Managing Your Prospects Using CIA Philosophy

7 Stages of Prospect Commitment

by Paul DiModica

I have four brothers in my family . . . I am the quiet one. Years ago, one of my younger brothers Mark was an airborne ranger in the U.S. Army attached to an intelligence unit at Fort Lewis. Every day, he would get up and follow around Russian sailors in Seattle to see who they talked with when they came ashore off of their "fishing trawlers."

After doing that for several years, he was then transferred to work at the White House, where he and other paramilitary types like Navy Seals and SF (Special Forces) commandos were co-mingled with secret service agents for presidential security. During his tenure, he often worked with Caspar W. Weinberger, the secretary of defense at that time, traveling the world.

To be honest, I wouldn't give my brother a sharp pencil, but he was always carrying around automated machine guns in a bag, a locksmith license, and a bullet proof vest. A long time before 2001, it took him hours to get through airports because he had to check in ahead of time with airport security to show his "hardware".

Then he left the secret service and kind of disappeared for a while. My family and I thought he went to work for a black bag division of the Pentagon, training counterinsurgency and intelligence tactics to Fortune 100 CEO bodyguards -- but, we never really knew.

Then he resurrected again and went on to work in technology security (one of the three things secret service agents monitor) for a global accounting and consulting firm and often traveled to Moscow to help a national truck rental company set up Russian transportation distribution channels.

I know this is hard to believe . . . but it is all true.

Through his travels and his adventures, he often talked about how he and his cohorts always managed the environment they were operating in. They never assumed that people (even those who had appropriate authority) knew what they were doing regardless of what they said or did. He often stated, "It's really up to me -- to manage . . . not to be managed. Being managed can be dangerous. When dealing with people, you need commitments . . . not just intentions."

And this is the point. You need to get commitments.

Spending time with prospects who are supposed to be qualified, but never buy depletes and wastes your available selling time and effort. In IT marketing and sales, you must force prospects to take parallel action steps with you to prove that they are qualified buyers – not professional lookers.

The 7 Stages of Prospect Commitment You Should Manage to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle
 
It is important to manage prospect expectations. Selling is a profession where you must subliminally drive the prospect to appreciate the time limitations you have in moving them through the seven stages of client commitment and helping them fix their business needs.

The buying cycle and the selling cycle are always different.
Nobody has a two-year sales quota!

So, to sell more, you must manage the prospect's buying expectations.

You can combine some of these expectations (listed as stages below) and shorten your sales cycle even faster, but if you do not manage ALL of these expectations, you will not close the deal.

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7 Stages of Client Commitment

1. Prospect Attention -- Capturing the prospect's attention happens when you successfully cold call, network, or respond to an inbound lead by making contact with an appropriate prospect who has economic approval to buy.
   
    

2. Prospect Disbelief -- Prospects automatically tend to disbelieve you on the first pass for this simple reason: You're a salesperson. Use your knowledge of their business model and business pain to break through their disbelief filter and "prove" that you sell a business tool which can help their business.
   
    

3. Prospect Value Identification -- Based on your firm's unique sales value proposition, you must position yourself and your firm differently from your competition and get the prospect to verbalize the difference.
   
    

4. Prospect Action Step Commitment -- To sell more prospects, you need to drive them to take "action step" commitments not just "verbal" commitments. Has a prospect ever told you "we are going to sign the purchase order next month" and then not respond to any of your calls or email inquiries until 6 months later? Prospects need to show action steps that move your sales cycle forward to prove that you should spend time with them.
   
    

5. Prospect Time Management Commitment -- To close deals, management must commit their time for project scope development, demo's, executive briefings, and contract negotiations. If you have a prospect who will not commitment their time, then they are not ready to buy.
   
    

6. Prospect Financial Commitment -- There is an old Sicilian saying that my grandfather (a successful entrepreneur) use to say -- "No money? Call me when you have a nickel in your pocket." Spending too much time on a prospect because they "should" buy or "will" buy sometime in the future will not help you hit your sales quota now. Prospects must make a financial commitment by giving you their budget or by confirming your investment is affordable, otherwise you are just making friends -- not customers.
   
    

7. Prospect Decision Commitment -- The goal of every sales cycle is for the prospect to make a decision commitment. It's one thing to take a prospect through 6 steps and at Step 7, they buy from someone else. It's another for the prospect to decide NOT to buy from you or your competitors. You must force prospects to make a decision or else you are wasting your time with professional lookers.

Prospects must prove they are buyers through commitments . . . not just words.

Many salespeople "project" these steps as being completed before they have actually occurred and end up incorrectly making an assumption that the prospect is going to buy.

Once you have networked or cold called your way into the beginning of your sales cycle with a prospect and established there is a business need for your product or service, give the prospect a "Client Briefing Document" (after Stage 3) as a preliminary sales tool. It is a quick way to establish and manage prospect commitments.

A Client Briefing Document is a written outline of the expected sequence steps for the prospect to buy. It should identify dates, action steps, and timelines for each part of the sales cycle that should be completed by you including forecasted time for demos, contract negotiations, etc. In short, it lists each step so both the vendor and the buyer know what is expected.

It is a sales tool called an anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphisms assign human characteristics or actions to be taken by non-human things like the theory of sales steps.

By listing human steps in a Client Briefing Document, you can gently "push" the prospect through the 7 steps of commitment.

Use Client Briefing Documents to manage prospect commitments.

Remember, the faster you premeditatively manage sales commitments by prospects, the shorter your sales cycle will be.

So, act like a special agent and manage your prospect selling environment . . . instead of letting it manage you.

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Regards,

Rick Erling