Behavior Hacking, Episode 4: Decoding Seller and Buyer Behaviors

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Enabling Good Buying Behavior

Gray Hardell: 

One of the things that you talk about a lot is buying behavior and what happens outside of when the buyer and seller are actually talking to each other. Why is that important for the other teams in the organization to understand, like marketing and customer success?

Nate Nasralla: 

Yeah, so I think if we realign the way we think about the selling process, it's essentially enabling good buying behavior, like enabling the buying team to move closer and closer to a solution, ideally yours, right?

Ideally. Then what you can do is say this process, our sales process, actually looks more like creating a buying journey or experience, which then is a broader definition to include other people inside of the go-to-market role. Because if you're just talking about the stages in Salesforce, who do you think of? You think of just sellers, right?

Gray Hardell: 

A hundred percent.

Nate Nasralla: 

And if we begin to say, okay, let’s actually look at stage by stage by stage. What is the one point of evidence, the buying behavior, that we need to see to say, okay, they're moving closer toward the outcome of go-live or closed-won? 

Then you can say, well, what does product marketing need to do to help shape the way people think about the tie-in between here's what our solution does and here's what you're trying to solve for. How do we create a broader category-level narrative that we're sharing to help people put themselves into a place where they're like, yeah, that actually is what I'm looking for. 

And so you can begin to say, okay, all the way from early, early top of the funnel, when you're totally unknown but think you have some type of problem, all the way down to go-live with CS. Maybe there's a role for them to play pre-sales too, of like, are we actually setting up and scoping this correctly based on what we're seeing other customers do? 

So I think we start by redefining and saying, what is the sales process exactly? It's building influence in the buying journey to enable a series of behaviors. Then we can look at the different roles for our go-to-market team to play within that.

The Role of Marketing and Customer Success in Pipeline Progression

Gray Hardell: 

I have a controversial opinion. Well, I don't think it's that controversial, but maybe others do, which is that marketing and customer success — their jobs are just as much about pipeline progression as anything else. 

Because what is the first thing you do when someone says, “Hey, I'm thinking about buying this software or buying this product?” You go to their website. That's the first thing they do. That's already when the deal has started. There are certainly abilities for marketing and CS to play in pipeline progression, and that's why a cohesive narrative, in my opinion as a product marketer, is so incredibly important.

Nate Nasralla: 

Yeah. And I would say so, like, as a founder, I have a little bit of CS in me, I have a little bit of sales, I have a little bit of marketing, like, I do a little bit of everything. And I will tell you, the deals that close the fastest, the largest, and are most successfully adopting the product, where do they start?

They're typically reading the book. They're coming in, consuming a lot of content. Their thinking is aligned, which then facilitates a really meaningful set of conversations in the sales process that lead to behavior. That leads to fast product adoption. So to say I could do all of that without any type of marketing or CS work, just as a seller, it's not going to happen. It's a full funnel.

Changing Seller Behavior to Facilitate Buyer Behavior

Gray Hardell: 

So that kind of gets us into selling behavior and sellers actually understanding the entire go-to-market as well and understanding the components that they play. But how do we change seller behavior to actually facilitate the buyer behavior that we want to see throughout a more traditional sales process?

Nate Nasralla: 

Let’s take a simple example. Most teams will have some type of proposal stage inside their Salesforce, right? Call it stage four or whatever it is. Seller sends a proposal. If we redefine that to say, well, who's reading the proposal? Did they help write it? Is it being shared around internally? All actions that the seller can't do, like it's defined by what the buyer is doing. 

Then we can back out and say, okay, what needs to be true about how the seller behaves and interacts to drive that behavior of I'm proud to champion and share this around with the rest of the buying team and the executive? Well, then you could say even earlier, maybe the seller needs to go back and start building this with them, feature their language, right? 

And so if you just look at stage by stage, what is the single thing that if the buyer does this, we'll say, okay, great, they're moving forward. Then you can go back to the prior stages and say, okay, what does the seller need to do again to influence and enable that?

Strategically Recrafting Exit Criteria

Gray Hardell: 

So as a RevOps leader, if I want to think about strategically recrafting my exit criteria, how do I create a partnership to actually understand what that should be?

Nate Nasralla: 

The first thing I would do is talk to customers who have already bought to understand what they were doing behind the scenes in order to evaluate and then go live with the software. Look for patterns across all of those responses and be very detailed and specific. Understand the process that your customers are taking versus what your sellers are doing. Then begin to look at the gaps and say, okay, where do we have a bunch of stuff clumped up inside of our stages where actually, to go from three to four, there's a whole series of things the buying team is doing inside. 

That, I would say, is one of the more common things I see: stages are not granular enough, and so we're not able to get good data on what the journey actually looks like. Talking to customers is usually the right answer for a good first step.

Gray Hardell:

Exactly. I always think about it as deals that we want to replicate. If we could run that deal over and over again, would we? 

Understanding and dissecting it and taking a really intentional approach to understanding what made that deal so good, what we did, but also what they did. That's actually the more important aspect we want to focus on.

Nate Nasralla: 

Yes, one hundred percent.