All selling is not equal - not even within your own organization

If you’re a sales professional, you’ve almost certainly sat through more than one sales training session that consisted of discussing the “stages” of the “sales process” and how to move customers through them.

If you’re lucky, you’ve also been in training that began with the customer’s point of view and showed you how to influence them to make successful decisions, hopefully including you, your products, and services in the process.

If you’re really, really lucky - you might even be part of a sales organization that understands that the sales approach must be customized to each customer’s decision culture.

And maybe you have even been engaged in an organization that recognizes the uniqueness of each sale - and guides you in following a dynamic and effective sales process, enabled with content and coaching - to support each sales project in an optimal way.

Why all selling is not equal, even within your own organization

At Membrain, we consider our sales efforts to fall under the umbrella of “complex b2b sales.” We use a carefully customer-focused sales process that is reinforced within our software’s workflows - a common “way of selling” across the organization, with stages, milestones, steps, and checklists.

Yet even so, not every sale is the same.

Just because you’re in complex b2b sales, does not mean that every single sale will be complex, or even require a sales effort.

Not every sale is the same. Is your sales process dynamic?

In our case, for instance, many customers come to us because they have heard our software will solve sales effectiveness problems for them, or because they’re evaluating CRMs, or need to complement existing tools with what we can offer. Often, this begins an exploratory process with our sales team in which we work to understand the problems they’re trying to solve, explore whether Membrain can help them, and ensure that all relevant stakeholders are engaged in the process. During the process, we may bring in partners to consult on strategy, process, approach, methodology, or any other needs the client may discover along the way.

All of this takes time and involves substantial skill, experience, and time investment on the part of our sales team.

Sometimes, however, a new customer comes to us ready to buy. This most often happens through our most successful partners. In these cases, the partner has already done extensive work with the customer to develop a sales process, provide training, and set the customer up for success. These partners know when our product is the right software to support and reinforce their work, and they bring us customers who are ready to buy our software more or less immediately.

In these latter cases, our sales environment is far less complex, sometimes bordering on transactional.

In between these two extremes are buyers who are more and less educated, farther or less far along the journey to purchase, and who come with needs that are more or less aligned with what Membrain has to offer.

And that’s to say nothing of the sales process involved in bringing new partners on board, and supporting them to boost results for clients by integrating their methodology with our technology, as a part of a larger strategic initiative.

How this fact can mess you up

Like the teams at Membrain, most sales teams will interact with customers along a broad spectrum of “readiness” for a purchase. Treating every customer exactly the same can backfire and make you lose sales. It can obscure your qualification criteria, causing you to disqualify buyers who might be a perfect fit but may need more hand-holding during the sales process.

If your sales team goes into a sale expecting it to be easy, they may skip steps and fail to bring the customer along. If they go in expecting it to be hard, they may repeat work that’s already been done and bog the process down.

Too many sales teams take a customer’s readiness for granted, trusting them when they say they already know what they need. These customers may ask for a demonstration or product description without having laid the groundwork to truly understand what they need.

Inexperienced or poorly trained salespeople, assuming that they have a customer who is ready to purchase, may not do the legwork to truly understand the customer, if you can help, if a purchase makes sense for them, and if they will do what they need to do.

Sometimes, skipping steps “works” because the customer is, in fact, relatively ready for the decision to make a decision. These “successes” can give the salesperson a false sense of security, and cause them to become complacent with other customers.

Furthermore, this in turn can lead you to misunderstand what qualifies a customer to be a good opportunity for you. You may disqualify those who would make good customers with the right approach, or qualify those who are likely to make a hasty choice that they regret later.

How to address the fact that all selling is not equal within your organization

The solution to the problem of diverse sales types within your organization is a dynamic sales process that adapts to the customer.

Inside Membrain’s workflows, your sales process and checklists can guide salespeople through the prospecting and opportunity management processes. You can establish checkpoints and dynamic flows that adapt based on information gathered during the process.

For instance, when a customer comes to us through a VIP partner, it automatically triggers a “branch” in the workflow to adapt the process to that fact.

This ensures that our salespeople don’t get in the habit of skipping steps, but also enables them to take the shorter route to the sales when it’s appropriate, without becoming complacent.

Of course, you can do this on your own without a platform like Membrain, but it’s more complicated. Salesforce and similar CRMs do not make it easy to modify and update your sales process in a dynamic way.

However you go about implementing a dynamic sales process, every sales organization will benefit from recognizing the different types of sales that occur within their own organization, so that sales teams can be aware and alert to it.

How many different types of sales exist within your sales organization? How far along are you in recognizing and adapting your sales process to each one?