How to lose big – why high-maintenance behaviour will scupper your deal

We're launching the first wave of our Customer Buying Index on 2nd June. It analyses the buying cycle for the biggest deals at the world's biggest companies - who's involved, what their drivers are, and how to most effectively target and influence them. It’s a tool-set that enables data-driven recommendations on how best to support large deals, depending on what you're aiming to sell and where. The data-sets have been designed to identify specific strategies for pipeline velocity, larger deal sizes and ambitious conversion rates.

This is wave one and we'll be updating it in the future to add trend analysis. The Customer Buying Index codifies a decade of work here at Momentum helping our clients increase their probability of winning.

The launch of the study at CBX2020 will also see leaders come together online to discuss in detail the reasons some deals cut through and others miss the cut completely.

In this exclusive preview from the report, we can reveal that top buyers place a high premium on how easy you are to do business with – inferring your future relationship from the way you act during the buying cycle.

Just as with the missing of proposal deadlines, which we discussed in last week’s blog, being difficult to work with is another seemingly obvious faux pas that vendors are making time and again with huge implications for their ability to secure deals.

The simple matter of slow response times to calls and emails during the pre-sale stage of the process is a deal-breaker for 39% of major purchasing decisionmakers – who told the survey that this would result in a vendor being eliminated.

This takes on an even greater significance during the purchase process phase of the cycle, when sluggish response times will lead to 51% of leaders discounting the vendor from their thinking.

Changing meeting times repeatedly, is another piece of high-maintenance behaviour to avoid – over half (52%) of big buyers say this will slow down or stop their purchase decision completely.

Just how long is a reasonable time to respond, and how many meetings can you afford to postpone before the opportunity is lost? Ease of business will be just one of the topics discussed in-depth by purchasing decisionmakers at MomentumABM’s CBX2020 – a free digital event on 2nd June.

Leaders from sectors including automotive, finance, professional services, retail and consumer goods, technology, telecoms and utilities have given their views and many will be online to share their experiences in more detail.

From the triggers that lead large enterprises to consider a purchase; to the internal dynamics that drive their decision making; to the support that they find most useful from vendors; to the factors most likely to turn a purchase into a long-term partnership; buyers will share their perspectives on every stage of the process.

To receive the full report and participate in the discussions with top buying influencers, register your place now here.