The Sales Cycle! What You Need to Know!

Many non-sales people don’t really understand that great sales people have the process of selling down to a half science / half art form. Good sales people don’t even really sell, they simply help a customer resolve a problem they may have. The other thing people working in a small business don’t understand is that nearly every customer facing employee needs to know the science part of sales. A long time ago I was taught that there were five steps of a sale. With any client you need to know exactly where you are in the cycle, so you can use probing questions to find out what needs to be known to get to the next stage.

Stages in the five step sales cycle are progressive and you can’t move to the next step until you are sure your customer is ready.

Step 1: Attention. Before you can start getting into the detail of what your customer needs or wants, you need to get their attention. Attention simply means that the prosopect (or suspect) is willing to listen to you and go through as many of the steps to qualify or disqualify them.

Step 2: Interest. After you have gotten their attention and they are listening they must be interested in two way dialogue that will help you identify what is most important to them. Many sales people loose their prospects at this step because the sales person hasn’t been able to keep a prospect engaged long enough to determine their needs. An example of a customer that is interested is after talking about your product or service and the ways it may benefit them, they give you indications they are still interested you know you are at this stage.

Step 3: Conviction. Although all steps of the sale are important, conviction may be the most important and hardest to overcome part. Conviction has two parts: First the customer must know they have a problem, and second they must believe you, your company, and its product or service is the solution that is going to help them solve their problem. Here is a good example. Let’s say you are a consultant selling a service to help business owners understand better how to measure their business performance. You may easily see the company is having serious problems and you may know exactly how to help them fix them, but until the business owner really believes he has a problem you won’t get past part one of the conviction step. This is the step where ideally you the sales person do more listening than talking and you ask probing questions that will help you understand how the customer perceives their situation. You then use anecdotal stories and examples that will allow the owner to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

If you are able to check off the first part of the conviction stage, your client must believe you are the one to help them solve their problem. Both parts are equally important. I like to think that once a prospect has passed the conviction stage, the rest is the fun part of sales.

Step 4: Desire. This is the stage of the sale when the prospect / customer emotionally buys into your company’s solution as theirs. It is the stage of the sale where the customer has mentally checked off the box for resolving their problem. It’s important that even when a customer is in the desire stage, they may not “buy” for a number of reasons. Affordability may be a reason, timing of other projects that are consuming the buyer’s time and a host of other reasons may require you to put the sale on the back burner until they customer believes they are ready to move to the final stage.

Step 5: Action. The action stage is where the customer places an order, pays for your services or signs a contract that may allow you to move forward.

Don’t assume that a customer won’t move backward in the process once or twice while moving through the stages of the sale. It happens. For that reason it is important to evaluate which stage you are at every time you plan to move to the next stage.

It is easy using the methods I have described above to set up a customer relationship management system (CRM) to show the stages of the sale and put % of estimated success on each stage. It’s also easy to teach this method to those in your company that are customer facing since they also play a continuing role in keeping a customer happy.