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Those who know me or have read anything I have published in the last decade would know that I am always banging on about one thing – the need for sales organizations to surrender the focus on their own internal sales process and instead turn things outside-in by focusing on their customer’s actual buying journey. 

In our research we have talked to over 2,000 customers, and one of the many insights gained has been simply that customers in today’s world do not buy as a result of a sales person completing a sales process – they buy as a result of completing their own buying journey. You can have the best salesperson following the best sales process (whatever that may be) but that never guarantees that a customer will buy. The only guarantee is if a customer completes their buying journey – guess what – they buy. It is my belief that the singular mission for today’s sales organization must be to initiate, support and manage the customer through their end-to-end buying journey. 

I believe that this Outside-In approach can only succeed by gaining a deep understanding of exactly how a specific market will go about buying a particular offering. Not why they should – that quite frankly is the easy bit – but how they would buy and why they don’t. Based on the insight that such a deep dive into the customer buying journey never fails to deliver, an overall market engagement strategy can then be crafted. Let me offer you a glimpse of the dramatic results that are possible with this approach by offering seven simple ways in which you can start the transition to Outside-In. 

Let’s take seven straight-forward questions that sales leaders often ask a salesperson about a any sales opportunity. For each of these questions, let me invert them and offer an equivalent Outside-In question. I encourage you to try them. It isn’t as easy as you may expect; you may have to change the habits of a lifetime. But let’s give it a go, and instead of asking the “traditional” question I list below, start asking the Outside-In equivalent. 

I promise that you will see an immediate and dramatic result. It may not lead to what you want to hear. You may well discover that a deal that was forecast to close this month, doesn’t look so good. You may discover that deals that are stuck in the pipeline may be shouldn’t even be in the pipeline. However, would you prefer to discover these dark secrets now, or when it is too late do something about them

Here we go and let me know what happens.

1. Traditional Question: When will you close the deal?

Outside-In Question: When will the customer be able to make a commitment and sign the order?

This is a simple and dramatic one to start with. What would you prefer to know; when a salesperson thinks they can or should close the business, or when the customer will be able to buy? It should be the exact same thing, but it rarely is. The follow-on discussion is also very interesting. Exactly how much do we know about what has to happen for the customer to be able to commit?

2. Traditional Question: How’s that deal going?

Outside-In Question: Is the customer in a buying journey? How do you know?

You can hear a lot of stories about a particular deal, and your sales team can commit a lot of cycles to it, only to discover that the customer isn’t even in a buying journey. It happens more than many would like to admit. These are the deals that get stuck or are lost to “no decision”. The customer could have been educated or even entertained by the selling effort, but they were never in a buying journey.

3. Traditional Question: What do we have to do next on that deal?

Outside-In Question: What does the customer have to do next?

That first question leads to hearing the same things again and again, and likely lacks any real insight. However, how about looking into what the customer must do next to move things along through their buying journey. 

4. Traditional Question: How did it go? (Meeting/Presentation/Demo/Call)

Outside-In Question: What will the customer do as a result? (of the meeting/presentation/demo/call)

The only thing that matters with any customer interaction is how it impacts their overall buying journey. Asking how something went invites a lot of storytelling and may be some chest beating. However, asking about what the customer is going to as a result of the interaction dives a lot deeper into the situation and focuses on the objective of positively impacting that buying journey. 

5. Traditional Question: What step are you at in the sales process?

Outside-In Question: What step is the customer at in their buying process?

No comment necessary, I hope.

6. Traditional Question: Who’s the competition?

Outside-In Question: What alternatives is the customer considering?

The biggest competitor in today’s world is the customer doing nothing, staying with their status quo. Regardless of how great an offering may be and the undeniable value it can create for an organization, customers often opt to stay where they are. There are many reasons for this, and many customers turn down great offers every day. Customers don’t think about competitors – they think about their alternative approaches. It’s far more effective to think about the alternatives a customer would face than simply list your traditional competitors.   

