Map your customer’s decision process. Just as every company has a slightly different sales cycle, each organization has a slightly different way they go about making a decision about products like yours. The more you know about their decision process, the easier it is to map it to your sales cycle, and identify the kinds of information that will be helpful to your customer making a good decision. In the end, that’s what we want, right? We want to help them make a good decision, ideally one that involves us.
To map your customer’s decision process, you need to get in front of them and ask them to describe how the decision was made. The easiest ones to do this with are your recent customers because they just finished the process. Asking them to recollect how they got to where they are will identify key steps in your customer’s decision process. Each customer is unique, but after a few conversations you’ll get a sense of how they identified the problem or result that needed to be solved, how they researched solutions, how they narrowed the choices and how they finalized the decision. You were probably involved in the last stages, but we find that where we add the most value is in the early stages.
