Rather than focusing on the 'sales process', sales people need to be taught how to notice the customer's 'buying process'.

So forget about the sales process and start to notice the customer's buying process so that you can pitch what they need to hear.

The customer, the customer, the customer! That's what selling is all about and every customer is different.

You might have come across these silly steps before:

1.finding your lead

2.making sure that lead is qualified (has a phD or two!)

3.need identification

4.proposal

5.closing

6.transacting the deal

and I would urge you to forget about them because they don't address the customer! They address the process in a text book (and we don't sell to text books). I might also add that the reason this process has spread so much is because too many sales trainers don't ever sell a thing

Put differently: so many sales geniuses don't use the sales process because they haven't got time to think about it! Their too busy noticing what's going on with the customer in terms of their verbal and non verbal cues. And it goes without saying their close rate is at least 4 times as high!

Supposedly there is an advantage to following the 6 steps above and its: ' achieving a standard with customer interaction in sales'.

But standards don't help when there are so many variables and no 2 people are the same, so how can it possibly be useful to use the same process on them? So sometimes standards end up capping progress. It's not really possible for a student to get higher than an A+, for example.

But they can get lower, right?

Do you want to cap your 'bottom line'? If not, if like me you think that the more money the merrier then be careful with standards.

Enough of the diversion, lets recap: the sales process needs to be about noticing verbal and non verbal cues that allow us to pitch our product or service in just the right way for the customer to buy.