The Two Playbooks
As a professional with a revenue goal, you value the relationships you have with your prospects. They’re more than a conduit to cash, they’re people you can and want to help out. Your solution or your service can solve challenges for them, so long as they trust you.
So why does it feel like you’re working against them, sometimes?
The truth is, modern organizations have developed a purchasing playbook, apparent in nearly every industry today. You need your own plans to counteract it. When you do, prospects actually appreciate the journey more, and regret the outcome less. Let’s take a quick look at the two playbooks, buyer’s and seller’s.
The Buyer’s Playbook
The buyer will travel through three phases of the sale.
- Priority: This is where the buying organization decides to take action to solve a problem or a threat they’re facing
- Planning: Here, the prospect will research how to find and implement a solution to the problem they’ve identified.
- Procurement: Now the buyer finds vendors to fulfill their order, comparing proposals and typically deciding on price.
Here’s the problem with the buyer’s playbook: It’s designed to set up a race to the bottom, a price war. Sure, this may be because funds are tight and everyone likes to save money, but there’s something else at work here: ease of decision-making. Once they can convince themself that all options are the same, they’re done thinking. The decision becomes clear and easy.
In order to do this, the prospect keeps you out until the very end of the sale. Their perception is that the salesperson isn’t providing a lot of value, but they’re wrong. If they had you, an expert by their side from the beginning, they could define the problem and the solution better than on their own. But how do you counteract this?
The Seller’s Playbook
Your job is to meet prospects earlier, in the Priority Phase of the sale. It’s here that you can help them realize the real threats they’re facing and tackle them together. This is the real value you can provide. Simple right? Simple and very hard to do.
The Priority Sale breaks down early access into three phases: attention, belief and trust. You can meet prospects earlier on, you just need the right tools to demonstrate value early on.
The truth behind all of this is that prospects actually want this to happen. They’re more satisfied with what they buy if they’ve had you, an expert, by their side, helping them solve the problem they’re working on. But the email or phone call that asks “Who is responsible for what I want to sell you?” isn’t going to cut it.
The Priority Sale eLearning Platform contains one instructor-led session and several eLearning modules that tackle this process and set you up to start finding Priority Phase prospects. Get started here.