great success! And if you can create one, you can create more!

1. Recognize

In this stage, a customer recognizes some dissatisfaction with their current state (A). It might be that they’ve fallen short of some stated goal or objective. They could be missing deadlines, failing to meet customer expectations, or experiencing declining profitability. Along with this recognition, they would also likely conclude that the consequences of doing nothing are just too great and there is an urgency to take some action now. Here are some examples of digital assets that we might be able to provide that would help them in this stage of their process:

White paper: How Top _______________ Companies Spot Gaps in Critical Success Metrics

Free guide: 5 Root Causes That Lead to _______________ Failure. Here’s How You Can Correct Them!

Article: 7 Key Metrics That Every Executive in the _______________ Industry Must Monitor Carefully

LinkedIn post: 3 Ways You’ll Know When It’s Time to Upgrade Your _______________ System

Notice that all of these examples relate to some form of assessment that will drive recognition of a dissatisfaction with their current state (Point A). That’s why I stressed earlier that the assess and measure stage, which I usually list as Stage 7, is often the first stage when it comes to helping customers recognize problems and opportunities for improvement.

Assuming your customer has already recognized a need, pain, or problem with the current state (A), they might be able to benefit from some insights, such as the following:

Video: 5 Key Steps to Conducting Your Own _______________ Needs Analysis

White paper: 4 Ways to Quantify the Consequences of _______________ (common problem you solve)

Free guide: A Step-by-Step Guide for _______________ Root-Cause Analysis

Checklist: 7 Vital Steps to Conducting Your Own Feasibility Study

Article: So, You Think You Need to Upgrade Your _______________ System. Now What?

2. Explore

Now that your customer has determined they have a problem and they really need to do something about it soon, they naturally start looking for solutions and the people who can help them solve it. They move into the explore stage. Keep in mind that there is often far more to solving business problems than just buying a product or a service. They may not even have determined they need to make a purchase yet.

If your customer does decide they need to buy something, they often look to their existing partners and suppliers first to see what they could possibly provide. They might start to think about gaining internal support, consensus, and maybe even securing funding to help solve this burning problem. Think about how assets like these could assist in your customer’s decision-making process:

Video: Top 3 Ways to Eliminate the Problem of _______________

LinkedIn post: 6 Ways to Determine If It’s Time to Switch _______________ Providers

White paper: The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing _______________ Versus Doing It In-House

LinkedIn article: 4 Critical Capabilities to Look for in a _______________ Solution

Blog post: 5 Steps to Gaining Consensus and Support for Your _______________ Project

Free guide: A Step-by-Step Guide to Securing Funding for _______________

3. Evaluate

In the evaluate stage of their process, your customers will not only start looking at possible providers but also start thinking about:

•   Establishing responsibility and project oversight

•   Validating the business impact of a purchase and the associated project

•   Confirming that they have support from all the relevant stakeholders

•   Determining if this investment will produce an ROI attractive enough to get funded

A few digital assets that might help do some of the selling in this stage could include the following:

Article: 4 Reasons Why _______________ Projects Fail. This is similar to the article I published in the Washington Business Journal (which I mentioned in Chapter 6) that was written to expose some of the pitfalls for executives to avoid as they worked through their selection and implementation processes. One of them was failure to establish responsibility and oversight. Another was poorly defined project goals and objectives. A tool like this can be a terrific way to advise your client on how to properly evaluate and assess the viability of an upcoming investment and mitigate the risk of failure at the same time.

Checklist: 7 Pro Tips for Evaluating Possible _______________ Providers. Write this in the voice of your customer. Perhaps even feature seven of your best, most well-known customers who provide one pro tip each. This can be an incredibly powerful selling tool. Make one of these for your company ASAP!

Blog post: How to Secure Executive-Level Support for Your _______________ Project Before You Ever Start. Wouldn’t your prospective client love to know whether they are able to garner the support they need for a new project before they spend a ton of time working through their choice decision (as discussed in Chapter 3)?

