The best sources of information on this are, of course, your customers themselves. Salespeople too, can be good sources of information.

Generally speaking, it is easy to see that people don’t just go from having never heard of you to spending their time and money with you in a nanosecond. First they have to realize the problem, prioritize the problem, seek alternative solutions, etc.

Once you know they go through stages like this, you ask them, “So, when did you start thinking this was a problem that needed to be solved?” … and, “What other things were you working on/struggling with, and what made this problem more important than that?” And so on.

A good book on the idea, by the way, is Hugh Macfarlane’s “The Leaky Funnel.”

I’ll be writing an article about this in the near future, but I hope that helps.

Michael

This is a GREAT question!

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and there are so many possible answers and complexities it is well worth discussing in detail. It will be the topic of my next blog post. Stay tuned.

Michael

I believe most sales execs are stuck in a broken framework – one they did not create.

To the extent that many of their problems are caused by factors outside their control, and they resist attempts to hamper and “limit” their actions, as anyone would. Like most people they assume the sales process is “about what salespeople do.”

Some sales managers and execs can make progress improving their process from within, but the big breakthroughs happen when finding, winning, and keeping are treated as an interdependent sales system. This is the sort of thing that cannot be changed from within. Improving it requires an outside force to make it happen.

In other words, this is NOT a sales problem (or a marketing problem, for that matter).

It is a management problem.

You can accomplish an awful lot if you have the support of senior executives who understand what process thinking really means to a business.

Michael

This is THE list. Bullseye.

Now the big question: How do you get a majority of sales leaders to even say the word process, not to mention take the time, money, resources, focus and possible short-term revenue hit to actually make process changes?