How Do I Learn the Buying Cycle and Map it to My Sales Process?

Speaker A: Hey, this question comes from somebody who's just becoming an ae, an accounting sac, going from being somebody who just gets meetings to somebody who takes that meeting and takes it and turns it into a deal. Now this is a, uh, nerve wracking time because it's a whole new job with a whole different objective. Now I'm going to start with the three mistakes. I see people doing this, and these are natural. These are the things that everybody does because nobody really helps you. Number one is they try and get too much information. They'll go out and read four or five books. Why is this wrong? Because it sends you in hundreds of different directions and just makes you feel insecure about what you know and how good you are at certain things. So I would say stick with one. Okay, slow down. Really take your time. Okay. Number two is they focus on closing the deal. And instead of driving the process to the close in the complex sale, the close should be a natural progression of the deal, little baby steps through the sales process and the buying process. Now the buying process is the selling process because people do not know how to buy. This is one of the maverick laws. You may know how to sell, but people do not know how to buy. Think about, say, buying a summer house. Do you know how to buy a summer house? You think you do? Oh, I'll go look for a place and then I'll go see a place. But, but wait a second. The realtor will take you through the process. You know, they'll start asking you, what's your budget? And you'll be. And they, and you don't know what your budget is. They'll say, well, okay, what's your income? What's your current expenses? Okay, this is how much you can get financed, how much can you put down? And a good realtor is not going to take you and show you a house you can't afford. This is braindead. I see it on these realtor shows all the time. When somebody say, uh, what's your price range? Uh, anywhere from 100k to 8 million, which is pretty much 90% of the real estate in that area. That doesn't help. So the realtor has to take you through that buying process because they've done it before. Now, uh, what happens if the realtor hasn't done it before and the buyer hasn't done it before? This is the problem in the complex sale. You have to know that process. So guess what? You got to learn it. Okay? And the way to learn it. Well, wait a second, before I get into it. Number three mistake is rushing and reacting. Rushing means that you're not going through the process. You're showing that person the $8 million summer house, which is a nice, um, academic exercise, but still, you know, they can't afford it, and, you know, you're. You're just wasting their time. And if you show them something that's too small and they need, you know, more bedrooms, or if they're just in the wrong market, given their budget, you got to guide and coach people through this process. So don't rush and don't react. Proact. Okay. Those are the three mistakes I see. Now let's get into what I'm, um, recommending you do. One is you got to learn what that process is, the selling process and the buying process. Uh, the best way to do is draw a straight line from, okay, where you are today to purchase order, if that's the outcome, or referenceable customer, if that's the outcome. Now, you can either work forwards or backwards. Sometimes it's easy to work backwards because it makes you think about the steps. I would go and find a sales rep at the company who has been successful, who shouldn't be, meaning that somebody who doesn't have a great territory, doesn't have, um, some unique charm or isn't the person that's working 80 hours a week somebody who's just seems to have figured it out. Go through their CRM, uh, records, go through their forecast, see where they are. See how long each step takes. Look at those little notes there and see exactly how each step took and how long it was and what it was. Draw that process out. Okay? Now, number two is you get that, okay? How many steps? Legitimate steps, calls, actions, reactions. How many of those are. That's why I like pipedrive. You can visually see it, and for $12 a month, believe me, it'll save you an enormous amount of time. Now, think of the three things that can go wrong at each step. Okay? What typically goes wrong? This is what you can ask reps for. And they will be able to tell you, because guess what? They've done it. Now come up with three prevention steps for each mistake. Each thing that goes wrong, the typical thing that goes wrong is they don't call you back. Okay, how do you prevent that? You have the next meeting already set. If they don't want to do the next meeting, how do you prevent that? Well, you didn't build up enough interest or reasons for that meeting. What are, uh, three good reasons to have that meeting so that you can prevent them not wanting to have that meeting. See, now you'll be able to say, okay, um, I'm pretty good at getting the next meeting. I get that on the calendar. But they're not putting me in front of the manager. So maybe you read a book on that or you read a blog post on that. Break down your sales process. Then your skill set about how to move each one of these steps and relax and don't rush, prevent the things from going wrong and drive the customer through that buying process. They don't know how to buy. You have to know how to sell, though. Otherwise it's going to be two people trying to figure this out. Number three is you got to document it. The way to become great at anything is do it. Get feedback, Correct the feedback and accept it. I've got this friend of mine who, no matter what, he never plans. He takes action. If it goes right, it's because of him. And it usually is. If it goes wrong, it's always somebody else. And then if you point it, uh, out, he'll back that up again. So he cannot learn from that mistake. And this goes on year after year, and I just give up. I'm not learning from the mistake of trying to help him. He doesn't want my help. So I'm just like. I just, like, smile and nod now because they just don't learn. And there's a lot of people who just don't learn. So the only way that they ever do is, you know, get slapped on the head or nothing. What you have to do is learn each time. Okay, what went wrong here? How do I prevent it, and how do I build that into my process again? You can do it by trial and error, but that's going to take you five or 10 years. And it'll be subconscious. It won't be conscious. You want to make it conscious, meaning that you know it, that you see it, that you know exactly what game you're playing. A lot of people in sales are trying to become magicians and not understanding the tricks. And that's what's missing. You gotta understand the tricks. And the problem is they go and ask their manager. And I hear this all the time. Oh, just work hard. Well, that doesn't tell me anything. Oh, okay. I come in earlier, so I'm doing the same thing more. Same wrong thing, but more often. No, what you want to do is take a particular action. How good are you at the demo? How good are you at, uh, committing to the next meeting? How good are you getting access to the people who can approve it? How good are you convincing them that it makes economic sense to take action now and go with you and commit to actually doing something and getting a deadline? How good are you at, you know, handling objections about price and delays and capabilities and future capabilities? Think of these things, draw them out and you might think, well, that's overwhelming. It's a whole lot less overwhelming than reading five or ten sales books that kind of contradict each other and to have different styles. Don't worry about style, worry about strategy. I hope this has been helpful. Keep these questions coming. These are good. These are really good and I hope they're helpful because I still have to do it today because I'm constantly selling new things and I'm constantly going into ah, clients that are selling different things. So the context is very different. Hope it's been helpful. Check out the show notes and we'll see you next time.