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It should be no surprise that we live in a very different world, one awash in information. Buyers no longer must wait for sellers to provide them with product details, pricing, and case studies. Today’s research has repeatedly shown that buyers get 50% or further through their Buying Journey before even talking to a salesperson. This is partially based on the unfortunate, but understandable, perception that salespeople add little value outside of pushing for an order. In fact, this is why some customers avoid salespeople altogether. 

So, how are companies responding to this lack of connection? Well, just look at your inbox and mobile phone! If yours is anything like mine, you may also be thinking of the immortal words of Mick Jagger, “Everyone’s tellin’ me more and more about some useless information, to fire my imagination… telling me how white my shirts can be.” The net result is that buyers are becoming even more disconnected from sellers than ever before.

The only way in which to engage with a buyer, whether through marketing collateral or sales conversations, is by delivering something the buyer perceives is valuable, relevant, and not easily gained in other ways. Note that is an “and,” not an “or;” you must meet all three conditions to engage with a buyer. Bring them something they see as valuable, that is relevant to their current situation, and that they won’t believe could be easily accomplished with an alternative or substitute. 

The only way to meet those three conditions is to truly understand their world, or in other words, their end-to-end Buying Journey – what matters to them, what they are concerned about, what they value, and what they are trying to achieve at each step of that journey. The good news is that our studies clearly demonstrate that customers acquiring a specific offering within a particular market behave in remarkably similar ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if buyers act differently from one another, then for all intents and purposes, they belong in different markets entirely.

Once the buyer’s world and their Buying Journey is understood, we can then design our marketing content and sales conversations  to not simply bombard buyers with more useless information, but rather strive to bring wholly unique value and relevancy.

Here is a quick list of seven possible ways to engage and connect sellers to buyers. Each one of the seven can refer to either marketing collateral or sales conversations:

1. Diagnostic: help the buyer diagnose or determine what their real needs are.

2. Innovation: bring an innovative idea to the table, something they were unlikely to think of on their own.

3. Configuration: help the buyer configure, design, or develop what they need.

4. The Success Path: provide them with the path to success, showing how they will succeed with whatever they are trying to do.

5. Connect: connect with, or show, them what others like them have done.

6. Clear Obstacles: provide them with the way in which to clear, or mitigate, the obstacles they may be faced with in their overall Buying Journey.

7. The Broker of Information: based on the knowledge of what is important to them, synthesize what may be an overwhelming amount of information so that they have a highly relevant picture, tailored to their needs.

While this checklist will hopefully help you discover new methods to deliver one-of-a-kind value and relevancy to your prospects and customers, to be successful in any of these strategies, you must start with a deep understanding of your buyer. Failing to gain that level of insight will simply make you another man on the radio, giving your buyers no satisfaction.

Whenever we talk to folks, one of the most common goals we hear across every industry is a desire to speed up the sales cycle. This typically comes in the form of either shortening the cycle as a whole or increasing the velocity of their sales process. On the surface, these would both appear to be logical and effective strategies. The faster you’re selling, the more money you’re making – who wouldn’t want that for their organization? Yet when we dive deeper into this ambition, it can prove more complicated than many initially realize.

Upon evaluating which approach is best, there are two key factors to consider: current cycle length and current cycle velocity. First, how long it does it take your team to sell today? We find most businesses do not really know. When asked, front line salespeople are fairly accurate with their estimates. But we have found that as you go up the levels of an organization, for some reason, the envisioned length of the sales cycle decreases! This might be influenced by what parts and how much of the sales cycle executives see on a regular basis, on top of when one decides to “start the clock.” If you think of your sales cycles begins when you first engage with a prospect, you are missing all of the activity that went on in the Buying Journey before that moment. If aiming to be objective, we believe the timer should start from the first time a buyer recognizes a need or a desire up until you receive the order. This means one of the best ways to shorten the sales cycle would be not talking to customers until they are ready to buy. 

Although I say that in a tongue in cheek manner – how many MQLs are rejected because the prospect does not have a budget? In all likelihood, these leads are not being coy with you, but are actually just at an early stage of their Buying Journey. Therefore, you will only increase the length of your sales cycle if you’re spending time selling to someone who doesn’t know if or what they can buy yet. However, before you dramatically change the way you qualify leads, making contact earlier can have its own set of benefits. So where else could you save time? The honest answer is… nowhere. At least not practically speaking. 

