Are you delivering knowledge to your customer in each and every step of the sales process? Do you have SMART Goals outlined to follow and assist your customer in making the decision he invited you to assist with? When we model the sales activity, we get into very specific kinds of interactions that are critical for success, and we can define them into two types, tangible or intangible.
Tangibles are formal and often contractual. Often the conversation starts out that way, through the form of a request for a proposal. Everything is outlined and if we don’t do these things we will not get a chance at the order or if the transaction occurs they could want their money back. We even attempt to influence our transactions through the creation of sales funnels or using a form of Sales/Marketing automation.
These formal transactions lead us to believe that we can find the best path or a few “multiple” best paths (segmentation) that everyone should follow. If you can, then I guess things can be automated and/or scripted. I recommend the USA Principle established first in ERP, Understand – Simplify – Automate. The order happens to be important.
We need to develop a different philosophy. We need to think less about qualifying and more about learning and understanding. In Business Development, it’s not enough just to have formal paths towards a transaction. This pattern of thought does little to create a robust and resilient architecture. It is a process of exclusion and depletion and does not allow for the development of multiple passages into an engagement process. Just think, how many times orders are received outside of your constricting funnel. Or how often, the engagement starts downstream of your initial awareness channel.
We need to understand the underlying forces of these relationships and what is critical for this activity. The conversation we must have, the value that must be delivered. Our models need to include the intangibles or informal exchanges that really build relationships. That is what is missing from most mapping or sales automation attempts. If we would go back and ask. “What typically sets off manual intervention in this network?” It creates a starting point of bringing formal interactions (tangible) and human (intangible) interactions together. Through this engagement, we can start piecing together behaviors and motivations.
It is difficult to make these connections and visualize this process. It is one of the reasons we create maps and funnels. It would be great if we could treat every individually/organization separately but most of the time we cannot. I try to make these systems look more like an affinity map with circled clusters. As we distance ourselves from individuals, groups we capture the strongest and most dominant behaviors. We can create stories around these behaviors which empowers us to engage and extend our conversations. It is the development of the intangible that will create our success, not the effectiveness of our automation.