The Decision Process is often underestimated regarding the importance and challenges that may exist in understanding it. According to many studies surrounding processes, most people do not like them because they feel it limits how they can achieve outcomes and slows or hinders success.
If you want to be successful in your sales career, you will want to get engrossed in learning and understanding your buyers' decision process/procurement process. On the surface, this may sound very simple, but it isn't. Here is one example of how a standard sales process is described.
Create a list of potential vendors
Evaluate each vendor
Select a vendor
Negotiate contract
Purchase solution.
Another example of a procurement process is the one provided by Oracle, where they outline a more detailed 9 Step of Procurement Process in the chart below.
While the 9 Steps are more detailed than the five steps, there is still much more information that is missing; for example, do we know the following each step:
How does the company identify how projects will be prioritized? Who will own this, and which departments? Who are all the stakeholders?
Who submits the purchase request? Have they done it before? Do they have a budgetary limit to what they can request? What is that amount?
Are they required to look at a set of vendors that have been previously approved? Some organizations require people to look only at vendors on an "Approved Vendor List." If this is the case, you would be missing a step called "Get on the Approved Vendor List." This is very common when selling to financial institutions.
Do you know what terms are required? In one of my previous roles, our finance department would not sign off on any contract if there were no 45-day payment terms. Without that, the deal would not get done. Do you know what terms are non-negotiable up front? The more transparency you have in this area, the better you can forecast your deal.
Creating a purchase order sounds simple, but do you know how long that takes? Who has to approve purchase orders? Does it have to go to multiple layers of approval from different stakeholders? Do Finance, Security, IT, and Legal all need to sign off? What is each department looking for?
If you sell software, does it have to be deployed in a particular way? There was a sales cycle I was involved in once where there was a requirement we uncovered early on that any client software must be able to be deployed silently without any user participation or acknowledgment; however, our software required the end user to accept the terms. To move forward with this deal, we had to involve our engineering team to scope out potential changes.
The list could go on, and we will cover more examples in future MEDDIC Monday posts covering the Decision Process. Let me leave you with this last example of how well you should know and be able to describe their decision process. When I was in 7th Grade Science, Mrs. Woods had an activity where we had to write instructions on making peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Here is a funny YouTube video that brings home the point:
🎬 Action
|
Comments