It is very unlikely your salespeople are intentionally leaving their prospects hanging for days or weeks, procrastinating endlessly on returning calls, scheduling demos, or sending out proposals (if they are, you might have a bigger problem!). So even if you wiped the whole sales team’s calendars clean of any internal meetings and equipped them with every conceivable resource to manage a single account, your efforts might save you a grand total of a few hours or days on your sales cycle depending on the product or service.

When laid out like this, it should quickly become apparent that the majority of your time to sell does not take place within your corporate office. And this simple fact ties directly into the second key factor, velocity, and where the delays and hold ups actually are.

The counter intuitive truth is that the only thing yielding business is the buying process – not your organization’s selling process. As we have said many times before, buyers cannot be pulled through any form of sales process, but rather go through a specific set of steps, headed from interest to adoption based on the particular market and offering. Our fifteen years’ worth of research show that buyers do not even connect with sellers until they are 50%, or more, of the way through their Buying Journey, and more importantly, that salespeople are actively involved in less than 10% of buying activities. In no uncertain terms, this means that 90% of your “sales cycle” is controlled by the customer. You can certainly feel that imbalance when you are waiting for multiple departments to approve a proposal, no matter the rate of your selling.

If at its core, your goal is to see more profits sooner, then what you really want to do is speed up your customer’s buying. Like we said before, if you engage early in the Buying Journey, the sales cycle will lengthen; yet if done correctly, this comes with the added benefit of increasing win rates and average order size. It is phenomena such as these that are exactly why positively influencing your customers Buying Journey will give you the results you are after – and why speeding up your sales cycle is ultimately a futile venture.

Like with any business problem, the answer must always start from the Outside-In™. Managing and then accelerating the Buying Journey begins with gaining an in-depth knowledge of your market’s specific buying process. What happens across the entire end-to-end spectrum of activities? who gets involved? what do they value? where are the anxieties and concerns? and how are decisions made? Though at times the Buying Journey can be meandering, the opportunities lie in discovering where you can help your customer buy, thus speeding up the buying, not simply by selling faster.

For many, the path a customer takes from initial interest through a purchasing decision into successful adoption can seem both circuitous and unpredictable. However, though it may appear to diverge for no rhyme or reason, our fifteen years of research show that a specific market’s Buying Journey actually has many common elements.

Regardless of the industry, buyers within a specific market share common goals and motivations when acquiring a particular offering. On the flip side, these customers also worry about the same things. And the same key players, or personas, will come in and out of the Buying Journey, bringing with them these similar agendas and concerns. As the deal progresses, these decision makers and influencers become more educated, and what they seek might change in turn. Consequentially, what they need and how they decide to buy will shift in a congruent way.

Despite appearing confusing on the surface, the key elements that dictate if, when, what, and how your customers will purchase have a striking resemblance. We call these patterns the Buying Journey DNA.

Although they share the same genetic code, buyers can still take a less than optimal route. They may loop back in their journey upon discovering something new, taking time to re-examine their needs. For example, your customer might suddenly recognize the importance of a requirement that they had not previously considered, such as the need for end-user training when buying a software application. Perhaps they will become hesitant given the change management required for adoption and decide they want to explore other options.

Whatever the case, this realization causes them to rethink the effort, backtracking to secure additional funding, extend the timeline, or change the scope of the project entirely. At times like these, if we imagined our customers as travelers, they might appear completely directionless.

Meandering is unfortunately normal during a customer’s first time acquiring and adopting a particular kind of offering. Buyers who are new to a market don’t know what they don’t know. Therefore, as they progress through their Buying Journey, they are simultaneously on a voyage of discovery.

So how do we redirect these wandering customers?

As we have said many times before, the new role for sales and marketing is to positively manage the Customer Buying Journey. Salespeople can no longer expect to pull a prospect through the stages of some internal sales process, because that is not how customers buy anymore. Since the advent of the internet, buyers have not been dependent upon salespeople to learn about a company and its offerings. Our research highlights customers are typically well over 50% of the way through their Buying Journey before they even connect with a salesperson.

The irony – and the opportunity – comes from the fact most salespeople have already seen their customers traverse their Buying Journeys. They should know what their prospects get hung up on. They should know what is around each corner. They should know where the “surprises” are.

Where most salespeople fail is not making the crucial transition from educating prospects on the offering’s value to helping the customer buy. A salesperson should act as the harbor pilot boarding a large vessel when it navigates a foreign port; these veteran sailors have the maritime experience, know the local tides, and can maneuver the ship safely into a dock. In the same way, the salesperson needs to be the guide for their prospect, steering them through their Buying Journey.

The successful salesperson develops a level of trust with their client and sets the course from the first idea of solving a problem, through acquiring the offering, and onwards to being a satisfied customer.