I recently had a conversation with Julie Thomas, the CEO of ValueVision Associates. She pointed out that most companies have sales processes that define the steps in the sale that seems logical to the seller, such as “initiate cold call,” “obtain appointment for presentation” and so forth. However, she notes that while such steps vaguely define how the sale might (under ideal circumstances) take place, a standardized sales process can’t possibly encapsulate the way that an individual company actually buys something.
For example, a standardized sales process might end with a step like “obtain commitment from key decision-maker.” Well, yes, that’s a good thing to have happen, but it skirts over some inconvenient details, namely that the “key decision-maker” probably has to run the decision by legal and by accounting and by his boss and who knows who else, many of whom may have veto power over his decision. Or once the decision is made to buy, the execution of the purchase may go to a purchasing department where the head of purchasing (who needs to sign the purchase order) is on vacation for three week, which means that the sale isn’t really going to happen for three more weeks. Or the customer organization might not even know how to buy the offering, if it’s something they’ve never bought before.
Thomas points out that while companies within a given industry often have similar buying habits, the individual variations within companies are a result of history, personality and accident, and thus can be extremely idiosyncratic. For every major opportunity, she believes that B2B reps should be required to research, write and review (with the customer contacts) a formal document describing exactly how the decision to buy will be made, and exactly how it will be executed once that decision is made.
In essence, she’s recommedning that reps create an individualized sales process for every customer, rather than try to cram customer behavior into a standardized process that may either be too general to be meaningful or contrary to actual reality. As I see it, there are four key advantages to this approach:
- It makes the entire sale more predictable, thereby increasing the accuracy of the sales forecast.
- It identifies anything that might block or delay execution of the sale, so that the situation can be handled before it becomes a problem.
- It flushes out cases where the customer contact is lying about his or her authority to make a buying decision.
- It provides a roadmap that will be extremely useful when selling to that customer in the future.
If Thomas is right (and her arguments sound compelling to me), then I have to ask the question: why have so many sales groups spent so much time devising a standardized sales process? And why have companies spent millions of dollars casting that process in electronic concrete (i.e. CRM). Were those massive efforts a waste of time and money? Or am I missing something here?
