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By Barbara Bix - Last week, we discussed the importance of reducing the cost of sales—which I defined as the time it takes to prospect for new clients and close new business. This week, I’d like to discuss how to get started.
Step one is recognizing that for the most part, we can’t convince anyone to buy something from us that they don’t want. When it comes to shortening the sales cycle—as with other forms of behavior change, the thing to remember is that it’s all about attraction and motivation—rather than persuasion and pursuit.
Purchasers decide what they want to buy and equally important how they prefer to buy it. All we can do is make it easy for them to buy from us.
The key to success is anticipating prospective buyers’ needs and then making sure you give them exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it—before they ask. When we neglect to first understand how our clients prefer to buy, we run the risk of failing to make the necessary connection and causing sales cycles to stretch out. Let’s look at a few examples.
Suppose prospective buyers need a written understanding of what you will deliver, and you don’t have it. Sales cycles will stretch out while you prepare the necessary documents. If they require certain payment terms, and you can’t provide them, the sale stalls until you obtain authorization to give them what they want—or worse, you may end up losing the deal. If they depend on their trusted advisors for recommendations and these advisors aren’t familiar with your business, you’ll need to wait while they perform due diligence, or more likely, miss out on the opportunity altogether.
The better you understand prospective clients’ buying behavior, the greater is your ability to anticipate obstacles, and then take action to shorten the sales cycle. In short, upfront marketing research pays.
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Gail Perry, CPA
Services versus donations
The process is the same. Let's pretend that you are soliciting donations for an organization that supports research for the cure of a particular disease. You'd want to first get an understanding of donors' giving habits. In doing your marketing research, you might learn that some of the people that donate to disease research do so only when solicited by a friend or family member. Others do so only when it is their friend or family member who has the disease. A third group only makes donations at a certain time of year, and then only when the research organization first provides a detailed understanding of how the money will be used, and when the solicitation comes via postal mail rather than by phone or email. With this knowledge, you'd have a good idea of how to make it easy for people to donate to your cause. In Scenario 1, you'd prevail upon existing donors to solicit their friends and families. In Scenario 2, you'd just solicit the patient's friends and family. In Scenario 3, you might send a mailing at year end that includes a statement of how you apply donated funds. Now, the question that comes to mind is "How can I afford to research each person's buying behavior separately?" The answer is that you can't--except perhaps for large donors. For everyone else, you'd need to either have access to a very good database that let's you trace individual donor behavior and then group givers with similar profiles, or you'd need to contact everyone in multiple ways with multiple messages and hope that the value of the donation would exceed the cost of the solicitation. And if you targeted only people with a history of making large donations, it just might.
Barbara
Good points!
Hi Barbara,
You raise some excellent points and I can see how they apply if you are selling a product. In practice, what are the differences if you are selling a service or actually soliciting for donations?
Bill