The Non-Linear Sales Process

Any decent sales leader is responsible for building a viable sales process, or at bare minimum, measuring conversion throughout an existing sales process and making tweaks along the way. Some leaders build processes and others inherit a process that needs to be monitored and possibly tweaked – or overhauled altogether. You will find different types of processes for different types of sales. For example, in the Enterprise segment, where deals are generally more complex and time-consuming, you will often find qualification criteria like MEDDICC overlaid into the process. In more transactional environments, you will generally encounter fewer stages and less friction for the buyer. 

Sales processes are important for many reasons. For starters, it helps the company understand where it is having success and where it is struggling. In the absence of a process, you cannot diagnose what stages you are good at and what stages you are bad at and why. If a sales process is proven, then standardizing it benefits the business because in theory you are optimizing your odds of success. Lastly, a unified sales process helps a team of individuals to speak a common language. After all, human beings are emotional, and some sales reps have a more glass half full attitude than their peers. When you forecast for your leadership team, you need to be able to be objective about where you are in every deal instead of relying on someone who might say “I feel good about this” or “I feel bad about this” for whatever reason.

Thought leaders in the sales world will often sing a common phrase, which is that you as a seller should not always present the seller’s journey; instead, you need to understand the buyer’s journey and walk with them along that path. For the most part, I agree with that, and in any sale, you fundamentally need to know how the buyer buys. While it is certainly the case that many buyers are alike within their vertical (say, higher education, or banking), there are always going to be outliers or nuances within each opportunity that make each one unique. So in that regard, there is definitely an advantage to working with some level of flexibility in how you engage the buyer.

I remember how not following a stringent process really came back to hurt me in a previous role. I was selling a solution to a top bank and my champion – who happened to also be a senior executive with decision-making power – implied that she was really interested in running a pilot. I got happy ears and ran with that and we marched ahead to run the pilot. Months went by as we went through vendor due diligence and signed a Master Services Agreement and an Order Form to run this pilot. I was excited.

The pilot never ended up happening. The group we had decided to pilot with was already running a pilot with another vendor, and the group’s leaders were not happy that their leadership team had pawned us off on them. They made that very clear to us when we came onsite to perform their training. We had no clear line of sight into what success looked like or how we could take success and expand upon it across other units within the bank. Why is that?

The reason this happened is because I did not adhere to my favorite phrase in enterprise selling: “Slow down to speed up.” The customer may tell you something you want to hear, but that does not mean that you should do what they want to do. If I had been wiser, I would have told my champion that while we would be excited to run a pilot, our process had taught us that there was a lot more work to be done in order to be successful. Namely, we should have ran more discovery across various units within the bank to identify the best group with something to gain from a pilot. Ideally we would have identified motivated champions within said group, people who would be rooting for us to succeed and who would take us much more seriously. We would jot down objective criteria of what success looked like for them, even if that required some tough negotiating that would prolong the amount of time until we would start collecting money from the client. The list goes on, and I think you get the idea.

This is the problem with many sales processes today. Sales processes are presented linearly to their salesteam. This means that the reps are eager to move deals across stages for the sake of appearances even if it means they get lazy along the way.

The reality is that sales processes are hardly ever linear. For example, running a pilot might be a next step in a sales process, but it is altogether still possible that running a pilot could be a massive mistake and waste of time if a certain stakeholder is missing from the equation.

As a matter of fact, I corrected my mistake at this same company several months later. I was on the one yard line with another banking client and I even had buy-in from the CEO, who had spoken to one of our investors (who also happened to be a client). I also had alignment from several key stakeholders across the bank after having traveled to Texas three times to see this customer in person. I had quelled the dissent from detractors within my deal. Seems like a done deal, right? Wrong.

What I had learned in my time at this company was that there were four people who I really needed on my side if we were going to launch successfully. Whenever you launch a new engagement, you want your customer rooting for you. When you have skeptics on the other side of the table, they simply will not put in the same level of effort to help make you succeed. And sales really is a two-way street between the vendor and the client. You need to hold hands and work together to succeed.

In this specific deal, I had three of my four stakeholders engaged. I asked my champion about meeting the Chief Digital Officer of the bank. She was a bit surprised to hear the request and when she asked me why, I told her, “I’ve found that it’s important to understand the goals for this persona in my other engagements because lack of alignment between them and the rest of the leadership team on something like this can lead to turmoil down the road.” My champion understood that and made the introduction.

For starters, this person was glad to have been included in the conversation. She had been aware of what was going on but no one had tapped her into the arena. My desire to reach out and involve her left a valuable impression upon her. Second, I learned what her goals were and how they affected our project. Fortunately, her goals were quite aligned with everyone else’s, so the rest was pretty straightforward. But what we both gained through this interaction was further clarity and we also both earned a new champion in the process.

Where I am going with this is that sometimes you actually need to go backwards if you want to improve your odds of moving forward. I am not suggesting that you have to go backwards in order to go forward, but I am suggesting that doing so absolutely improves your odds of sustaining that client for a long time. And this is lost on most salespeople: it is not just about getting the client across the finish line. It is also about making sure they keep running past that finish line for a very long time, happily.

All this to say, you are never hurting yourself by working around your “process” and learning more. The more and more that sales leaders compensate or even just reward individuals for their ability to “progress” a deal, the more they are losing sight of the things that matter. Yes, being able to answer certain questions about a customer opportunity is usually a good thing. You just want to avoid the feeling that you are reading the book without actually understanding the words. If we treat our close friends and family members with the respect of truly seeking to understand them when they come to us with their problems, why should we treat the customer any differently?