The Buyer Journey
How the traditional sales cycle compares with the DECIDE buyer journey, and why DECIDE leaves nothing to negotiate.
A traditional sales cycle is designed around the Seller. DECIDE follows the Buyer's journey instead. Seeing the two side by side shows where they part company.
The traditional cycle
- Identify the buyers. Who will be making the decision?
- Needs discovery. Find out what the buyer needs.
- Quote. Come up with a product to meet the need.
- Pitch features and benefits. Sometimes this comes before the quote.
- Overcome objections.
- Negotiate. There is some to-ing and fro-ing.
- Buy, and hopefully a relationship builds over time.
A product enters the conversation very early. As soon as a product, and particularly a price, is on the table, it becomes the topic of conversation and tension follows.
The DECIDE journey
There is no pitching, no pushing and no negotiation. Your offering is not mentioned until the end.
| Step | What happens | Your offering mentioned? |
|---|---|---|
| Discover | Identify the Buyers, much as in the traditional cycle. | No |
| Engage | Grow trust and gain insights. Learn about the Buyer personally: their key performance indicators, and what they value in a general sense. When you focus on the Buyer, trust grows quickly and the Buyer becomes more open about the outcomes they want. | No |
| Collaborate | Explore the Buyer's Value Gaps. Start from where the Buyer wants to be, then work back to where they are now. | No |
| Invent | Work with the Buyer to invent their own solution, in generic Buyer language, until you have a specification. Discuss what the problem is costing them, and so what a reasonable investment would be. | No |
| Dovetail | On your own, match your offering to the Buyer's solution to see whether it fits. | First time |
| Endorse | Return to the Buyer with the match. They endorse it and agree to proceed. | Yes |
If at any step you can see you cannot be of value, you can exit gracefully and put your time into opportunities you can win. Likewise, if there is no match at Dovetail, you exit. You never try to reshape the Buyer's solution to suit your offering.
Cost, not price
Price is about you. Cost is about them. It is much easier to reach consensus with a Buyer on cost than on price, and by the time you have worked through Invent you can usually get there.
At that point you ask: "If you could get this for that cost, would you buy it?"
- If the answer is yes, you move on to Dovetail.
- If the answer is no, ask why. Then go back through Invent, because the Buyer does not yet see enough value.
- If the cost, the solution and the value never hang together, you exit.
Because the Buyer has already agreed what they would buy, and what it is worth, before you offer anything, the negotiation never needs to happen.
How the two compare
| Traditional cycle | DECIDE | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | Hoped for at the end, after the Buyer has bought. | Grown first, before anything else. |
| Your offering | Introduced early. | Introduced at the end. |
| Price | On the table early, which creates tension. | Not mentioned until the end. |
| Negotiation | To-ing and fro-ing. | None. Consensus comes first. |
| Language | Seller language. | Buyer language throughout. |
For the detail of each step, see The DECIDE steps. To see how this applies to several Buyers at once, see Buyers and organisations.