Match the correct step number with what happens in that step in the B2B buying decision process

Disregarding the type of business you run, or the industry you’re in, you should probably be aware of what the buying process is & how to take advantage of it.

What is the Customer Buying Process?

In terms of marketing, many companies will put all of their energy and resources into the purchase itself. This is often a mistake because the customer has an entire process they will go through before they ever buy anything from you.

In fact, 70-90 percent of the buying process will happen prior to ever engaging with your company.

Every time a customer makes a purchase they go through a certain thought process. Even when they are making an “impulse buy” the customer will still go through the stages of the buying process.

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Understanding the buying process is important for your team and will help you design a better sales strategy.

The 6 Stages of the Customer Buying Process

When a customer is considering a purchase that is more expensive or requires some kind of monthly commitment they will usually spend more time thinking about it. They may want to research different options, talk to a friend or family member about it, and weigh the pros and cons of going through with the sale.

In business, this process is often portrayed as a sales funnel with more and more people dropping off as they move further into the funnel.

At each point during this process, the customer will go through a specific thought pattern. To help your customer follow through with the sale, you must understand what their needs are at each point.

Let’s look at the six stages of the buying process below:

Stage #1: Problem Recognition

This is the most important step in the decision process because your customer has to realize they need your product before a purchase can take ever place. This presents you with both the opportunity and the challenge of identifying with your customer. The best strategy is to articulate their problem in your marketing efforts.

With traditional marketing or PR, this can be done through advertising: having an ad that explains what the customer’s problem is, and how the product or service can solve it.

With any online business, on the other hand, the best way to influence the “problem recognition” stage is through content marketing. With the right content, you could identify with your audience, articulate their needs, and offer helpful resources and tools.

Stage #2: Information Search

Now the customer will begin searching for information to help them find the best solution to their problem. Most people will immediately turn to friends, family members, and colleagues for recommendations.

While you can’t really talk the above-mentioned friends or family members into endorsing your product, there are several things you could do.

• Focusing on the Product – If your product is really good, people are going to start being your brand advocates, and you won’t even have to pay them!
• Build Authority – This one’s pretty generic, and translates into regular marketing. It could mean working on your company web presence, for example, so that it’s easy for your customers to find you and learn more about your product.
• Reviews & Partnerships – Other than friends and family, there’s something else that’s extremely helpful in influencing decision-making: the influencers. Establishing connections with experts in your field (or bloggers, review websites, etc.) will help you stand out.

Stage #3: Evaluation of Alternatives

Although some people will come to a quick decision, most customers will not settle for the first solution they find. They will evaluate several different options and the possible benefits or drawbacks to each. And even if your company has the best product to meet their needs, they still may decide to go with someone else.

So, the one thing you could do at this stage is to offer a lot more value than your competition & communicate that with your customers. This can be easier in some industries (software, for example, where you can add more powerful features), but hard in others (consumer goods. Who looks at the brand of their toilet paper, anyway?)

Stage #4: Purchase Decision

Once the customer has explored their options they will make a decision about whether or not to move forward with the purchase. Yes, even though they have reached the middle of the buying process they could still choose to walk away.

At this point, customers need a sense of security. They also needed to be reminded of the problem that brought them here in the first place.

And if a customer does decide to walk away this is the best point in the process to bring them back. Depending on your industry, this could be a simple email reminder, for example (“hey, you were interested in out software!”).

Stage #5: Purchase

At this stage, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy from you. Does your website load too slowly? Can they order from their phone just as easily as on a desktop? These are questions you should consider.

The customer already decided that they want to do business with you – you don’t want to make it hard for them. Let’s say if your payment processing software is being laggy, they might just decide to ditch and go to your competitor!

Stage #6: Post-Purchase Evaluation

You may think you are in the clear now but your work doesn’t end after the customer makes their purchase! Customers will evaluate their purchase based on previous expectations and decide whether or not they are satisfied. If they’re not happy with your product, they’ll just never use it again – and everyone knows that recurring customers are much better than those buying just once.

Or it could end up going even worse, with the customer asking for their money back.

Depending on how you handle this situation, the customer will react differently. If you put their concerns at ease & even make them feel better, they’re much more likely to come back or even refer their friends. Or, if you treat them wrong, you’re never going to see them (or their friends) again.

There are a couple of ways to work with this stage…

• Good Customer Service – being able to talk to your customers & help them use their product can take you a long way.
• Follow-Up Emails, Survey – showing the customer that you care about their experience is a pleasant experience on its own.
• Fair Treatment – sometimes, the product might just end up not being what the customer is looking for. If you treat them with respect & offer a refund, they’re more likely to come back for a different purchase. If you shut them down, they’re lost forever.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these six steps have given you a better understanding of the thought process that goes into making a purchase. They can be extremely helpful if used as a framework to analyze your customer’s thinking, and then use what you learn in combination with other marketing efforts.

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Posted by: Lucid Content Team

If you are one of the 2.5 million employees in the United States working in sales, you know that even for the most natural salesperson, it can sometimes be difficult to turn potential leads into closed sales. Across industries, you need different skills and knowledge to prove to your potential customers that your solution is best for their particular problem.

