The Problem: Your sales process is misaligned with your buyers!
Fewer than 10% of polled organizations claim to have initiatives targeted to align selling and buying processes. I am sure that, if probed, the positive responses would change their responses when adding “…with discipline and regularity.” This statistic is not so much a condemnation of an organizations dysfunction, but an alarming missed opportunity to stay in alignment with its buyers.
Sales organizations don’t knowingly want to miss prospect opportunities, but this glaring oversight costs organizations millions in lost potential business. Sales organizations spend millions of dollars on sales process training. Yet, 3 out of 4 sales training initiatives fail to return its investment. Sales training focuses on the process used to qualify prospects when selling a vendor’s products and services. Not a single dime is allocated to understanding the buyer’s evaluation process. Therefore, when training is complete, most sales processes are out of alignment with their buyer after the first sales cycle. This resource risk (people and money) could be avoided by simply adding a buyer-based diagnostic back-end step after every sales cycle is concluded. That diagnostic “insurance policy” step is a win/loss analysis or post-decision interview (PDI) conducted with prospects who have evaluated your products and services.
Other than mitigating investment risk, the greatest benefit of embedding an iterative PDI process into daily operations is the assured organizational alignment with your buyer. There are three types of buyer alignment: Process (Sales, Evaluation); Differentiation (Solution, Company); Messaging (internal,external). All three types are embedded into the buyer evaluation process and can be quantified using a PDI process. Four priorities that buyers continually strive to align during their evaluation processes are the: buyer needs; vendor solution; solution cost; aversion to risk. Furthermore, the primary keys to aligning these buyer evaluation priorities to a vendor’s selling process are the articulation of the vendor’s differentiation and the validation of that differentiation. Therefore, the PDI process can diagnose the sales cycle to quantify a vendor’s competitive differentiation and the articulation performance of the “differentiation story.” What’s more, the PDI verifies the prospect’s perception of the sales cycle processes (e.g., site visit, references, demonstrations) taken to “prove” the differentiation claims of the vendor.
Considering that they are responsible for the sales cycle, should the sales organization be responsible for the PDI process? Sales people are strong objection-handlers, so can’t be relied upon to be unbiased. For this reason, (extracting from my free “8 Rules of Successful Post-Decision Interviews” report) you know that the sales organization is ill-equipped to conduct these PDI interviews. Therefore, the interview responsibilities fall to product management and marketing. This is actually a good thing. If working in collaboration, there are many cross-organizational benefits for everyone extracted from the PDI process:
• Sales management can use empirical evidence when reviewing individual sales personnel performance;
• Sales pitches are enabled with validated differentiation of products and services;
• Product management validates market-based perception of its products and services;
• Product marketing quantifies prospective customer messaging instead of relying on clever advertising or awareness campaigns.
Post-decision interviews are not discretionary in order to maintain buyer alignment. Therefore, sales organizations, product management and product marketing must instill a buyer-based discipline into daily operations to avoid risking investment waste and sales cycle misalignment.Windtalkers movie download Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker on dvd
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