Spreadsheet template: Business Case Calculator to Justify Your Investment in _______________ . Most companies who are considering spending a lot of money with you will have to produce a business case to justify the investment and obtain funding. One of the best things you can do is provide some guidelines or maybe even a template to help them with that process. This can save your customer a great deal of time. They will love you for it!

4. Select and Request

During this stage, your customer will be working through the steps of selection and requisition. It may be obvious what kind of information they are requesting from would-be providers, such as presentations, proposals, and responses to RFPs (requests for proposal). But we also need to give some serious thought to the steps that the customer has to take within their internal buying process. Some of these steps might include the following:

•   Evaluating proposals or RFP responses

•   Planning an implementation

•   Creating and submitting a business case or cost justification

•   Submitting the purchase requisition and all associated paperwork

Here are some ideas for digital assets that might be useful to your customer:

Blog post: 4 Things to Look for in Your _______________ Partner That Will Never Show Up in an RFP Response

Spreadsheet template: Implementation Plan Template with Timeline and Milestones

White paper: 5 Steps to Producing a Bullet-Proof Cost Justification. This can be one of the most powerful and useful sales tools you ever create!

Checklist: Purchase Requisition Information Checklist. A private cheat sheet of all the facts and details your customer could possibly need to know about you and your company as they are completing internal paperwork for approval and purchasing. This can be a huge time-saver and significantly accelerate the deal!

We have to remember that most of the people we work with in our customer’s organization aren’t professional “buyers.” Unless they work in the procurement department, taking steps to buy something is just one of the many hats they wear in a day. And in many cases, they are not all that experienced in taking some of these steps because they don’t do them all that often. Anything we can offer them to help streamline the process, make it easier, or save them time is a huge win for your customer.

5. Approve and Commit

As your customer works through their approval and purchasing process—the “deal path,” as I like to call it—the proposal or requisition often passes through one or more stakeholders that we never have a chance to meet personally. This could be one of the best opportunities to really leverage the true power of asynchronous selling assets. In some instances, our digital assets will be the only exposure some of these stakeholders ever have to us and vice versa. Here are some of the actions that might be involved in the approval and commitment stage:

•   Obtain all needed approvals and signatures

•   Secure funding of financing for the expenditure

•   Check references

•   Have contract approved by the legal department

•   Process purchase through procurement

These are probably only a few of the steps involved in your customers’ approval and purchasing process. As I mentioned earlier, buying processes vary greatly based on a host of different factors. The idea is to try to identify the various steps your customer has to take in each of the seven major stages of the buying cycle and provide whatever digital assets you can to empower and enable them to take each step. Here are a few assets that might apply in the approval and commitment phase:

Checklist: 5 Things You Can Do to Expedite Obtaining Approval Before You Submit Your Requisition

Private article: Best Practices for Improving the Chances of Getting Your Project Funded

Client reference videos: We’ve already talked about this multiple times. Here is the perfect place to utilize them!

Contract overview video: Shoot a video walking through your proposal and your contract that can travel with the requisition as it goes from one approver to another. This is the next best thing if you never get the chance to walk each person through the proposal personally.

This idea of a walk-through video is especially important if you never had the opportunity to meet with some of the key stakeholders throughout the buying process. If the deal warrants this much effort, shoot one video specifically for the financial approver, another for the contract approver, one for the final approver, and maybe even one for purchasing. This will give you a chance to go over the salient points of the proposal and the contract that are relevant to each persona.

Just in case you are thinking you don’t have time, let me ask you this: If you were given six minutes to meet privately with each of these key stakeholders—whom you otherwise would never have access to—where you could walk them through the proposal, would you take the opportunity to do it? Of course you would!

We have to stop thinking about the selling we do using digital assets as something outside of our core job responsibilities. Selling via every possible medium is our job! Technology now allows us to get through doors digitally that we could never get through before. Take advantage of it!

