Ep 19 Buyer Indecision

Welcome back to yet another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast.

My name is Bram LeGroux, and for you sales directors, here's a new topic for you.

Buyer indecision.

Think about the deal sitting on your board right now that's been stuck in a late stage the longest.

Not the one you lost, because that one's easy.

You know what happened.

I mean the one that's still technically alive.

Every time you check in, you get a we're close and I just need to align internally or you should have an answer soon.

And it just doesn't move.

Every sales director hearing this has at least one of those on their board right now.

And if you go looking for help with it, I know a lot of you have because buyer indecision is one of the most searched problems among sales leaders today.

You'll find page after page of the same advice.

Things like tighten your qualification, build more urgency, get a mutual action plan signed, ladder up to the economic buyer.

They're all useful.

But none of it explains why a prospect who told you in writing that your solution is exactly what they need still can't bring themselves to sign.

That's what we're unpacking today.

Not process.

We're going underneath the process into the actual psychology of the humans sitting in that buying committee.

Because indecision isn't your prospect being difficult and it isn't your rep being lazy.

Nine times out of ten, it's predictable.

It's explainable.

And this is the part that actually matters most for you as a leader.

It's preventable.

The two Ps, as I always reference.

Now a quick word on where this is coming from for anyone new to the show.

Six years as a sales manager, 16 years as a management consultant, I've been in the room with commercial teams across 25 countries.

I hold a master's in psychology and a post-grad in training and development behind that.

So this isn't just pattern matching from war stories.

And the methodology that I built out of all of it which is called communication mastery, is what I license to corporate clients as consulting, training, coaching, and soon to be technology.

Most sales training treats psychology as a garnish, a slight on building rapport or a throwaway line about reading the room, and then straight back into stage gates and forecast categories.

I wanna flip that today.

Buyer indecision, longer deal cycles, risk aversion, multiple decision makers pulling in different directions, every one of those shows up in the data as a process problem.

I don't think it is one.

I think it's a psychology problem wearing a process costume.

So today we're leading with the psychology and letting the process follow it, which not coincidentally is exactly how we approach it inside communication mastery.

Welcome back to yet another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast.

My name is Bram LeGroux, and for you sales directors, here's a new topic for you.

Buyer indecision.

Think about the deal sitting on your board right now that's been stuck in a late stage the longest.

Not the one you lost, because that one's easy.

You know what happened.

I mean the one that's still technically alive.

Every time you check in, you get a we're close and I just need to align internally or you should have an answer soon.

And it just doesn't move.

Every sales director hearing this has at least one of those on their board right now.

And if you go looking for help with it, I know a lot of you have because buyer indecision is one of the most searched problems among sales leaders today.

You'll find page after page of the same advice.

Things like tighten your qualification, build more urgency, get a mutual action plan signed, ladder up to the economic buyer.

They're all useful.

But none of it explains why a prospect who told you in writing that your solution is exactly what they need still can't bring themselves to sign.

That's what we're unpacking today.

Not process.

We're going underneath the process into the actual psychology of the humans sitting in that buying committee.

Because indecision isn't your prospect being difficult and it isn't your rep being lazy.

Nine times out of ten, it's predictable.

It's explainable.

And this is the part that actually matters most for you as a leader.

It's preventable.

The two Ps, as I always reference.

Now a quick word on where this is coming from for anyone new to the show.

Six years as a sales manager, 16 years as a management consultant, I've been in the room with commercial teams across 25 countries.

I hold a master's in psychology and a post-grad in training and development behind that.

So this isn't just pattern matching from war stories.

And the methodology that I built out of all of it which is called communication mastery, is what I license to corporate clients as consulting, training, coaching, and soon to be technology.

Most sales training treats psychology as a garnish, a slight on building rapport or a throwaway line about reading the room, and then straight back into stage gates and forecast categories.

I wanna flip that today.

Buyer indecision, longer deal cycles, risk aversion, multiple decision makers pulling in different directions, every one of those shows up in the data as a process problem.

I don't think it is one.

I think it's a psychology problem wearing a process costume.

So today we're leading with the psychology and letting the process follow it, which not coincidentally is exactly how we approach it inside communication mastery.