Clearly understanding your customer’s buying milestones is essential to pipeline visibility. Without clearly understanding where your salespeople are in the customer’s internal buying process, you can’t know if a particular opportunity is merely possible, probable, or a sure close. Assuming salespeople and their managers are managing the pipeline based on clearly defined customer buying milestones, we have seen numerous organizations significantly increase their ability to assess the pipeline well beyond the current quarter.
Here are a few examples of customer buying milestones that provide more concrete evidence that real progress is being made in a sales cycle:
- Customer acknowledges a business need and agrees to evaluate a business relationship with Acme Solutions
- Customer confirms opportunity priority, internal business case, funding and agrees to a ‘Needs Analysis’
- Customer confirm our recommendation will meet their requirements
- Customer may or may not generate an RFP
- Customer confirms Acme Solutions is on the short-list
- Customer confirms their support for the Acme Solutions proposal
- Customer approves proposal and price
- Contract is executed
‘Customer’ as outlined in the milestones above may represent an executive sponsor, decision maker(s), key stakeholders and or a selection committee.
Based on a defined customer buying process and typical buying milestones, the pipeline of opportunities can be rendered visible by sales managers asking their salespeople focused questions based on these verifiable customer actions. The content of these questions must be consistent and a ‘critical few’ questions must be asked on a regular schedule. In part 2 (next week) we will talk about how to implement a cadence of sales review meetings to improve the effectiveness of interactions between managers and reps in light of the customer buying process.
