The good news is that investing just a little bit of time and effort to understand and address real-world buying barriers delivers wonderfully asymmetric returns, because doing so empowers you to develop high-impact messaging, effective content, and efficient sales processes.

In practically all of our client engagements, I ask about ‘buying barriers’.

Most times, I receive a quizzical expression in response; occasionally, I’ll hear something like, “Well, we documented the buying process, and we built our sales process around that.”

Documenting the buying process is a good start, but it’s incomplete.

The buying process (or its superset, the customer experience journey) is the codified, step-by-step process or sequence of milestones that a prospect follows. Documenting the buying process is a good start, but it’s incomplete because doing so does little or nothing to capture the information needs, organizational blockades, and other complications that arise in the messiness of the real world. If you’ve structured your sales process around a squeaky-clean, perfect-world buying process, then you’re missing an enormous opportunity to improve results.

If you’ve structured your sales process around a squeaky-clean, perfect-world buying process, then you’re missing an enormous opportunity to improve results.

What you need to do next is to address buying barriers. If you haven’t really looked into buying barriers yet, then you’re note alone – when we surveyed Waterloo Region’s technology marketers for the Waterloo Region Technology Marketing Spotlight, only 17% reported that they understood their prospects’ buying barriers “Very well”.

The good news is that investing just a little bit of time and effort to understand and address real-world buying barriers delivers wonderfully asymmetric returns, because doing so empowers you to develop high-impact messaging, effective content, and efficient sales processes.

In this post, I hope to show:

1. What buying barriers are, and why understanding them is so important
2. How to identify and document them
3. How to deal with them

Let’s look at that first point.

Fine, What’s a “Buying Barrier”?

A buying barrier is anything that, from your prospect’s perspective, stops or slows their purchase (or adoption, in non-commercial relationships) of a solution.

A buying barrier is anything that, from your prospect’s perspective, stops or slows their purchase of a solution.

Understanding buying barriers puts you in position to:

• Increase demand by crafting high-impact messaging that specifically and proactively addresses major barriers
• Enable self-service research and improve sales enablement by producing effective content to proactively address and reactively respond to barriers
• Improve sales efficiency by structuring your sales process to better enable your prospects’ real-world buying experience

It should be pretty clear that those are positive outcomes in and of themselves; taken together, though, and extended over time, they let you leave your competition in the dust because prospects would much rather buy from the solution provider who ‘gets it’ and has anticipated their every need.

Prospects would much rather buy from the solution provider who ‘gets it’ and has anticipated their every need.

There are three important points in the definition that deserve some small elaboration…

Take the Prospect’s Perspective

Why’s it important to talk about buying barriers rather than selling barriers? Because our job isn’t to sell stuff to a prospect – our job is to help the prospect solve a problem.

Taking your prospect’s perspective is crucial to developing an outside-in understanding of the things that stymie their attempts to find a solution to a problem.

As David Nour said in Co-Create, “It is not your customer’s job to buy from you. It is your job to find out what would make for an exceptional experience from their point of view, and invite them into it.”

Taking your prospect’s perspective is crucial to developing an outside-in understanding of the things that stymie their attempts to find a solution to a problem. Especially in larger organizations and those with longer, more complex sales cycles, this outside-in understanding lets us develop a collaborative relationship with our prospect (who might turn into a ‘champion’).

By contrast, the mistaken, arrogant, self-centred approach of looking at things mostly from our perspective and our desired outcomes creates a more adversarial environment in which we focus on ‘selling to’, in which we don’t have the context to empathize with the prospect’s challenges, in which we get frustrated at the prospect rather than the barriers, and in which we waste our efforts on the wrong things.

Stopping and Slowing

Obviously, a barrier that stops a purchase is something we want to avoid, but barriers that slow things down are also horribly damaging.

The former are easy to identify – look at drop-off points, and closed-loss stats, and so on – while the latter are often overlooked as unavoidable aspects of doing business.

Your prospect probably wants a solution to a problem sooner rather than later. Most slow-downs aren’t deliberate or strategic; they’re the result of buying barriers.

