The 7 Stages of Prospect Commitment You Need to Manage

by Paul DiModica

• Are you managed by your prospects?
  
  
• Are you projecting your needs onto prospects -- hoping they will buy?
  
  
• Are you held hostage to the small size of your sales pipeline?

To sell more products and services, it is important to manage prospects -- not have them manage you. Selling is a profession where you must subliminally drive the prospect to appreciate the time limitations you have in selling and getting them to take action steps to buy.

To increase your sales success, you must move your prospects through the seven stages of client commitment and help them fix their business needs.

The buying cycle and the selling cycle
are always different.

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.

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 the 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 your offerings as 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 make "action step" commitments not "verbal" commitments. Has a prospect ever told you "we are going to sign the Purchase Order in December" and then not respond to any of your calls or email inquiries until April of the next year? Prospects need to show action steps that move your sales cycle forward to prove you should spend time with them.
   
   
5. Prospect Time Management Commitment - To close deals, management must commit their time for your product or service review, demo's, executive briefing, 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 (or target) now. Prospects must make a financial commitment by giving you their budget or confirming your investment is affordable, otherwise you are just making friends - not customers.
   
   
7. Prospect Decision Commitment - The goal of every sales cycle is 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 happened 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 them 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 your firm to sell and the prospect to buy. It should include dates, action steps, and timelines for each part of the sales cycle needed for the sales transaction to be completed from your end including forecasted time for product or service review, contract negotiations, etc. In short, it lists each step so both the vendor and the buyer know what is expected.

In sales, this is a 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 a Client Briefing Document to
manage prospect commitments.

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

"It is not what they say they're going to buy that's important -- it's what they buy that counts." Anonymous

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