Buying cycles: Customers can go forward – or back

Connie, who sells industrial control systems, is meeting with Edward, the CTO of a large corporation. After months of meetings where they explored three buying options, Edward says he and his team have agreed on Option 1, an upgrade to their entire system. He wants Connie to present Option 1 to the buying committee a week from Monday.

Connie hears nothing from Edward in the coming week, then shows up to the meeting confident she’ll get a quick approval. It doesn’t happen.

A key decision-maker, an executive Connie hadn’t met before, raised objections that neither Connie nor Edward could address. His last comment was, “We need to do a reset. I’m not even sure the timing is right for this upgrade.”

Connie is confused. She’d been careful all along to align herself with Edward’s buying cycle. How could this happen?

Progression…

Here’s why. When prospects engage with sellers to explore a purchase, they follow a relatively standard buying cycle, which leads forward toward a purchase.

The typical cycle looks like this: A change in business triggers an organization to Recognize a new need. Next, they Clarify options to meet that need and then seek Alignment from internal stakeholders. And finally, they Negotiate with the seller, and then Implement the solution.

But here’s the problem: The cycle isn’t totally predictable, and the buyer can go backward as well as forward, in what’s known as “regression.” Why is that? Because stuff happens. For example, during the Clarifying phase the buyer might realize they hadn’t correctly identified the need, so they regress to the Recognize phase. Or they might be in Align and some stakeholder recognizes a required outcome that no one had seen before, so they regress to Clarify.

…or regression

In Connie’s case, she presented to the buying team assuming that Alignment had been achieved and they were ready for the Negotiate phase. But that executive, who hadn’t attended previous meetings, raised objections and took them all the way back to Recognize, where the company was debating whether the need for Connie’s solution even existed.

Could Connie have done anything to prevent this meeting from going off the rails? Yes. She could have approached the deal with the mindset that it’s normal “stuff will happen” and buyers will regress to an earlier phase of the buying cycle.

Sellers with this mindset approach situations like the one Connie faced very differently. For example:

1. Before presenting to a buying committee, make sure you know exactly who will be in the room. You might learn that a key decision-maker you’d never met would be present. In that case, to ensure alignment and avoid wasting time, you’d insist on speaking to that person before presenting.
2. Even if you know everyone in the meeting is aligned, ask your contact a day or two before the meeting if anything has changed. If yes, amend the agenda and revise the presentation.
3. On the day of the presentation, begin by saying, “Before I dive in, let me sum up what I’ve learned from you over the past few months, and what assumptions I’m making. If there’s anything I’m missing, please let me know.”

Not always bad news

If as a seller you have the mindset that buyer cycles are not predictably linear, that things change, you’ll continually ping the buyer to make sure you’re in alignment. And you won’t be caught off guard when buyers regress to an earlier phase of the cycle.

You might assume that regression is always bad news. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s the opposite. You could be in the Negotiating phase when some change occurs – a surge in new business, a shift in the market – and the buyer might regress to the Clarify phase where they see new outcomes and new options that need to be explored.

In that case, you’d conduct a new round of discovery and might end up with a bigger sale.

This blog entry is adapted from the BTS Total Access micro video “Aligning to the customer’s buying cycle: ‘Regression’ and what to do about it.” If you’re a Total Access customer, you can watch the video here.  If you’re not, but would like to see this video (or any of our other programs), request a demo and we’ll get you access.