Your Sales Process Is Costing Your Deals

Your buyer has a buying process, and if your sales process is so rigid that a high-intent buyer with cash in hand can't buy from you, then you're doing it wrong. I build sales processes for a living, so I'm the last guy that is going to tell you to throw yours out the window. But there is a side to the sales process, and the systematic nature of sales and building sales organizations and teams that really nobody talks about.

And what I mean is, everybody obsesses over the sales processes, right? The playbooks, the scripts, the sequences—it's literally what we build when we do fractional sales management, and I value all of that as much as anybody alive. But we ignore the other half of this equation: your buyer has a buying process, too. And the temptation we have as sellers is to always force people out of their buying process and into our sales process because it makes it easier for us to sell stuff.

And listen, like the intent there is actually selfish, right? Like, "I need you in my process because it's harder for me to sell you stuff if I don't do it my way," right? And that's the truth of it. You know, "Your decision-maker has to be on the qualifying call. Your decision-maker has to be at this stage or do X, Y, Z." Look, I know why we want decision-makers in the room, believe me, I understand it. But there's a reality. Sometimes you've got somebody who's legitimately high-intent, has the money to buy your shit, and just doesn't want to hop on a call to be sold. Like making your job easier to sell stuff is not high on their priority list—they just want the thing that they want.

When that happens, you've got like one of two things, like that become your job as a seller. Either you sell that person on why changing their buying process is in their best interest, not yours, or you adjust your selling process so that it's compatible with how they actually want to buy.

And let me show you both because this applies to every part of the sales process. So say you're selling MSP services. You want the decision-maker, but somebody's out collecting quotes, the decision-maker's not coming to the table, and you've you've probably seen this—you've read this book before, right?

Option one: Sell them on why being present serves them.

You know, can you help the coordinator, the influencer, the champion, whoever it is—can you help them understand how having a decision-maker involved benefits everybody, including the decision-maker and including the influencer? Because there's a lot of ways to buy IT, right? And not all MSP packages are built the same, although a lot of buyers think they are—they aren't. So our job becomes helping them, uh, educate them on the fact that it's not.

So when you go collect a stack of quotes, you're rarely comparing apples to apples. We know this—a lot of times they don't. We want to help them understand that. So having a decision-maker in this process means potentially we don't load you up with a bunch of services, right, that you don't need and ask you to spend money that you don't have to. That that can save you money, right? That's one reason having the DM here may help. Another, like can you get a better service? Yeah, because we can build the packages in different ways, and some companies use IT kind of like a utility, some are really heavy in AI and want way more involvement, and the right input up front lets us assemble the best package for your company instead of instead of guessing. And it can save you time! Like if we get the decision-maker involved in this process, this is a this is a big one because the real reason decision-makers don't want in this process is because they don't have the fucking time.

I relate to this completely. I just went through a few buying processes for our company, and you know, one to make it easier for the fractional sales management customers that we have to pay and contract with reps who are abroad. And I had someone on my team running that process. They went, they got quotes, making sure it was exactly what we needed. And I promise you, anybody who would have mandated that I join those calls would have just been excluded from the process. Why? Because I don't have the time! That's why I have somebody doing this for me, and I assume the call is going to be a waste of my time.

But here's the thing: if if being involved on the front end actually saved me time on the back end and I understood that, I'd probably be more inclined to change my buying process. What usually happens is, you know, after the quote comes in or I get all these like, "Hey, I got all these quotes sitting in front of me," that's when you realize, you know, what you really wanted and what you didn't, and now you're going back and forth. You've got three vendors, you've got to go back and forth with all of them, and you know, after the the coordinator's already run this whole process for weeks. And a little input up front kills all that back and forth on the back end. So framing it this way to coordinators and influencers and decision-makers is what helps them helps us sell them on the idea of changing the buying process because it's in their best interest.

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Okay, so that's option one: sell them on why. But sometimes that still doesn't land. So option two is you modify your sales process to fit their buying process. And I did this recently, uh, with a seller in in one of our programs. And he did option one. He pitched how it saves them time, saves them money, gets a better service, and he did everything right, and the coordinator even agreed, but the decision-maker still didn't want to get on the call.

So the rep said, "Tell you what. There are a handful of things that I I really do need the input on. Can I send you five custom questions? Not a form, not a survey, and I promise it's not going to take him more than 10 minutes to fill out. Could I could I get those to you, and you get those to to him, and spend 10 minutes and shoot that back to me?"

And here's the key: we built the five questions, and they didn't sound like a sales form, right? Like, these aren't questions that are like, "What's your urgency level? What's your budget? How many decision-makers?" Like, no like nothing like that. These are really targeted strategic questions designed to stand out precisely because they don't sound salesy. You know, one of them, for example, was, you know, "Is there anything about your current setup that you absolutely don't want to give up? Something that you like and don't want to change?" And so we're asking their preferences, we're asking their priorities—like, that's the stuff that helps you build a proposal really strategically and actually get the input that you need.

We sent it, we got the input, and we differentiated because we were the only people doing that. And the questions were were really good questions, you know, and I'm sure it got the decision-maker to think and say, "Hmm, these are actually pretty good questions," and helpful, and they don't sound super salesy. So we differentiated ourselves in the process by adjusting how we sold to be compatible with how they buy.

And because of that, the coordinator's, you know, taking a few quotes back to the decision-maker, he's going to remember we were the ones that asked the smart questions. And he might, you know, even go to the to the other vendors and say, "Hey, you have some questions you want to send over? Anything like that?" And as long as your questions are sharper and and less salesy than theirs, you still win on on differentiation.

So, here's where I land. Like, sales process is obviously critical. The the discipline to stick with it is critical, and I'm not telling you to throw out the process like the second a a buyer, you know, has any objections to the process whatsoever. But if your if your sales process is so rigid that qualified, high-intent people with different buying processes literally can't buy from you, then you're doing it wrong. There are there are always alternatives that get you what you need and respect how they want to buy, and those are just two of them. So, I hope it helps. Adios.