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    The Buying Zone
    The Buying Zone
    The Buying Zone
    Ebook220 pages3 hours

    The Buying Zone

    By Drew Pickens and Dave Tonn

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    About this ebook

    Why is it that when you do everything right as a salesperson, the customer still says "no"? Why do they sometimes say "yes"? What's going on inside a buyer's head when they decide to buy something? The Buying Zone is a journey through the mind of a buyer, when and why they choose to make a purchase and from whom?
    Whether you are a strategic level sales professional trying to close multi-million-dollar B2B deals or an owner of a local business like a restaurant, fitness studio, or an e-tailer, you're always trying to grow your customer base and establish yourself in the market. This book will help you understand the buyer – at any level – during the buying process.
    This isn't just another sales book. The Buying Zone is about the buying process.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJan 17, 2020
    ISBN9781543996371
    The Buying Zone

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      Book preview

      The Buying Zone - Drew Pickens

      ©2020 Drew Pickens and Dave Tonn. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      ISBN: 978-1-54399-636-4 (print)

      ISBN: 978-1-54399-637-1 (ebook)

      Contents

      PART ONE

      Chapter One Setting the Scene

      Chapter Two Selling from the Buyer’s Perspective

      Chapter Three Defining the Buying Zone

      Chapter Four What Motivates a Buyer

      PART Two

      Chapter Five Can Afford It

      Chapter Six Need It

      Chapter Seven Want It

      Chapter Eight Like You

      PART Three

      Chapter Nine Summarizing the Elements

      Chapter Ten Intersections

      Chapter Eleven Bringing it all together

      Appendix

      Self-Coaching Questions

      PART ONE

      Chapter One

      Setting the Scene

      by Drew Pickens and Dave Tonn

      Consider the following scenario:

      You are a salesperson and you have offered a customer a very generous discount, you’ve done everything the customer asked you to do and you are indeed a very nice person. But for some reason, the customer doesn’t agree to buy from you and/or never follows through on a commitment to purchase. You come to the same conclusions as most of your colleagues: I need to lower my price, and then the customer will buy from me. That’s what I will do next time. So, you fight with your pricing department to get all of the approvals necessary to offer the most aggressive (i.e., competitive) price possible to the customer.

      You’ve been there, right? Of course, you have. We’ve all been there.

      The result is almost always the same: The customer’s behavior doesn’t change (they stay with your competitor), or the customer doesn’t follow through to make a purchase, even though you’ve got a great product and your price is very good, maybe even lower than your competition. You are left confused and bewildered. "If only I could have gotten a better price. That was the reason I didn’t make the sale" we all mutter to ourselves as we finally move on to another prospect, encouraged to push the pricing department for an even more aggressive discount next time.

      What is recurrent through many sales efforts, is that the customer never wanted to buy to begin with. They genuinely appreciated the discounted pricing offer, but never intended to change providers. No matter how much discount was offered, how much pizza was brought to the office and how much wining and dining took place, the customer deep down didn’t want to change service providers.

      Often, we as salespeople are working with the following equation in our minds:

      Good Product + Friendliness + Discounted Price =

      Successful Sale

      Why isn’t this working? We ask ourselves. If this isn’t resulting in a ‘Yes’ from the customer, then the product must not be good enough, or I need to be friendlier, or the pricing isn’t low enough,.

      Love or hate this equation, one thing is undeniable: this is looking at the sale from the salesperson’s perspective. From that perspective, the responsibility is entirely on the shoulders of the salesperson to drive it to a successful conclusion. The customer plays no role in this formula at all. In this world, sales success is completely the responsibility of the salesperson, and they are in complete control of the outcome, and as a result completely responsible for it, as well.

      We have discovered that the customer has a much larger role to play in the decision to buy than this equation would lead you to believe.

      Maybe the customer has something going on in their mind, too? Maybe there is a logic or a combination of elements that have to add up for them to make a decision to change or spend money? Maybe I, as a salesperson, can do everything perfectly, and the customer still doesn’t see the need to change. Maybe my product and price are just fine. Maybe something else is going on.

      We took this as a personal challenge to overcome this dilemma and to look at things through the buyer’s perspective and change this equation. For years, we’ve been thinking very carefully about the different elements that go into a customer making a buying decision, how that impacts the likelihood of a sale, and how they can be influenced by a salesperson, marketing team, commercial strategy, etc. We had to get to the bottom of why customers weren’t making the change, even when the salesperson had a great approach, a good product and a good price. Something had to be missing.

      Below is a simple model illustrating the buying process for a typical product or service:

      Illustration 1.1

      It reads as follows:

      If the customer wants to buy your product or service, then a successful negotiation will lead the customer to commit to make the purchase. Then, all the salesperson needs to do is ensure a successful implementation, and the purchase is complete.

      This of course begs a couple of questions: How do I get the customer to want to buy my product? And if I lead them to want to purchase my product, then success is all but assured, assuming a successful negotiation, correct?

      Not so fast. If wanting to purchase something was all that was required, we would all have some pretty fancy homes and automobiles, and the salesperson that was best at convincing customers to want to purchase his/her product would be the king of the sales world. The reality is: we are left wanting a lot of things we aren’t able to purchase, don’t need to purchase, or don’t like to purchase, so we don’t purchase.

      Something had to be missing.

