The word-of-the-month seems to be “alignment,” yet definitions bend to meet short-sighted visions marketed to sell vendor services.  Alignment between buyer and seller can only occur when a vendor decides that the prospect is the key holder.  Yet, only 20% of companies with complex sales cycles monitor the alignment between its adopted sales process and its prospective buyer process. Furthermore, alignment is maintained when the vendor adopts post-decision interviews to monitor prospect perception. Again, less than 1 out of 5 organizations conduct “win/loss analysis” with commitment, discipline or regularity.  

SCAI believes that a sales cycle is incomplete if a prospect is not interviewed after a decision is made. If the definition of insanity is, “the capacity to repeat the same actions but looking for different results,” isn’t it likely that prior sales messaging, positioning, and performance mistakes will be repeated unless change is integrated via constant diagnosis?

In most organizations, when sales performance springs a leak, management has failed to:

• Instill a process to understand its evolving differentiation;
• Continually train the sales channel to articulate the evolving differentiation;
• Invest in an iterative process to align prospective buyer’s perceptions to its company and products resulting in a consistent message to the market.

How can you prevent this from happening to your organization? A seller can be out of alignment in three ways: Competitive Differentiation; The Buyer Process; Messaging. You must start by re-aligning yourself with your buyer by instilling post-decision interviews as a diagnostic back-end to all sales opportunities.

SCAI’s CD training will enable you with the skills necessary to use successful post-decision interviews to align your organization’s sales process with that of your buyer. You will learn critical skills such as how to align your verified company attributes with your validated functional differentiation. In addition, once a benchmark of differentiation is set, you will learn how to continually align your sales process with how your prospective market is evaluating solutions. Finally, you will learn how to embed a common organization-wide message into your corporate DNA!

If you want to learn more about SCAI’s CD-based training or are ready to acquire the knowledge on how to use post-decision interviews to align with your buyer, please click on the following icon:

SCAI founder, Roger W. Allison, uses the principles of his manuscript, “The Reality of Perception: Aligning Buyer and Seller Processes,” to deploy all SCAI services. This book, in its entirety, will be available to all disciples of his teachings in 2008.

All SCAI monthly educational presentations, guru interviews, and conference presentations will be transcribed into written documents. These products will be available free of charge to Buyer Alignment Advisory Service members and for a nominal fee to non-members.