7. Traditional Question: Who’s the decision maker?

Outside-In Question: How will the customer make their decision?

The days of the traditional decision maker are long gone. In today’s organizations, decisions are made through a dynamic network of decision influencers. We must stop thinking that there will be a single decision maker and start mapping out how a customer will arrive at a decision and what we need to do to support and manage that process.

There you have it. Seven questions you may ask each day. Invert each one and ask the Outside-In equivalent and see what happens. 

Let me know what happens and contact me for an easy Quick Reference Guide.

For those who know me, that headline may send you reeling. But before you think that I’m abandoning process, read on.

Sales Process comes from the days when selling started to get more complex. It was around the late 1940’s when companies – the likes of NCR, IBM and Burroughs, selling their latest and greatest accounting machines – observed that their sales teams were no longer engaged in the “one-call close”. Selling had become more complex and had entered a new age. There was growing competition, greater communication (hey, you could even talk to suppliers from out of town) and the advent of more than one person involved in buying. The sales person now needed to talk to more folk, orchestrate trials and demos, write formal quotes, and learn to negotiate contracts.  

Out of this environment was born the Sales Process; a series of sequential steps that a sales person would follow in which to progress a sale. The sales process was useful as it helped to organize the pipeline, see where prospects were, determine what to do next, and enable all sorts of management reporting. The sales process had the obvious hoped-for result of a purchase order. Over the subsequent decades, the sales process has been elevated to almost a new science. CRM systems can churn out pipeline reports and all sorts of analytics, and many organizations have gone so far as to assign forecast probabilities to the stages of their sales process. However, the accuracy and usefulness of such reporting and forecasting may be amongst our first clues to the fact that all is not well, and that we are now witnessing another disruption in the way individuals and organizations are buying.

The challenge we have today is that customers don’t buy the way they did back in the 20th century. No longer do they have to work through a sales person to gain information; there is an abundance of knowledge available at their fingertips. No longer is there a single decision maker for the sales person to meet with; rather buying decisions are made through a dynamic network of decision influencers. 

Perhaps even more disruptive is the simple fact that the world has changed. Each, and every, organization has become more consumed with simply keeping up and staying the course. They can’t stop to evaluate every new idea that arrives at their doorstep, no matter how compelling. They can’t invest in every offering, no matter how breakthrough and valuable it would be to their organization. As paradoxical as it seems, it is very important to keep in mind that when customers don’t buy, it’s rarely due to a lack of belief in the value of your offering.

It’s a new world and customers no longer behave as we – the sellers – would like them to. They don’t walk in lock step with our sales process. They don’t buy because we have put a great proposal in front of them. They won’t issue a purchase order because we are at “step 5” in our sales process and have forecast them at 90%! Customers do, however, follow a process – their own buying process. They embark on buying journeys where various players come and go at different stages with different concerns. In those journeys are any number of internal issues, friction points and potential roadblocks. Through our own work and research, we have found that, for a given offering across a specific market, these dynamics can be predicted and mapped. And we have also found that these buying processes have nothing to do with any sales process.

So, it is time to let go of the notion of “our sales process” and adopt the new concept of understanding and supporting their buying process. We must define the optimal selling activities for each stage of that buying process. We must stop categorizing our sales opportunities relative to our sales process – which is subjective and therefore worthless – and start understanding where our customers are in their buying journey. After all, it is a customer successfully navigating that journey that results in a purchase order, not our sales process. 

I am therefore advocating a 180° shift in focus. We must turn our attention away from the internal sales process and place it externally on the buying process, an Outside-In approach to selling.  I guarantee that any organization that adopts such an approach is going to be far more successful in terms of not only sales forecasting and but also in maximizing revenue. So, I’m not giving up on process, but simply saying that the success formula for today’s sales forces is in focusing on the customer’s specific buying process. Because it’s not what they buy, it’s how they buy.