How Customers Buy

Most sales processes are designed around the seller's convenience. Enquiry comes in, we qualify it, we quote, we follow up, we close, we invoice. Neat, linear, and almost entirely disconnected from what is actually happening on the other side of the table.

The buyer's process started weeks before you heard of them and carries on long after your invoice is paid. The parts of their journey your process does not touch are where deals are quietly won and lost, usually by someone who was in the conversation earlier than you were.

The six stages, from their side

1. No problem yet. They are living with it. The system is slow, the supplier is average, the process is clunky, and none of it has become urgent. Nothing you say here will make them buy. Everything you do here decides whether you are remembered at stage two.

2. Something triggers it. A failure, a bill, a new contract, a resignation, a rule change, a competitor doing something. The problem becomes worth solving on a specific morning. Almost every purchase you have ever made as an owner has a trigger date like this.

3. They set the criteria. This is the stage nobody sees and the stage that decides the outcome. They work out what good looks like, usually by asking two or three people they trust, reading whatever is easy to find, and remembering what went wrong last time. The specification gets written here.

4. They shortlist. Now they invite three firms to quote against criteria that already exist. If this is the first you have heard of it, you are being marked against somebody else's paper.

5. They justify it. The decision has to survive contact with a co-director, a finance person, a spouse, a board. Risk gets examined. The question stops being "is this good" and becomes "what happens to me if this goes wrong".

6. They buy, then judge. The decision is not finished at signature. For weeks afterwards they are looking for evidence they chose well. What you do in that window sets up every repeat purchase and every referral you will ever get from them.

The stage that actually decides it

Stage three. Whoever helps a buyer work out what good looks like has an enormous advantage, because they get to put their own strengths into the criteria without ever mentioning their own name.

This is why a buying guide, a straight answer on the phone, a checklist of the questions to ask any supplier, or twenty minutes of genuinely useful diagnosis is worth more than a beautiful quotation. The quote is a response. The criteria are the question, and the question is worth more than the answer.

If you only ever arrive at stage four, you will win roughly your share of the three-quote lottery and you will spend your life explaining why you are more expensive than the other two.

A worked example

Illustrative sequence, not a client. Take a fifty-person firm deciding to change IT support providers.

Week 0. The server is slow and the current provider is fine. Nobody is buying anything.

Week 3. A business two streets away is hit by ransomware and it makes the local press. The trigger.

Weeks 4 to 6. The managing director rings two people he trusts and asks what he should be looking for. He also reads a short piece called Seven questions to ask any IT provider before you sign, written by a firm he has never used. By the end of week six he has decided that good means round-the-clock monitoring, a named engineer, and a proper accreditation. Two of those three criteria came out of that article.

Week 7. Three firms are asked to quote, including the one that wrote the article.

Weeks 9 to 11. The finance director objects to a three-year term. The question is no longer capability, it is exposure.

Week 12. Decision. Week 14. Onboarding.

Now the money. Two credible quotes: £1,950 a month and £2,300 a month. Over a 36-month term that is £70,200 against £82,800. The more expensive firm wins, not because of the pitch at week seven, but because the criteria written in week five were partly theirs, and because at week ten they handled the term objection by offering a 90-day exit in the first year, which removed the finance director's real problem.

The £12,600 difference was decided in week five by a piece of writing that cost an afternoon, and defended in week ten by anticipating an objection that had nothing to do with the service.

How to apply it this week

1. Reverse-engineer your last five wins. For each, find out what actually triggered the search and who they spoke to before you. Ring them and ask. Most owners have never done this and are surprised by the answers.
2. Write down your customers' trigger events. The specific things that turn a tolerated problem into an urgent one. Three or four is plenty. Everything in your marketing should be aimed at those moments.
3. Build one stage-three asset. A short, honest guide to choosing a supplier in your category, including the questions that make you uncomfortable. It works precisely because it is not a pitch.
4. Change the shape of the first meeting. Spend it establishing what good looks like for them rather than describing what you do. You will hear the criteria out loud, and sometimes you will be allowed to add to them.
5. Deal with stage five before you are asked. Name the risk in your proposal and say how it is handled. Terms, exit, guarantees, phasing. Whoever is defending your quote internally needs ammunition, and you are not in the room.
6. Put something deliberate in the first month after purchase. A check-in, a short review, a thank you that is not an invoice. Stage six is where referrals are manufactured, and almost nobody works it.

The mistake most owners make

Confusing their sales process with the buyer's. The CRM tracks enquiry, quote, follow-up, won or lost, and it feels like a process. It is a record of the last three stages of someone else's decision.

The second mistake is "just following up". Chasing a quote adds nothing at stage five, because the buyer is not waiting for enthusiasm, they are waiting for a risk to be resolved or a person to be convinced. Ask what still needs answering and who else has to be comfortable, and you are useful. Ring to see if they have had a chance to look at it and you are noise.

The third is going quiet at stage one. That is the only stage where you can build the relationship cheaply, and it is the one owners abandon first when they are busy, which is exactly why the pipeline goes empty ninety days later.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how well do you actually know what triggers someone to start looking for what you sell?
• At which stage does your business typically first appear in a buyer's journey, and what would it take to appear one stage earlier?
• Who else is in the room when your quotes are discussed, and what do they need that you have never given them?
• What deliberately happens in the thirty days after somebody buys from you?

This is the map the Sales & Marketing Engine is built on. A sales process that mirrors how people genuinely decide feels like less selling and produces more sales, because you stop arriving late to a conversation somebody else has already framed.