Aligning to the Buyer’s Journey: A New Sales Imperative

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If you’ve used a computer in the past five years, you’ve run up against a reCaptcha test—those prompts to prove your humanity, which often require you to select all the bicycles you see in photos of streetscapes or pick out the obscure bus from a sea of trains. While many users find them annoying, they’re a crucial security measure helping sites weed out legitimate human interest from malicious bots.

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Unfortunately, there is a direct parallel to the sales profession: While research shows salespeople are a crucial part of any high-confidence buying decision, many buyers feel differently. To them, we’re merely the reCaptcha test, the silly roadblock between them and what they truly want. After all, the buyer in most B2B buying processes typically goes through six phases:

Identifying problems
Searching for information and possible solutions
Evaluating competitive alternatives
Justifying the financial expenditure
Purchasing
Evaluating the solution post-purchase

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Notice anything alarming? That’s right; at no point in the process is the sales professional explicitly included. This creates a fundamental challenge: How can sellers add value when they are often excluded from much of the decision-making journey? The answer lies in meeting buyers where they are and adapting your approach to align with their unique needs and timelines… even at the expense of your own sales process.

Meeting Buyers Where They Are

Have you ever received an RFP with a mile-long list of capabilities? The problem with this approach is that buyers aren’t always adept at self-diagnosis. In fact, some sales organizations I’ve worked with have a policy of not responding to RFPs for this very reason.

This is a mistake. In situations like these, you must align with the buyer’s process. Now, please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that you can’t influence and guide the buying process—you can and you should—but that is fundamentally different from forcing a buyer to align with your sales process, which is a mistake I’ve seen time and time again.

Let’s look more closely at the RFP example and the associated capabilities. Buyers often believe they have a complete picture of what is needed. While that may sometimes be true, more often than not, their understanding is incomplete. The trick is to form a complete understanding of why the buyer believes those capabilities are required. Then, you’ll navigate the delicate balance between reinforcing the buyer’s thought processes while identifying opportunities to re-educate and finding the context needed to position your solution as the best alternative—here’s how you’ll do it:

If you can access the buying committee or the individuals behind the RFP, start with questions like these:
- What led you to reach out to us?
- Will you please share the process/journey you have been on to this point?
- What business problems are these required capabilities meant to solve?

While simple, these questions can provide an incredible depth of information—the key is to let the buyer do the talking. Even if connecting with the potential buyer proves impossible, you can still bake subtle moments of discovery into the responses. While often overlooked, discussing how your capabilities address probable underlying problems can open the door to future business conversations.

Transforming Expertise Into Relevance

Now, let’s tackle the issue of product demos. Buyers grow frustrated when sales professionals fail to understand their business, their needs and their desired outcomes. Showing up to deliver product demos without making meaningful connections or insisting demos are shown before ROI discussions can begin risks alienating buyers and turning them away. Sales never has been, and never will be, about a product’s features—instead, it’s about fostering understanding, gaining consensus and crafting solutions that solve pressing business problems.

This transformation requires a mindset shift. Demos are nothing without the proper context. Instead of treating buyer requirements as fixed, sales professionals must dig deeper, asking targeted questions that uncover underlying motivations. For example, when presented with the buyer’s idea of a solution and its capabilities, sellers should ask questions such as:

What problems do they expect to solve?
What specific frustrations are you experiencing with your current solution?
What outcomes are you hoping to achieve with these capabilities?

Equipped with answers to these questions, you can reframe demos from surface-level presentations to roadmaps for impactful problem-solving—they enable you to reverse engineer the “why” behind the prospect’s interest and position your offering as the unique solution.

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Ultimately, prospects need to be seen, and they need to be seen as unique. They need you to understand why they are different and why they are seeking unique solutions. While they might set the criteria, your opportunity lies in expanding their thinking with thought-provoking questions and answers. By focusing on the buyer’s process, understanding their journey and bridging gaps in their self-diagnosis, sales professionals build trust and credibility. In turn, you’ll no longer be the silly roadblock set up to deter their buying journey, but a long-term partner whom the buyer will turn to every time they have a business problem worth solving.

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