The most Important Stage in a Complex Sale

By Ernie A. Cevallos

For generations and to this day many managers swear that obtaining commitment or closing the sale is the most important stage in a sale. If you are dealing with small or transactional sales, there is evidence to suggest that closing is the most important stage supporting the notion that “if you can’t close, you can’t sell”.

On the other hand, high level or complex sales have a much longer sales cycle and closing is not the most important sales stage. Why?

Let’s take a closer look at the “Discovery “or “Investigating” stage.  In a sales context, investigating means systematically discovering, clarifying, and clearly understanding the buyer’s business need and problems. This understanding should be fully from the customer’s perspective, and not assumptions captured in an account plan just to check the box and get the sales manager off the salesman’s back.

To investigate well, requires research beforehand to become knowledgeable about the customer’s business and issues. In this day and age there are some many ways to gather information that can arm you with great insight, and at the same time allow you to show the customer that you care and understand his(her)  business. Concurrently with researching the customer’s business, the other step in this stage is to gather, verify, and clarify information through effective questioning and listening well to the feedback provided by the customer. I like the SPIN selling approach to questioning.

In the time line of a complex sale, you win by achieving a series of small victories or accomplishment of planned objectives aimed at making sure that there is a great fit for the proposed solution, that unknowns are dealt with, that your understand the customer’s buying process, that stake holders are properly aligned, and that you are viewed as a competent professional acting in the best interest of the customer.

Clearly customers purchase products and services to meet needs or resolve problems. Such decisions are made when the pain of the problem or desire for results have been built up to the point where they are greater than the cost of the solution.  If you have progressed the sale successfully though the “Discovery” or Investigating” stage, closing becomes much easier. That is why this stage is so critical. Bungle it by assuming and not truly learning the customer's perspective and closing becomes very difficult. Obtaining commitment is clearly a must have skill to cultivate, but it will be much harder, if not impossible, to close if the foundation was not put in place by doing a great job in the earlier sales stage of “Discovery” and Investigating”.

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