Success in a Sales 2.0 World - the Buying Process

In my blog entry Success in a Sales 2.0 World - a Marketing Viewpoint, I talked about how critical it is for marketing and sales to cooperate together to support the prospect’s buying process. Together, they must craft a seamless buying experience that builds the prospect’s persuasive momentum. I’ll talk more about persuasive momentum in future posts. Today I want to focus on a new tool that helps gets marketing and sales talking about the buying process.

Traditional marketing texts (Philip Kotler, et al.) discuss the typical five stage buying process as: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behavior. This standard buying process describes deliberated purchases made by consumers. It applies less to impulse purchases. It is only a piece of the puzzle of more complex corporate purchases.

In his book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Bryan Eisenberg takes a closer look at the buying process. In particular, he describes a couple of additional stages with the purpose of calling out important details that often get lost in the five stage process.

I have leveraged both of these sources to describe the deliberated buying process as follows:

1. Awareness of a need


2. Frame the need


3. Research the framed need


4. Define the decision criteria


5. Narrow down alternatives


6. Choose an alternative to buy


7. Make the purchase


8. Reevaluate the purchase decision

I have created a new eBook, Understanding the Buying Process, as a tool to help marketing and sales explore their roles in their prospect’s buying process. To help marketing and sales understand the process, each stage is defined and illustrated by examples. That is just the foundation. Each stage includes a section called “Define your role” that helps marketing and sales

1. Realize that the buyer is in control


2. Think like the buyer thinks


3. Uncover holes in the buying process that are not addressed by the marketing and sales processes


4. Prepare to plug those holes in the marketing and sales processes


5. Create a seamless experience that supports the buyer through every step of their buying process

It is my hope that this eBook will help open up a dialog about the buyer that encourages the participation of both the marketing and sales organizations. As you try it, please let me know about your experiences using it.