Selling Today: Partnering to Create Value, 14/e

Achieving Alignment with the Customer’s Buying Process

1. 8.3 Understand the importance of alignment between the selling process and the customer’s buying process

The foundation of a successful sales effort comes from knowing how buyers buy. If you don’t know what the customer’s decision-making process is and you proceed according to your own agenda, you risk losing the sale. If you have not defined how buyers buy, then you make assumptions that throw your sales process out of alignment with the buyer’s buying process.18 Too often salespeople rely on generalizations about the buyer’s decision-making process rather than acquiring specific information.

The buying process is a systematic series of actions, or a series of defined, repeatable steps ...