How You Buy Affects How You Sell – The “Supportive Buy Cycle” Competency

Would it surprise you to learn that how you personally approach a significant purchase will have a huge effect on your own selling process?  Only 38% of all salespeople have a strong supportive buy cycle, which makes it one of the reasons why this competency impacts our ability to close deals.

In this article, we’ll take you through a couple of examples to show you how your personal buying habits impact your ability to sell.  If you’re like most, you’ll even see some of your buying habits showing up.  The connection between the two, of course, is how your personal habits will cause you to react when a client presents that very same approach or objection to you.

Before we get into your personal habits, here are some of the at-work symptoms you’ll find when a seller doesn’t have a good supportive buy cycle in their own life:

• The salesperson will continually ask for discounts on most of their deals.
• The salesperson will have many opportunities that are slow to close after they send proposals.
• The salesperson will continually need to ‘align’ their pricing to a competitor’s price to get sales.

Those are all ‘symptoms’ that will help you recognize when a seller has a non-supportive buy cycle. Unfortunately, that’s going to be very difficult to ‘fix’ when they’re already an employee.  And guaranteed, they won’t be one of your top performers.

A Seller’s Personal Buying Habits

When a seller is meeting with a prospect or customer, these four scenarios will show typical symptoms of your seller having a non-supportive buy cycle.  That’s because the reaction is really reflecting their own behavior when they make a significant purchase.  It’s also very hard to talk them out of it because they really believe that they are all valid objections.  We’ll dive down into a couple of these a little bit deeper to show you the underlying problem that’s created:

1. Giving discounts or decreasing the average sales price.
2. Giving in to the sales objection: “I have to think about it.”
3. Accepting that their prospects need to shop around.
4. Supporting their prospects’ need to research.
5. Giving discounts, or in other words, empathizing with a customer’s need for a lower cost. If you are a seller who thinks that your product has a high price, you’re going to empathize with a customer who says something similar. How does that belief impact you?  Obviously, discounts will be rampant, but there are other impacts.  If you sell accessories or product options, the seller with this price sensitivity is going to shy away from mentioning them.

If this is your style as a seller, then chances are you’re going to be more of a transactional seller than a consultative seller.  Read my blog post on the difference between transactional and consultative selling to understand the impact on the size of your deals: /whats-the-difference-between-transactional-and-consultative-selling/.

2. Giving in to the sales objection: “I have to think about it.” When a seller takes the time to think things through before buying in their own purchases, it transfers to their selling cycle at work. Of course, the result is that his or her sales cycles will lengthen significantly.  He or she won’t be able to push back when their customers want to take time before buying.   It’s not about putting pressure on their customers to buy.  Sellers who make quick purchasing decisions know how to challenge the purchasing process of prospects.  That’s because it’s what they do in their own internal dialogs when it comes to buying.

We’re not suggesting that you must be a compulsive buyer to sell.  Not at all.  There is a big difference between buying everything you see or that you think you must have and making a quick purchase decision for a product or service that addresses a real need or problem that you have.

That difference is that you can see when a product is an exact match to your problem or need.  Once you find that product, are you now going to go through an extensive search to see if you can find an identical product?  To what end?  To save a few dollars?  Or would you tell yourself that you should probably get this one purchased before you lose momentum towards a great solution?

If your hesitancy was because you were worried about something going wrong, you’d simply pre-negotiate a solution if that happened.  If the product or service is legit, and the seller is reputable, then it won’t really be a problem.  That’s exactly why Amazon makes it so easy to return a product and why they stand firmly behind their customers.  It takes away buyer risk, and more importantly, buyer indecision.  That’s not always the case with a lower-cost alternative supplied perhaps by a foreign company or a company with a very elusive or objectionable return policy.

3. Understanding and giving in to the customer’s need to “shop around.” If you’re a seller who compares brands, suppliers, stores, or other aspects of a product before you buy, then you’re going to be completely vulnerable to that same activity when it comes up with your potential buyer. As a seller, you will accept that behavior in your customer as completely reasonable.  Unfortunately, a competitor’s salesperson may not have that selling vulnerability – so guess what – you just lost the deal.  You can’t be effective if this is acceptable behavior for you.

A good seller will find a way to mitigate the “shop around” in a variety of ways.  He or she might refer to their company’s credentials and tell them that a competitor won’t have the same quality or assurances of success.  They may probe to find another worry and then offer a way to put the customer’s mind at ease.  They might even suggest that the delay to shop the deal around, will delay the revenue gains or cost reductions by an unacceptable amount of time for the company, and there won’t be any better chances of being successful when they find the next vendor.

Every time you allow the “shop around” your chance of getting that deal diminishes by the number of competitors they talk to.  If it’s 2 more, your chances just dropped to 33%.  If it’s 3 more, your chances just dropped to 25%.  Don’t let it happen.

4. Supporting their prospects’ need to do further research. Most of today’s buyers do a lot of research before they even reach out to a company. That means that at the start of the buying process, you’re already working with a buyer who is knowledgeable about your company and its products or services.  Allowing your prospect to get involved in more research – because it’s how you would do it – will only serve to make getting future meetings more difficult.  They will still be looking for information.

These are only a few of the troublesome buying habits that we test for when we assess a candidate.  There is usually no course available to simply educate the person on the relationship between their own habits and what’s happening to their sales performance.  It will take some personal coaching to help them get around their self-sabotaging beliefs.  It’s solvable, but it would be much better to find this out before you make the hire, and territory sales are put at risk.

If you would like to learn more about using competency data to drive your hiring, training, and coaching efforts, we invite you to watch one of our recent webinars: How to Implement Data-Driven Sales Enablement. View the webinar for free here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/webinars/How-To-Implement-Data-Driven-Sales-Enablement.html