Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors

The Buying Behavior Spectrum

To compete in today's complex sales environment, salespeople must go beyond traditional sales approaches and serve both their customers and their own organizations as Consultants and Strategists. The Sales Advantage Series focuses on building a consultative mindset and employing critical consultative approaches, skills, and tools that enable salespeople to differentiate themselves and their offerings in key accounts.

Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors focuses on winning more sales and retaining more business through keenly understanding the client's buying processes and aligning one's offering to these priorities. While focusing on how a client prefers to buy may seem obvious, in reality it is rarely done. Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors helps salespeople adapt their offering to complement the client's buying process and create greater business value for their clients compared to the competition.

Overview

Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors helps high-performing salespeople understand the customer's buying process. They learn how to look beyond their own selling priorities and adapt their offering to meet the client's buying priorities—fitting into the customer's business and buying processes versus requiring the customer to adapt.

Through the Buying Behavior Spectrum, salespeople learn how to identify and recognize client buying behaviors. They learn the characteristics of buy/sell behaviors that either move a client toward a long-term interdependent relationship or keep the client in a repeat transactional pattern.

As a result of participating in Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors, salespeople are able to build stronger collaborative/non-adversarial relationships with customers, ultimately differentiating themselves from their competitors.

Program Outcomes

Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors helps salespeople win, keep, and grow more business by ensuring that solutions and offerings address the real-time buying processes and priorities of their customers.

Approach

This half-day module equips salespeople with the strategies and tools to better understand and respond to client buying priorities.

Participants complete pre-work, then engage in session activities that bring the concepts to life through reflection, case work, and analysis of the buying priorities of their own company. During the session, they apply new tools—the Buying Behavior Analysis and the Offering Alignment Planner—to their own client opportunities. They learn to test the feasibility of an adapted offer against the operational and profit margin needs of their own organization, ensuring better go/no-go decisions earlier in the sales process.

An optional half-day application session is available immediately following the session or at a later time. This learning and application approach reinforces key concepts, allows salespeople to put new ideas into practice following the training, and further advances their understanding.

Enabling Improved Performance

Sales Advantage Series modules feature application, reinforcement, and support tools. These tools ensure that salespeople can hone newly acquired skills and behaviors back on the job. Involving sales managers early and training them to coach for improved performance is also fundamental to successful implementation.

To discover how we ensure learning is reinforced and applied for improved performance, see our Learning Transfer Approach.

Measurement

Organizations that implement the Sales Advantage Series also have access to Wilson Learning's measurement and impact evaluation tools. The application session can serve as a leading indicator of behavior change and potential results. Account planning and coaching tools indicate and demonstrate progress with strategically important accounts.

We are committed to helping you succeed. We will work with you to set up measurement systems to help move desired change forward and sustain the momentum of your implementation.

Learn more about our Measurement and Evaluation Services.

Series Modules

The Sales Advantage Series modules introduce strategic approaches that equip your sales team to provide greater value to your customers and compete more effectively for business. The modules include:

Aligning Sales with Business Value
Conducting Strategic Business Calls: Discovering Critical Success Factors
Aligning with Customer Buying Behaviors
Creating Differentiated Offerings
Managing Opportunities
Managing Decisions
Managing Competition

Modules can be taken independently or as a complete series over time. Participants complete pre-work for each module to better leverage session activities that bring the concepts to life through reflection, case work, and application of new tools. Salespeople also work on their own client opportunities to advance their understanding and use of the tools.

This offering, like all others from Wilson Learning, can be customized to reflect your sales environment and business priorities and can be integrated with your sales process.