The seven-step sales process outlined in business textbooks is a good start, especially since leading sales ops teams attribute to 60% or more of their total pipeline in any quarter to actively designed and deployed sales plays. The seven-step sales process is not only a good start to customizing it to your particular business but more importantly, customizing it to your target customers as you move them through the sales funnel.

Overview of the 7-step Sales Process (Click on image to modify online)

As the old adage goes, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.” Once you’ve mastered the seven steps of the sales process you might learn in a business class or sales seminar, then you can break the rules where necessary to create a sales process that may not necessarily follow procedure but gets results.

The textbook 7-step sales process

What are the seven steps of the sales process according to most sales masters? The following steps provide a good outline for what you should be doing to find potential customers, close the sale, and retain your clients for repeat business and referrals in the future.

1. Prospecting

The first step in the sales process is prospecting. In this stage, you find potential customers and determine whether they have a need for your product or service—and whether they can afford what you offer. Evaluating whether the customers need your product or service and can afford it is known as qualifying.

Keep in mind that, in modern sales, it's not enough to find one prospect at a company: There are an average of 6.8 customer stakeholders involved in a typical purchase, so you'll want to practice multi-threading, or connecting with multiple decision-makers on the purchasing side. Account maps are an effective way of identifying these buyers.

2. Preparation

The next step is preparing for initial contact with a potential customer, researching the market and collecting all relevant information regarding your product or service. Develop your sales presentation and tailor it to your potential client’s particular needs. Preparation is key to setting you up for success. The better you understand your prospect and their needs, the better you can address their objections and set yourself apart from the competition.

3. Approach

Next, make first contact with your client. This is called the approach. Sometimes this is a face-to-face meeting, sometimes it’s over the phone. There are three common approach methods.

• Premium approach: Presenting your potential client with a gift at the beginning of your interaction
• Question approach: Asking a question to get the prospect interested
• Product approach: Giving the prospect a sample or a free trial to review and evaluate your service

Dive deeper into the various sales approaches you can use to start a relationship off on the right foot.

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In the presentation phase, you actively demonstrate how your product or service meets the needs of your potential customer. The word presentation implies using PowerPoint and giving a salesy spiel, but it doesn’t always have to be that way—you should actively listen to your customer’s needs and then act and respond accordingly.

5. Handling objections

Perhaps the most underrated step of the sales process is handling objections. This is where you listen to your prospect’s concerns and address them. It’s also where many unsuccessful salespeople drop out of the process—44% of salespeople abandoning pursuit after one rejection, 22% after two rejections, 14% after three, and 12% after four, even though 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups to convert. Successfully handling objections and alleviating concerns separates good salespeople from bad and great from good.

Use this flowchart to map out objections and link to relevant collateral (Click on image to modify online)

In the closing stage, you get the decision from the client to move forward. Depending on your business, you might try one of these three closing techniques.

• Alternative choice close: Assuming the sale and offering the prospect a choice, where both options close the sale—for example, “Will you be paying the whole fee up front or in installments?” or “Will that be cash or charge?”
• Extra inducement close: Offering something extra to get the prospect to close, such as a free month of service or a discount
• Standing room only close: Creating urgency by expressing that time is of the essence—for example, “The price will be going up after this month” or “We only have six spots left”

7. Follow-up

Once you have closed the sale, your job is not done. The follow-up stage keeps you in contact with customers you have closed, not only for potential repeat business but for referrals as well. And since retaining current customers is six to seven times less costly than acquiring new ones, maintaining relationships is key.

Want to nail the sales follow-up process? Follow our tips.

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Now that you understand the basic seven stages of sales process development, you can begin to tailor them to your own product or service and customer base. Cut out steps that are unnecessary to your particular business and focus on your customer. You know the rules—now get ready to break them in ways that bring you closer to your customer and turn you from a sales professional to a sales artist.

Whatever approach you take, keep these fundamentals in mind:

Identifying the customer’s problem

You have a product or service you want to sell—now what? Anyone with a problem related to your area of expertise can be a potential customer. You'll need to dive deep into discovery work to learn each buyer's specific goals, needs, and pain points. 

Develop a solution for the customer

Once you have uncovered problems for your products to solve, tailor your offerings to fix those issues—and be prepared to explain how your product truly is a solution for the given problems. Sales engineers can use Lucidchart to visually demonstrate how their product or service solves client problems and makes their lives easier, such as the flowchart below.

Quarterly Planning Before and After Lucidchart (Click on image to modify online)

Following up isn’t just for after the close to get repeat business. As stated before, most customers don’t buy right away. You have to handle objections and try, try, try again. This is where the seven-step sales process doesn’t account for repeated approaches, presentations, meetings, or phone calls where you handle objections. If it did, it might be a 13-step sales process or a 21-step sales process, or… you get the idea.

Bottom line: stay connected—set up a calendar for repeated contact with potential, present, and past customers so you're more likely to reach them when they're ready to buy.

What are the key steps in the sales process? Whatever your customers need them to be.

Once you’ve tried out a few different approaches, tweaking the original seven steps in the sales process to fit your customers better, document your successes so that you can follow the steps that work best and easily get new reps up to speed as they are onboarded.

Whatever steps you settle on, you need to document your sales process to ensure that sales reps follow it. Learn about sales process mapping.

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