How to Move Buyers into the Buying Zone

Sellers achieve a high close ratio with a buyer that is already in the market to buy. But this is not because the seller is a great closer; it’s because the buyer has already made up his or her mind to buy when s/he gets to this stage: the buying zone.

Buyers have already navigated through the first two phases of the buyer’s journey before they get to this third and final phase.

Phase One: Identifying the Problem or Opportunity

In the first phase, buyers are trying to position themselves to work on their business. Essentially, they’re educating themselves on “what problem or opportunity” they should focus their attention.

They avoid sellers because they believe that meeting with them is a waste of their time, and instead gather their information from internet searches, web sites, peers, and groups. Once they settle on “what” they are going to work on, they enter the second phase of the journey – solution education.

Phase Two: Learning about the Available Solutions

During the second phase, buyers are determining the pros and cons of the various possible solutions. They tend to get their information from the same places because they still want to avoid the seller.

Studies show that when the buyer finally meets with the seller, they are usually in the third phase, the buying zone.

Phase Three: The Buying Zone

By the time buyers get to this phase, nearly 60% of the time they know who they are going to buy from, or have at least have narrowed it down to two or three finalists.

Traditional sales culture encourages sellers to find buyers that are already in the zone. However, only about 3% of buyers are in the zone at any given time. Since so few buyers are in the zone, sellers are spending a lot of their selling time just trying to find these buyers or, better yet, figuring out how to be found.

This should be the role of marketing. Sellers should instead be asking themselves “How can we move more buyers into the buying zone?”

Let me give you an example of what I mean. In major league baseball, a hitter’s batting average is a 150 points higher when the count is 2-1 (2 balls, 1 strike) rather than 1-2. Great hitters don’t simply hope to get an advantageous count, they have learned how to work the count to gain the advantage.

In order to be a great seller, you have to learn how to move buyers into the buying zone. In order to do that, we have to focus on process rather than outcome. It’s about how the seller approaches the process that is the key.