3 Reasons to Get Your Sales Timing Right

Football season is long over, but imagine some poor wide receiver who missed that memo. He waited until today to say, “OK, I’m suiting up, going out there, and I’m ready to catch a touchdown pass.”

Wouldn’t he look pretty foolish trotting onto the field and wondering where everybody was? He’d have to wait a while before making that reception — in fact, he wouldn’t even have a chance for quite some time.

He’d be in the right place, but when your timing is that far off, it barely even matters — much the same way mistiming your top prospects’ needs in the B2B buying cycle can take you out of the game, and leave you sitting on the bench waiting to get back in.

OK, so a professional football player would never make a mistake on that scale — but is it any more absurd than expecting a sales prospect to just wait to make a purchase until you show up? And yet, so many suppliers run into just that mindset and wonder why they’re not landing the leads they want.

When you put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and really think about how industrial purchasing works, you can see how important timing is for making that big sale — the one you’ve been angling for that can really change your business. Let’s look a bit further at the reasons why:

1. Buyers only change suppliers for a good reason. 

It’s rare that an existing partnership between a buyer and a supplier would dissolve over something like pricing or an out-of-the-blue quality issue. The list of reasons that a buyer would seek out a new supplier for anything from raw materials to MRO goods is very short — that’s why it’s so critical to take advantage when the chance does present itself. Even for items like new machinery, the need only arises every several years.

2. Buyers can’t afford a supply gap.

There can’t be any downtime when changing suppliers. The industrial B2B buying cycle can be lengthy, but when they have to, a buyer is going to start the process as soon as possible. The window of opportunity to get in at the early stages of the cycle is very small.

3. Experienced buyers know where to find suppliers.

Traditional search engines don’t work well for buyers conducting new supplier discovery, so they’re using them less and less. It’s important for you to establish a presence in the channels that do work for buyers — content marketing efforts like informational white papers, your company blog, social media outreach, a cohesive email marketing strategy, and a listing on the Thomasnet.com platform. By providing buyers with information that’s useful for their jobs — going beyond a mere sales pitch— you make your value and utility as a business partner known.

The nature of today’s industrial searching and buying process makes it impossible to know just when your ideal prospect might be searching for a supplier like you — the only way to be sure that your timing is right is to start sharing your content and information now, and continue to build on it.