As essential pre-requisite of sales strategy is an understanding of how targeted customers make buying decisions. This Customer Journey will influence the sales process that ultimately seeks to match customer requirements and expectations with the selling organisation’s own product and service offering.
Typically, the Customer Journey has a number of essential stages as illustrated below. At every stage in this journey, the sales organisation needs to know: What happens? What’s important? & Who’s involved?
This Journey can vary in length from a matter of minutes in some cases, to several months in others.
Need
Customers have requirements and needs. These could be negatively based in order to avoid some issue or problem, or positively based to achieve some ambition or aspiration.
The sales organisation should identify what requirements their chosen customers typically have and how these typically surface in the buying organisation.
Search
Customers then look around for what might be available to help them meet their requirements. This process of Search might include the Internet, it might include visits to exhibitions and trade shows, it might include formal requests for information and might include discussions with other customers.
The typical ways that customers obtain their information should be reviewed as this information will influence how the selling organisation should communicate their products and services in the marketplace.
Additionally, the Decision Making Unit (DMU) should be identified: Who is involved in the purchase process during its various stages, together with their specific business and personal agendas, which may be different.
Evaluation
After the search phase, customers will then evaluate the best purchase option by comparing rival offerings.
It is sometimes possible to influence this decision making criteria by engaging with the customer at an early stage and by encouraging the buying organisation to create its ideal solution around the sellers own proposition.
Decision
Finally a purchase decision will be made. Although much of the decision will be made on objective technical and performance data, the decision will also be influenced by subjective perceptions of the selling organisation.
These subjective perceptions derive from the selling organisations reputation and overall positioning in the marketplace, together with any perceived values inherent in the selling organisations brand.
Review
Organisations review their purchase decisions from time to time, some every year. These reviews take into account a number of factors: The actual performance of the product or service in question, the after-sales or service experience and how the selling organisation has conducted itself.
Additionally, competitive offerings may well be evaluated again to see if they present any advantages over their existing solution.
The upshot is that selling organisations need to be just as attentive after the sale as they were whilst the sale was being made.
Rennie Gould
Customize Sales Strategy Consulting, July 2010
