The Sales Process Milestone You Can’t Get Wrong

Each year I eagerly await the arrival of May 11th.  While that date is important in 2025 because of Mother’s Day, most years, it is the day when newly formed leaves finally reach full size (based on my observations since 1988).

Last year the early spring months were very cool, and the leaves were a week late.   This year saw a warmer April and the leaves appeared two weeks earlier than last year.

The timing of the leaves appearing is also a very powerful analogy to sales and more specifically, closing.

Most salespeople reach the end of their pitch and assume it’s time to propose and close.  But just because they reached “the end” doesn’t mean their prospect arrived at the same place at the same time.  Some prospects arrive earlier and salespeople miss the signs.  From that point forward, every word can potentially help to unsell the prospect.  Could anything positive possibly come from that?

While far less likely, the timing problem can even occur in a well-structured, customized, staged, milestone-centric, buyer-focused, and optimized sales process such as Baseline Selling.  While the BLS sales process includes a milestone to identify the timing of the purchase, shit happens. Collecting proposals, inviting competitors to present, and involving additional stakeholders can also cause delays.

Timelines can also move up.  If the salesperson is meeting with the actual decision maker(s), and the compelling reason to buy creates enough urgency, the decision maker may very well short-circuit their entire buying process, skip the meetings, consultations, committees, competitors, and proposals, and simply buy to get their problem solved today.  How do you eliminate your competition?  Make yourself and your company irreplaceable, the obvious choice, a no brainer, and remove your competition from consideration. We teach sales teams how to execute their sales process so as to achieve this very outcome.

Consider that children learn to walk, talk, become potty-trained, and ride bicycles at different ages. Sometimes the gap between them can be years!  Similarly, there may also be significant gaps as to when salespeople and prospects arrive at decision-making moments. When you consider how frequently prospects need to think about it, talk with others, collect more proposals, find the money, take care of more important priorities first, or budget for it, it’s pretty clear that in most cases, salespeople are the first – and only ones – to arrive at decision-making moments.

35 years ago, I named one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies, “Supportive Buy Cycle.”  Buy Cycle represents how a salesperson makes a major purchase and there is a nearly mirror-image correlation between how salespeople buy, and what they expect their prospects to do.  One of the five attributes in the Buy Cycle competency is Decision Maker – whether a salesperson makes a decision or thinks it over at decision making time.

For example, if your company’s model calls for a one-call close, you want salespeople with the Decision-Making attribute as a strength.  They make decisions and therefore expect their prospects to make decisions.  They are much more likely to overcome a put-off than a salesperson who thinks things over and will understand when a prospect wants to think things over.

On the other hand, if your sales process routinely has salespeople reaching decision time well ahead of their prospects, then handling objections, and not taking think-it-overs, is counter-productive, and the prospect will feel pressured and annoyed.  I prefer salespeople who are decision makers, but in order to prevent uncomfortable situations such as the one I just described, we train salespeople to get the timing right.

In addition to the Decision Maker, other attributes of Buy Cycle are:

• Money Tolerance – how much money is a lot of money
• Comparison Shopper – whether or not the salesperson compares stores, brands and/or vendors
• Price Shopper – if the salesperson looks for the lowest price or buys value
• Researcher – whether or not the salesperson conducts research before buying

I could add a couple more:

• Sales Hater – if the salesperson dislikes or respects salespeople
• Being Sold – if the salesperson hates being sold to or enjoys the process

Most of the top 5% of all salespeople have Buy Cycle as a strength.  Most of the bottom 50% of all salespeople have Buy Cycle as a weakness.  That’s quite telling!

Dinger, my dog, asks for dinner each day at 5:08pm. (Article about Dinger and his listening skills) It got to the point that if I say, “Oh, is it 5:08?” he goes to his bowl and sits and waits for the food.  On the other hand, I’m always hungry, but it’s not appropriate to seek out lunch at 10am, or to ask for dinner at 3pm and again at 9pm.  I can’t eat just because I’m prematurely hungry because there are other people to consider, especially my wife, who does the meal prep and cooking, and the rest of the family, who have an appropriate alignment between hunger and meal time.

There are many important milestones to a sales process and some of those milestones are very predictive of whether you will win or lose a deal or account.  One of those milestone is timing, and while that may not be predictive of a win, if you get the timing wrong, you are likely to find yourself on the wrong a sales process outcome.  They say that timing is everything.  It’s true, and everything you do correctly in the sales process can be undermined by your bad timing.