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Buyers have progressed 57% through their buying process before they engage a salesperson. Keep in mind that this statistic is in fact an average and how you act before and after the 57% is a matter of choice, not a function of averages.
It really comes down to whether your engage first with the buyer, or react to their engagement with you.
Keep reading for some guidelines on how you might react after the 57% point, if you find yourself in that situation.
Let’s first consider the whole spectrum of engagement, the Sales and Marketing Continuum. According to Avinash Kaushik, Google's Digital Marketing Evangelist, "The Sales and Marketing Continuum, in battling the 57%, is such an amazingly simple and clever way of showing something complicated."
For any purchase, the customer goes through a number of phases, beginning with Awareness. At this point, they learn that you and your product exist. This is followed by Interest, where they care about what you (and others) have. The next phase is the critical one. This is where they establish a Preference for a given solution or supplier.
When you overlay the 57% point on the Sales and Marketing Continuum, you can see that it lies at the critical juncture between Interest and Preference. If the customer is already 57% through the decision process before they engage you, there’s a high probability that they’ve already established a preference.
If you’re late to the game, you’re probably chasing a sale that will be hard to win. In this case how you respond is really important. At this point your competitor is probably in the lead and has been established as the preferred supplier. You need to shift the focus of the customer’s buying criteria to a new or additional issue, one that your solution will uniquely deliver. This is called a Flanking Strategy and can reset the conditions of the sale in your favor.
There are four things to consider:
However you can’t just arbitrarily adopt a Flanking Strategy, you must also have the right conditions in place.
Here is an example:
In our own case at The TAS Group, we adopted a flanking strategy to introduce our solutions. We examined the business of sales training, methodology, and effectiveness tools: $10 billion of expenditure every year. But research showed that on average 87% of that training was ineffective after thirty days: $8.7 billion wasted.
Clearly, traditional approaches weren’t the most effective investment for improving sales team productivity. Our solution, Dealmaker – embedded with decades of sales methodology in a smart, easy-to-use software application – uniquely helps companies to operationalize their sales effectiveness initiatives – for true, sustained sales transformation. Our flanking strategy was born of this insight and helped us establish a new market category: “How do you operationalize your sales effectiveness? What do you do when the sales trainer leaves?”
While customers have an ever-increasing opportunity to research their own solution before they engage with a supplier, you have an opportunity to shape the subsequent interaction by helping them to learn what you want them to know.
About the author:
Author of Amazon #1 best-seller Account Planning in Salesforce, Donal Daly is CEO and Founder of (his fifth global business enterprise) The TAS Group, the global leader in Smart Sales Transformation. Combining his expertise in enterprise software applications, artificial intelligence, and sales methodology, he continues to revolutionize the sales effectiveness industry. Feel free to download The TAS Group's latest publication, Battling the 57%: Deconstructing the Buyer Seller Dance.
There are three sales activities, when practiced together, that turn prospects into customers. Download this free e-book to discover what they are.
