Buyers Need Your Help Before They Need Your Solution
Buyers are evaluating themselves and their ability to withstand the pressures of change. They’re not evaluating solutions.
Buyers need your help figuring out how to figure it all out much more than they need a product pitch, or more discovery questions that attempt to uncover a “need”, they don’t yet know they have.
How Buyers Buy
There are two aspects to a Buyer’s Journey as they consider a solution purchase:
1. Buying Decision: getting internal buy-in from colleagues, bosses, and budgets to decide to make a change, figuring out how or what will be included in the change, and agreeing how to move forward.
2. Solution Purchase: choosing a solution and vendor.
INSIGHTthought is concerned primarily with decoding and mapping the Buying Decision aspect in the Buyers Journey. This is the part of the Buyers Journey that buyers and sellers face every day and that the sales model and methodologies largely ignore.
We code every step your buyers must go through to discover how, when, and if, to make a change. The more your reps understand this, the easier it will be to engage their prospects early and lead them to quickly and systematically address their own decision issues and get ready to choose a solution.
Buyers spend 83% of their time independently making a buying decision. Your reps have less access and fewer opportunities to influence customer decisions.
Plan
Buyer Assessment
Discover the behind-the-scenes change management decisions and assessment tools that promote buyer readiness.
Apply
Lead Engagement
Use the assessment tools to help buyers traverse their Buying Decision Journey through to Buyer Readiness.
Learn
Skills Training
Learn the sequence and steps of how buyers make decisions that create and maintain their status quo.
Need is Never the Issue
Why Buyers Don’t Buy
Until your buyers walk through each stage of managing their unique change management issues, until everyone who touches the final solution agrees to a change, until the entire team is assembled and lends their voice to ideas, problems, solutions and fallout, they cannot buy regardless of how much they may need your solution.
Where Buyers Are Spending Their Time
%
Time spent making a decision.
83% of a Buyers Decision Time is spent evaluating themselves and their ability to change. And your sales people are not involved.
%
Time spent choosing a solution.
Buyers spend less than 17% of their journey interacting with your sales people. You’re seeing a very small part of the decision you need to influence.
%
buying is strategic
More than 83% of your buyer’s journey is spent getting internal buy-in from colleagues, bosses, and budgets to decide to make a change, figuring out how or what will be included in the change, and agreeing how to move forward.
%
selling is tactical
Buyers spend only 17% of their purchase time meeting with potential suppliers. When buyers are comparing multiple suppliers‚ the amount of time spent with any one sales rep may be only 5% or 6%.
The Buying Decision Journey is Hard
More than three-quarters of the customers Gartner surveyed described their purchase as very complex or difficult. Buyers are evaluating themselves and their ability to change. They’re not evaluating solutions.
Rather than “understand needs” to find prospective buyers and pitch solutions, facilitate willing buyers through their Buying Decision Path, to the point where they understand exactly what they want/need, and how/when they will buy – and then sell.
“Your current messaging is the wrong tool for this part of their process because it’s not information, need, or sales driven, it’s change management focused”.
Need is never the issue.
Discovering the Buying Decision Path
Decision Style
What internal obstacles prevented recent buyers from considering changes to their status quo?
Buying Drivers
What specific business drivers or personal outcomes did recent buyers expect from purchasing a solution like yours?
Decision Steps
What behind-the-scenes steps did recent buyers navigate to get buy-in for a purchase?
Buying Concerns
What internal obstacles played the biggest part in slowing down or halting the decision process?
Buying Starts with Change
What Buyers Need To Know
Imagine having to deal with new suppliers or new technology systems or new teammates or different instruments in a surgical procedure. What happens to the original system?
To adopt your solution, the buyer must be motivated to shift their status quo and able to get buy-in from any people, policies, rules, and politics that would be affected by the new procedures.
Sellers and marketers can use the buying steps that we codify and map in our Buyer Assessment Report to quickly identify where buyers are in their decision journey and help them figure out how to traverse their own steps efficiently.
By following the steps and knowing where decisions often stall and falter, you can guide buyers to address their internal resistance areas, disparate voices, and needs before they become unmanageable and derail a purchase.
Some rants and raves but mostly just insights from conversations with buyers, sellers and marketers.
Where are the Marketing Ready Leads?
Huh! What? That's the response you would expect to hear from this question. But how is it that Sales is expected to work on qualified leads that have been vetted and are ready to buy, while Marketing is left to "pull a rabbit out of a hat"? Your Leads Suck! Why Aren't...
Where are the Marketing Ready Leads?
Huh! What? That's the response you would expect to hear from this question. But how is it that Sales is expected to work on qualified leads that have been vetted and are ready to buy, while Marketing is left to "pull a rabbit out of a hat"? Your Leads Suck! Why Aren't...
INSIGHTthought.
We help CEO’s align their sales and marketing teams around the Buying Decision Path of their specific market — to engage the right leads earlier in their decision-making process. Clients include CEOs of publicly traded companies, as well as those at startups backed by top venture firms. To learn more or get in touch, visit https://insighthought.com/
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