Are Your Solutions Easy to Buy?

Do Your Customers Think that Your Solutions Are Easy to Buy?
While most consultative sellers believe that buyers have the advantage during the sales and negotiation process, customers report being overwhelmed, uncertain, and under tremendous pressure to get it right.  If your solutions are easy to buy, you should have a leg up on the competition.

Certainly, as solution sellers, we want to make the buying decision as frictionless as possible for our target clients. But are we succeeding?

The Problem
In a recent sales management training program, sales leaders heard firsthand how buyers are besieged by an overload of information, an expanding range of buying options, and an increase in the number and clout of stakeholders involved in the final decision. With too much data, too many choices, and too many decision makers, buyers struggle to manage internal expectations, do their day job, and feel confident that they are buying the right solution for their unique situation.

What Customer Surveys Have Shown
Interestingly, recent research by CEB backs this up.  When sellers are fully responsive to the customer in terms of providing information and options, there is an 18% decrease in so-called purchase ease. By providing whatever support is requested by the customer, sellers actually prolong the buying process and make it more difficult and uncomfortable for most buyers.

Instead, a more prescriptive and value-added sales approach, especially for highly complex solutions, can actually increase buying ease by 86%.

Successful sellers proactively guide the customer through the entire buying process with a clear, concise, and client-centered recommendation-backed rationale that aligns with their unique sales strategy, sales culture, and needs.

How to Make It Easy to Buy from You
In order to succeed, prescriptive guidance must meet three requirements. Your recommendations to buyers must:

1. Be Credible, Unbiased, and Client-Centric
   Recommendations that blatantly promote your solution are likely to be regarded with suspicion. Instead of raising a customer’s concern about your motives, you want them to be grateful for helping to make their life easier.
   
   That means that you must have the industry and business acumen to deeply understand what matters most to your clients, provide expert-based recommendations, and focus on helping your client (and their clients) to succeed. 
   
   To make it easy for clients to trust you, focus on helping and adding value, not selling ? this includes recommending a competitive solution if it is in the best interests of the client.
   
2. Lessen Indecision and Compel Action
   Help the customer focus on a manageable set of considerations that are relevant and meaningful in their situation. When you make evidence-based, concrete recommendations that fit the customer’s needs, customers take a giant step closer to action.
   
   Having too many options is overwhelming and slows down the sales process.  Offer no more than three simple and compelling options (low, medium, high) for clients to consider.  Your job is to proactively cut through the noise and guide your clients to see the best path forward ? not just to provide reactive information with varying degrees of relevance.
   
3. Facilitate Progress Toward a Good Decision
   Map out the buying process and the decision makers with your client.  Proactively identify, plan for, and remove barriers together.  Buffer the buyer from any internal politics or challenges on your side. 

Make it as easy as possible for them to succeed internally.  Help the customer navigate the different priorities, information needs, and agendas so that they are set up for success.

The Bottom Line
Today’s best sellers proactively guide customers and add value every step along the way.  Does your sales team have the sales confidence and competence to help customers sift through the information glut to chart a path toward a solution that is truly in their best interests?

To learn more about how to sell with more confidence and make your solutions easy to buy, download The Top 30 Most Effective Sales Questions in the Eyes of Your Buyers