6. Implement

Once your customer finalizes their purchase, their real work begins. Now they have to actually use whatever they bought to try to produce the results they promised their management team they could achieve if the investment was funded. Here are a few digital assets that might be helpful:

Checklist: Supplier and Client Responsibilities and Deliverables. I absolutely love this tool! It’s something that I’ve been using for many years. In fact, I always introduce it in the approve and commit stage once the time is right to start talking about who’s going to be doing what once we get all the approvals and signatures needed to move forward. This is a phenomenal way to make sure that your customer knows what they are responsible for doing through the delivery, installation, or integration phases.

Many of the delays in our internal process—that customers sometimes get upset about—are related to them not providing us with all the information, resources, or access to people and systems that we need. Creating a checklist of exactly what is needed and when it’s needed can really help reduce finger-pointing and avoidable delays during delivery and implementation.

Spreadsheet template: Implementation Plan Template with Timeline and Milestones. I listed this one in phase 4 because that’s where it is often introduced. Here is where the plan is executed and managed to completion. Some product and services rollouts required elaborate Gantt chart timelines and diagrams to visualize who needs to do what. Others can be defined with a few delivery dates and a payment schedule. But providing the digital tools that allow your client to track progress toward completion is one of the best ways I know to keep everyone accountable and committed to the stated goals and objectives of the project.

7. Assess and Measure

As I mentioned earlier, while we might think of assess and measure as the last stage in the process, it can also be the first stage of the next buying process if we work it right. If you’ve recently completed a project or are still on the way to completion, assessment can be a terrific way to prove that you delivered as promised and to reveal the potential opportunity for future partnership. If a prospective client is considering working with you for the first time, assessing and measuring their performance can be a great way to prove yourself and earn the credibility and trust needed to win an opportunity to serve them. Here are a few examples of how digital assets could be used for this:

Video: 9 Things You Have to Know to Assess the Health of Your Business

Article: 5 Early Indicators of Impending Disaster for _______________ Manufacturers

White paper: Why Smart Companies Should Reassess Their Vendors Every 18 to 24 Months. (Note: This is a perfect example of an asset you may not want to post publicly or send to your existing clients. You might want to offer it as a link in an email to target accounts that don’t currently do business with you. But then again, if you are confident enough in how you stack up against the competition, maybe you would be happy to prove yourself to be the best choice again every year or two.)

Industry benchmarks: The idea of industry benchmarks is very appealing. Companies are always curious to know how they are performing compared to their competitors or to their peers.

If you are able to collect data on various key performance indicators across organizations, and then enable your prospective clients to compare themselves to their contemporaries, that can be a fantastic way to start a relationship.

Many companies charge a fee for these kinds of assessments and the benchmark analysis. Depending on the nature of your business, this kind of data can be challenging to obtain. And, of course, you have to conduct the comparison in a way that doesn’t compromise proprietary or privileged information. But you don’t have to produce all the empirical data yourself. There are many research analyst organizations that publish benchmark data specific to certain industries. You can offer to help your prospects assess their own performance and compare themselves to industry averages.

As extensive as this exploration has been, these examples probably represent a mere fraction of customer buying actions required to make an investment in the kinds of complex solutions that many of us sell. I’ve tried to present all of these ideas as a way to help you save time and continue advancing a buying process even when you can’t be present with the customer. This will help you drive time out of your sales cycles! But I want to make one more really important point.

When you help arm your customer with the information and the insight they need to be more efficient and effective throughout each stage of their buying process, you are adding tremendous value. You are differentiating yourself as a real partner who is helping them get from Point A, through Point B, all the way to Point C, and beyond!

These examples of some of the digital assets you can use to facilitate your customer’s buying process and close more sales opportunities are barely the tip of the iceberg. The possibilities are literally endless. If you start to proactively look for ways you could help your customers take each step in their buying process, and then digitize as much of that help as possible, you will make yourself an invaluable resource. You’ll become a partner they want to come back to over and over. And they’ll tell all their friends, too!

Putting These Ideas into Practice