The ideal sales process is not about closing deals. It’s about moving prospects from one stage to another on a very contextualized journey that mirrors the needs of your buyer.

In our last GrowthBit, we looked at the importance of getting the fundamentals right in sales, including your value proposition, ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer journeys. In this second part of the two-part series, we’ll share how to use these fundamentals to help build a powerful, buyer-centric sales process.

A buyer-centric sales process is not one-size-fits-all. The most advantageous and efficient way to engage your market can change dramatically depending on the company, industry and the individual persona. It could be digital-centric, relationship-based, channel-focused or involve some other strategy entirely.

While the process varies, the commonality is alignment with preferences and priorities of your target buyer. Sounds simple, but we see many companies in the lower middle market get it wrong by failing to put in the work of building personas, constructing buying committees, understanding the individual journeys of each persona and writing a playbook that details activities for everyone involved in the process—not just sales but also marketing, customer success and more. The work of identifying the buyer journey and then mapping and marrying the sales process to that journey is the essence of a great sales process.

Map your process to the buyer journey (not vice versa).

Through helping companies transform their sales processes and outcomes, we have seen virtually every sales mistake a company can make. We’ve discovered that most mistakes are caused by inverted thinking about the sales process. In other words, companies construct their process before doing the work to understand the buyer and their journey. As a result, their process doesn’t align with where their buyers are, how they like to be engaged and what they need to know—not just at the company or buying committee level, but at the individual level.

Developing personas for every member of the buying committee is the first and most critical step. Mapping and marrying your sales process to the journey those personas take is the second.

For every stage of each buyer’s journey, you need to engage, inform, guide and support them. This requires the right resources.

Construct a multi-stage buyer journey.

Every salesperson wishes the process was as easy as the prospect recognizing their pain, discovering your company and buying your solution. But the ideal sales process is not about closing deals, it’s about moving prospects from one stage to another on a very contextualized journey that mirrors the needs of your buyer.

This involves a mapping exercise where you divide and define every stage in the journey for each buyer persona and identify the sales resources that are best able to support that specific stage. We often hold workshops designed to guide companies through the process of building a buyer-centric sales process. We start by identifying the multiple stages in that buyer’s journey:

  1. Recognize pain: The buyer identifies a workplace problem.
  2. Awareness: The buyer becomes aware of potential solutions to the problem.
  3. Consideration: The buyer begins to explore different solutions and set purchase criteria.
  4. Research: The buyer evaluates options in-depth against purchase criteria.
  5. Decision: The buyer selects a solution and takes steps to acquire it.
  6. Purchase: The buyer completes the purchase.
  7. Implement: The buyer implements the solution.
  8. Reinforce: The buyer reinforces their commitment through upsell, cross-sell or renewal activity.

For each stage, understand the buyer’s objectives and mindset, then determine the best way to support them. Note: When you sell to several different ICPs, this can result in multiple journeys and sales motions.

Adding more complexity is the fact that a company’s buyer journey will seldom involve just one person. Most include multiple personas, each with their own agendas, levels of influence and communications preferences. Many companies see a buying committee as a homogeneous entity focused on achieving a specific business need, but it is actually made up of very different types, each of whom will evaluate your product based on personal as well as business criteria (earning recognition or a promotion, for example).

The result is a playbook that identifies the resources needed to support your buyer at each stage. This isn’t just for sales: it’s everyone who touches the buyer in a process.

Build your buyer-centric playbook.

For every stage of each buyer’s journey, you need to engage, inform, guide and support them. This requires the right resources. When we help companies build buyer-centric sales processes, they work to identify these components for every stage:

  • Roles: Which company roles (marketing, BDR, account executives, etc.) need to be involved? Who is best able to address the needs of the buyer at that point?
  • Activities: Which activities are required? Trade shows, inbound sales calls, outbound prospecting, presentations, demos?
  • Outcomes: What outcomes will signal that the buyer is ready to move on to the next stage? Will they fill out a request form, attend a demo, verbally confirm their intention to buy?
  • Tools and collateral: What tools and collateral (Salesforce, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, Salesloft, Docusign, etc.) will support the selling committee in doing the best job at each stage?

The result should be a playbook that identifies the resources needed to support your buyer at each stage. And this playbook isn’t just for the sales team: it’s for everyone who touches the buyer in a process to get them to buy, including marketing, channel, customer success and operations teams, too.

Only when you’ve done the work of identifying the buyer personas, the journeys they take and the resources that support those journeys, can you begin to map and marry your process to anticipate, support and accelerate it.

The simpler the output, the easier for the selling committee to understand it. The deliverable can be a very simple spreadsheet that maps the required resources to each buyer stage.

Best practices for a better sales process.

Even when you know the steps to build a buyer-centric sales process, planning and coordination to follow them and emerge with a process that reflects the realities of your buyers and optimizes your resources. The below best practices can help you get (and stay) on track:

  1. Make it collaborative. Sales doesn’t function in a vacuum, and the sales process shouldn’t be built in one, either. Just as the buying committee includes many different stakeholders, the selling committee also requires a diversity of cross-organizational roles and perspectives.
  2. Involve your front lines. The sales process is often handed down by management, but it’s when the frontline sellers are included in the conversation that the company should see the best results. The people dealing directly with the buyer have a much deeper understanding of them.
  3. Talk to customers. In our experience, even companies with hundreds or thousands of customers haven’t always taken the time to find out how they arrived at the buying decision. Companies are afraid to inconvenience their customers or fearful of what they’ll hear, but that direct input is invaluable.
  4. Keep it simple. Constructing a buyer-centric sales process is critical, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, the simpler the output, the easier it will be for the selling committee to understand it. When LLR leads this exercise, the deliverable is just a very simple spreadsheet that maps the required resources to each buyer stage.
  5. Monitor progress. While you don’t have to overcomplicate the process, you do need to identify the data points that will help you measure its success and surface any areas that require further consideration.
  6. Reinforce adoption. Even a clear and simple sales process needs to be reinforced again and again before it truly sticks and becomes habitual for everyone—sometimes a year or longer. Refer to the process during one-on-ones, bring it up at team meetings and integrate it into formal education at least once or twice a year.
  7. Revisit your process. Your sales process will evolve over time as you move upmarket, release new products or face new market dynamics. Plan to review and adjust the process annually to ensure it continues to reflect these factors and align with your buyer journey.

Here’s the bottom line.

Some of the most successful companies in the world follow a buyer-centric way of selling, yet many mid-market firms default to sales processes that align with internal needs and assumptions, not buyer objectives and mindsets. By using your ICPs and personas to guide your sales process, you can create a buyer-centric approach that aligns with the buyer journey and guides them through every step. And while the sales process is about more than closing deals, your company should see far more success if you place your buyer at the center of that process.

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