The Customer Buying Cycle
Here is part of an interview I recently did with Andy Paul, the author of “Zero-Time Selling: 10 Essential Steps To Accelerate Every Company’s Sales
The Customer Buying Cycle Transcription:
CHRIS HAMILTON: I’m glad you brought up the concept of buying cycles. It’s common to look at the sales cycle but, in fact, honing in on the buying cycle allows you to focus more of your attention on the client, as opposed to the process.
ANDY PAUL: That’s right. I think there’s a sales cycle and a buying cycle that go on simultaneously, and they intersect at certain points along the road. But the customer has their process to buy something, and that’s really the determining step as to how fast things are going to go, and that has nothing to do with your sales cycle.
You have to be really mindful of the information requirements you need at each step of the buying process, and how you are going to get that information to the buyer in a way that helps them use this information with the least investment of their time possible so they can make a decision.
That’s all they want to do. They want to make a decision. They’ve got this item on a checklist of things they want to buy, like a product from Chris. Well, what do people want to do when they have things on a checklist? They want to get them off the checklist. Customers are so busy. They’ve got so many things on their plates. Companies are trying to do more with less, like everyplace else these days.
I write and talk about this. Back in 1971, a Nobel Prize-winning economist named Herbert Simon accurately forecast (along with Marshall McLuhan and others) exactly what the impact would be of the information economy. Obviously, this was back at a time when there was no Internet. There were four broadcast channels in the United States, and one or two in Canada at that time.
KERSTEN KLOSS: The Telex machine…
ANDY PAUL: Yes, the Telex machine…
KERSTEN KLOSS: [Laughs]
ANDY PAUL: Don’t laugh. In the 1980s I was selling satellite communication networks to replace Telex machines for the Associated Press and other companies. What Herbert Simon said was there would come a point where people would be so overwhelmed by so many sources of information that this surplus of information was going to create a shortage of the resource it consumes, which is people’s attention. Today we call that our bandwidth. We’re out of bandwidth.
He said what people are going to do, then, is unnecessarily make decisions on how to allocate slices of their attention or their bandwidth using economic means—meaning where do I get the best return for the time that I’m investing in this information source? Which information source is giving me the best return on the time that I’m investing in it?
Well, your buyers are doing that with salespeople. If there’s a competitive sales situation, and one salesperson or company is taking an inordinately long time to respond to their customer inquiry or to get back to them with answers to questions—then the customer is thinking that if they’re not getting a good return on the time they’re investing with this company in the presales environment, what’s it going to be like working with them in the long term as a supplier?
Alternatively, there’s Chris’s company. They responded to me within thirty minutes. They understood my needs. They gave me answers to my questions. They gave me a demo the next day. Wow! That’s a company I want to work with. I received a good return on the time I invested with them. I want to work with them long term.
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Keywords: The Customer Buying Cycle