Why the Sales Process Is Like a High Performance Engine (And Missing Gears Aren't Recommended)

We perhaps take for granted the rapid technological advances that have occurred over the past few hundred years in evolving what we pleasantly take for granted in everyday transport. The engine that powers our cars, trains, planes and bikes are fascinatingly complex structures that all but a few of us really understand, but what is implicit in our faith in our machinery is that they will reliably and consistently work. Deep down the main principle in any kind of engine is that all the parts work in conjunction with each other in a methodical and appropriate manner. Think how disconcerting it would be if while driving a car the gear you engage acts radically different to what is expected with disregard of other machine parts. The result is machine breakdown and unpleasant consequences.

In the same way it can be argued that a sales process is a complex machine that involves many of the same metaphorical parts. If the sales process were a machine there would be three basic machine parts, the first being a pronged cogwheel called the ‘sales cycle’. Locked into this large cog would be a smaller differential called the ‘buying cycle’ representing the customers cognitive decision making through all the different stages of the buying process from ‘awareness’ through to ’conviction and on to ‘commitment’ and attached to this would be the smallest known as the ‘selling cycle’, where the sales person works through all the stages of taking a lead through to a prospect and then on to a customer. This smallest of cogs is the source of the engines power and represents all the influences on the customers buying cycle ranging from television adverts, sales seminars, internet information to the sales team themselves. As the source of the engines performance the smooth running of the engine requires the selling cycle to affect the turning of the customers buying cycle which in turn affects the sales cycle which turns from its starting point all the way to closing the deal. The size of the cogs matters, as the smaller cog has to move faster to accommodate the larger.

In an ideal world that is how a sales cycle engine should run, but the problem is, that this engine isn’t a tangible object and can’t be easily comprehended. A lot of businesses don’t have any idea of how their sales cycles operate or the relationships involved in the different parts of the process. Even worse, some of the parts that we have mentioned operate independently of each other in the hope of arriving at the same conclusion. A sales person may have fulfilled every necessary process in obtaining an order, by discussion with decision makers, meetings and then send a quote but still be surprised in failing in completing the deal. This may be purely down to his failure to understand at what stage the customer’s buying cycle is at. Sending a quote when the customer is only just aware of your product will rarely result in success even though the sales person has fulfilled every stage of his own process, but because that process wasn’t in conjunction with all the other processes it was doomed to failure.

A fully functioning sales process requires a full understanding on each cog of the machine by all parties including the customer. The company needs to understand its sales cycle and how the customer relates to it so that it can refine and diminish the time that it takes to turn the cycle from start to finish. This is also true of the sales people who need to know at what point in the buying cycle the customer is at so that they can apply the right gears and at the right speed in facilitating further movement from the customer. They also need to know how and why they are applying their own selling cycle so that it achieves this purpose.