A Marketing View Of Sales Phases

So much for AIDA?

There are many proprietary buying processes. Whereas Sales funnel management tends to stick within a simplified suspect-prospect-client mode, Marketing outside of consumer-land considers more what happens before the project is given the Go.

Rather unsnappily, BEFTB in the above graphic represents;

Build-up (realisation)
Expand (identifying options)
Filter (excluding options)
Test (confirming conclusions)
Buy Best Deal

From a Raconteur piece entitled What drives B2B sales, there are a couple of alarming thoughts.

Forty-five per cent were “always intending to get the brand they bought”.

Making hard qualification from the very off critical. Especially if you had no involvement in instigating the buying process.

Then there’s this five-step journey.

The angle they promote, is that such buying is a balance between Worry and Confidence.

No-one can ever be totally confident that what they order will be perfect, yet the successful vendors get this. As a result they recommend a kind of mantra; “reduce worry, build confidence”.

This certainly pushes my buttons. From putting a section in my Props called “Risk Mitigation” to Validations, there’s plenty of proven tools in our solution selling kitbag on this. Now you can frame it in Forecast reviews as a seesaw, with buyer ‘worry‘ and ‘confidence‘ at each seat either side of the fulcrum. Or ‘scales’ or even good-old Ben Franklin style “+ | -” two columns.

Then there’s the final takeaway. One which I’ve spent a career trying to encourage. Emanating no less, from as I type (somehow) the world’s biggest company by share value, by Scott Allen CMO Microsoft;

“For marketing to have a good relationship with sales they need to gain credibility. They need to do this by getting in front of them”