      The two of us come from similar backgrounds, but we have completely different tastes in almost everything; from food, recreation, clothing, shopping venues, entertainment, and just about anything else that separates a Baby Boomer from a Millennial. We debated almost every topic imaginable during our time working together: religion, politics, food, and other fascinating topics. We even debated about the best place to buy underwear when on a business trip. Why were two individuals not able to agree on these very basic concepts? And if they can’t agree on basic ideas, then there must be more at play in the more complex questions buyers face every day.

      Wanting something isn’t the only criteria. There are other factors, and in this book, we will call these factors elements.

      There are many factors (elements) that play into a customer’s buying decision, and most of these are not obvious to salespeople. Buyers go through an agonizing journey throughout the buying process, probably almost as much as a salesperson does. What is going through their heads? What are they trying to accomplish? What internal and external barriers are they facing? What forces are influencing their decision? These are all things that salespeople have to consider when working with a customer. The more complex the sale, the more complex and numerous the things the salesperson needs to consider.

      The Buying Zone is a buyer behavioral model that brings all of the elements of a customer’s buying decision into clarity for the salesperson to understand. By identifying which element is satisfied in a customer’s mind, a salesperson can better help the buyer through the purchasing decision and accomplish their buying goal.

      In our many combined years in business, sales, leadership, and corporate training, we witnessed many salespeople struggling to find the answers to successful selling. We watched as our colleagues read many books, tried many strategies and listened to many seminars about motivation and desire and other catch phrases designed to fire up the sales force to raise their game.

      Many sales training programs were launched with the goal of growing the sales team’s selling acumen and effectiveness, with the common thread being to improve the salesperson’s personal drive and technical selling skills.

      We’ve even seen more pragmatic (tactical) approaches to achieving sales targets:

      Just spend one more day in field! we heard one leader say.

      We need better pricing to stay competitive! said another.

      Cancel all training and make more customer visits! yet a third strategist proclaimed.

      This book is going to take a different approach. This book is focusing on the purchase from the buyer’s perspective. We know you will find it to be a refreshing take on the relationship between a buyer and a seller.

      You already know the life of the seller. You live it every day. Join us as we uncover the story of the buyer. It’s a story of ups and downs, of fear and triumph, of joy and desperation. It’s the story of all of us when we play the role of buyer in the modern tale that is navigating through endless product choices and selection.

      This book is a deep dive into the mind of the buyer. It is a journey along two parallel roads: one down a rational path (sensible and quantitative) and one down the path lead by emotion (not measurable, but qualitative). It is not meant as a guide on how to hypnotize a buyer into saying yes or to conjure up some magic words that will lead the buyer make a purchase. Salespeople are always searching for that silver bullet. This isn’t that. I’m sorry to tell you. There isn’t one. This book is meant to help you, as a salesperson, to understand why the customer is saying no and not saying yes. Once you understand this, the next steps are yours, but it all starts with this…why the customer is saying no?

      You will have to take the journey with your customer, to where both of the paths intersect and into a zone where the buyer’s needs and wants align and where finance and relationships co-mingle.

      It starts with having the right goal in mind. Your goal should not be to make a sale; but rather it should be to help the customer to make a purchase.

      Get ready to enter...The Buying Zone.

      Chapter Two

      Selling from the

      Buyer’s Perspective

      by Dave Tonn

      You should have seen this office. It was absolutely gorgeous. Marble floors lined the reception area. Tall potted plants gave it a homey, soft and welcoming vibe. The security guard’s desk was long, pristine white, and although welcoming, it definitely had the sense of You’re not getting past me without an appointment feel to it. On top of the desk sat a modern tablet device for checking in and it was where you get your visitor nametag printed. Afterwards, we sat and waited in the black leather chairs next to old copies of common magazines for our contact to come and retrieve us.

      Chris will be out shortly said the security guard in his most authoritative manner.

      Chris came out a few minutes later and we proceeded past the doors via Chris’ key card granting us access. We followed Chris down a hall or two into his office. It was not as gorgeous. The floors were still pretty, but the desk looked as if a tornado blew through the office and left a wake of scattered handwritten notes, paid and due invoices and a stack of items on his to-do list. We exchanged our pleasantries and continued through the normal chat-gap that commonly takes place at the beginning of a sales visit. The weather. The traffic. The coffee, and finally down to business.

      I was with the sales rep to assist him, as he had been working with this prospect for a couple of weeks and he had already had a few meetings with Chris prior to that day. I was mostly there for feedback and coaching, but also to provide support or insight in case the visit went awry. The sales rep finally laid his plan out for the customer. He illustrated how his service can help the customer produce a better product, produce it faster, with better quality, and even at a cheaper cost than with their current service provider. He explained that the customer will be able to not only accomplish all of this, but he can even grow their sales by upwards of 50% year-over-year; all because of the sales executive’s most helpful service improvements.

      That was the end of the meeting. Chris thanked us for the presentation and bid us good day. No objection, no negotiation, no excuses. It was just over. No sale.

      The sales executive was flabbergasted! I can’t believe that guy! Who doesn’t want to grow 50% year-over-year?

      The sales executive was doing exactly what sales executives do: thinking like a salesperson. After I close this deal, I’ll hit my targets, receive a big bonus check, earn internal respect and maybe even get promoted. The salesperson knows, if they were to increase their sales revenue by more than 50% year-over-year at their company, they would be a hero! They would win President’s club awards, get big bonus checks, and could buy a fancy car or house or whatever their heart desired.

      Why did this not work from the customer’s perspective? The sales executive, by only thinking like a sales executive, could not possibly fathom a world in which

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