"Multiple stages are involved in reaching and then connecting with a single customer. It is not a single step. [...] This is why the customer acquisition funnel can prove to be very useful. It breaks down the stages individuals go through before they are ready to become customers by making decisions easier along the way."
Unfortunately this is not a standard quote from literature about B2B sales. You will find this quote or similar in almost every article or book about online marketing. For online marketing it is a commonly accepted fact that customers need to go through different stages of decision making and that it is your job as online marketer to prepare for each step and guide your potential customer through each step.
But how developed is your B2B sales funnel? Have you thought about all the different decisions your clients need to make in order to come to issue a final order?
Understand your customer's process to get to the next "Yes"
Most of the clients I work with have at the start, if at all, a very basic funnel in their CRM consisting usually of 3-4 stages:
Customer potential validated
Sample sent / demo provided
Offer sent
Order received
And when you ask the sales people about the next step they need to take to move the customer forward they usually say: "Oh, I need to call / send an email to follow up to see that we can move to the next stage". They see their role as pure reminder, almost holding the customer accountable, to move to the next stage.
When you ask them:
what the customer's internal processes are,
which decision makers are involved on the customer side, and
what decisions they need to take in order to move to the next stage,
they have no idea. They leave this part entirely to the customer and are utterly helpless when there are delays or stoppages in the funnel. You sometimes hear statements like "I have to lean a bit stronger on my contact, I think he's not doing a great enough job to push this trough".
But that is your job!
Guide your customers through the process to the next "Yes"
Your job as a sales person is to push the sale through the customer's internal process.
Yes, you are not the one sitting in the internal decision making meetings, but it is your job to:
understand the internal processes, the decisions involved and who needs to make them when;
understand what documentation and arguments those decision makers need in order to make their decision in your favour (what their individual gaps are);
engage with the individual decision makers yourself if possible, or at least prepare your contact for every single decision maker engagement.
Once you understand this, start to build your CRM accordingly (and be it in an Excel sheet), and work with your customers accordingly, you no longer depend on your customers to push through the decisions to the next step and you no longer are helplessly depending on them to prevent delays or stoppages in closing a deal.
Of course you can't achieve any of this unless you do a more in depth customer discovery.
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