Selling + Buying = Sales
Wait what? How does Selling and Buying equal Sales?
One of the “flaws” of our human mind is what psychologists call “Self-serving bias”. It makes us excessively associate successes to our own actions and blame failures on external factors. Doesn’t sound familiar? You never worked in Sales!
Those successful Sales happen, of course, because of your amazing pitch and tonality. On the other hand the failures – those buyers just don’t text back because they are not reliable. What if I told you that there might be more to it? That the self-serving bias might affect your Sales process too?
If so, it might be time to start thinking beyond your pitch about what actually happened on the buying side in a successful sale! How many hidden decision makers are there? How did your initial contact on the buying side pitch your product to those other decision makers? How did your buyer organize the evaluation process internally?
Well duh you say, but we can’t control the buying side. Unless you have some Jedi-mind tricks like Obi Wan, the answer is likely to be no. Here’s the caveat though: we can influence it. This is where we would like to introduce buyer enablement! Buyer enablement is what Gartner calls “the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase”. Examples can be as simple as providing supportive training material for the client’s customer facing teams or as subtle as helping a prospective buyer identify internal obstacles that he doesn’t think about.
This brings us back to our initial equation of Selling + Buying = Sales. Whenever a successful Sale happens, favorable actions were taken on the Selling and the Buying side. To improve our own sales performance we invest in CRMs, Call Analytics, Sales training and so on. But what about the Buying side of the equation? How are you helping your buyer to be more effective in buying?
Stageset is the simple buyer enablement tool that allows you to win more deals faster by supporting your buyer in aligning all stakeholders, removing any future obstacles from the get go and bringing deal collaboration to the next level. Get started for free and bring your Sales career to the next level.
