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Why Change Selling Blog

 

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2 min read

A New Guide to Selling Killer-Products the Way Customers Buy (video)

By Mark Gibson on Oct 27, 2021 11:23:06 AM

Got a Killer-Product, but having trouble achieving its and your companies' potential?
These 6 short videos (hosted on Wistia) were produced by Dominic Rowsell of Hot Rivet. Dominic is author and copyright holder of "Why Killer Products Don't Sell".

In this series, Dominic provides new insights on buying behavior as he explains that there are four and only four buying cultures and suggests how to adapt B2B selling to match how customers buy. He explores the IMPACT (Identify-Mentor-Position-Assessment-Case-Transaction) buying process that every B2B transaction will go through, from initial idea to a purchase order.

If you are interested in The Challenger Sale method, you will see some very clear parallels in the Value-Created Selling model as the Mentor phase in the IMPACT buying process is typically where Challengers engage.

Regardless of your company and its stage in the technology adoption life-cycle, the IMPACT cycle and four buying cultures are relevant and useful for marketers and sellers to understand how people buy and what is needed to move a deal through each stage in the buying cycle.

Introduction to the Four Buying Cultures

Topics: killer products challenger sale selling early adopters
3 min read

Selling with IMPACT: a guide to selling disruptive technology.

By Mark Gibson on Jun 11, 2014 12:00:00 AM

If you subscribe to current research, buyers are contacting vendors at somewhere between 60-70% of the way through their buying process.  What this research fails to mention is this only applies to mainstream technology that is in established markets and where there is an identified and known set of competitors. 

Buyers enter the buying process depending on technology maturity and buyer risk tolerance. I like to use the IMPACT mnemonic to describe buying cycles because I think it more accurately reflects what is actually going on in the buying organization

IMPACT The six phases of the buying process are easy to remember as they will have an enormous IMPACT on your company’s performance:

There are the Early Adopters (EA) who are happy buying innovative solutions. There are the Early Majority (EM) who want to buy the market leader. And there are the Late Majority (LM) who want to buy a commodity at the cheapest price. Here is where the buyer starts to engage in terms of the IMPACT process.

Early adopters will enter the buying process at 10-20% of the way through a buying process and laggards will wait till they are 90% of the way - and all they care about is price or the service discount.

Successful entrepreneurs, marketers and salespeople selling disruptive technology must learn to recognize early adopters, understand how early adopters engage with innovative technology vendors and how they manage a buying process. 

This is the subject of a new eBook from authors of “Why Killer Products Don’t Sell”, Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell, and Adrian King, entitled “IMPACT - the technology executive’s guide for selling B2B disruptive and innovative solutions”.  

Topics: killer products selling early adopters lean startups