But let me ask you: if all other things are kept equal, then wouldn’t you want to close your deals faster? In six months instead of nine months, or in four weeks instead of six? If doing so didn’t take any extra effort on your part, then it’s a no-brainer. Understanding buying barriers can deliver these kinds of results.

Remember, your prospect probably wants a solution to a problem sooner rather than later. Most slow-downs aren’t deliberate or strategic – they’re the result of buying barriers.

Anything can be a Buying Barrier

Buying barriers come in all shapes and sizes. No one barrier is any more or less legitimate than any other, because the impact is the same.

Buying barriers come in all shapes and sizes; quite literally, a buying barrier can be anything, so long as – from your prospect’s perspective – it pumps the brakes on the buying process.

For instance, here are some barriers I’ve encountered:

• Information gaps: functional (“Does your product do X?”), non-functional (“What’s your data privacy model?”), technical (“What’s your API to connect to our logging system?”), non-technical (“Have you deployed this solution before? For whom?”)
• Internal purchase processes: long tender periods, powerful and ‘uncooperative’ procurement organizations
• Misconceptions and misunderstandings: whether shaped by knowledge gaps (“We just don’t think we need it.”), poor prior experiences with other vendors (“We tried X before, and it didn’t work.”), etc.
• Budget cycles: “I’d love to buy it, but I don’t have the budget; I’ll request budget for next year, so let’s talk in 8 months.”
• Lack of, or need to build, internal support: “I’d love to buy it, but I need to get my VP’s support,”, or “I need to make sure engineering doesn’t block the project.”
• Doubts about business case and value: “I need to show an ROI of less than 18 months.”
• Existing or planned projects: “We’ve had an ongoing project to address this for three years…it’ll be hard to change course now.”
• Market dynamics: things that shape seasonal variations in purchase patterns
• Vacations: all-of-a-sudden (but predictably), everyone who needs to sign-off on the decision is on vacation

…and the list could go on. For your purposes, no one barrier is any more or less legitimate than any other, because the impact is the same; of course, some are easier to address than others.

Identifying and Documenting Buying Barriers

The first steps towards becoming an organization that laughs in the face of buying barriers are to identify them and to document them.

Knowing is Half the Battle

The real technique comes in asking the right questions: if you just ask, “What are your buying barriers?”, then you’ll get a blank stare; but if you ask, “What things can slow down a purchase decision?”, then you’d better have your pencil ready.

Identifying buying barriers is a pretty straightforward exercise: speak with people who experience them, either directly or indirectly.

In practice, that means:

• Talking to customers – especially your champions, who’ll likely be more open
• Talking to your customer-facing, revenue-driving teams – sales (account managers, BDRs and inside sales, sales engineers, leaders/executives), professional services, renewals, and anyone else who might be involved in any of those discussions or meetings (e.g., product management, product marketing, etc.)

Even just a half-dozen twenty-minute conversations will likely be enough, because the important stuff will pop out.

Even just a half-dozen twenty-minute conversations will likely be enough, because the important stuff will pop out.

The real technique comes in asking the right questions: if you just ask, “What are your buying barriers?”, then you’ll get a blank stare; but if you ask, “What things can slow down a purchase decision?”, then you’d better have your pencil ready.

To create a complete picture, I’ll usually ask a bunch of related questions:

• What process (do you / do your prospects) follow when you’ve identified a problem and need to find a solution?
• What factors can crop up that slows this process down?
• Can you walk me through a couple of real-world examples?
• What questions (do you / do your prospects) ask during the engagement?
• What misconceptions do your prospects have that can derail things, or that need to be addressed?
• Who else is involved in the evaluation? In the purchase sign-off? How many layers of the organization? Which departments?
• What’s the budget cycle?
• How (do you / do your prospects) prioritize projects internally?
• How (do you / do your prospects) calculate ROI or develop a business case?
• Why have projects stopped or stalled in the past?
• Is ‘no decision’ an outcome?

Asking all of these questions (and diving into the closed-loss data) comes at the problem from different angles, and provides a pretty comprehensive view of the hurdles that need to be overcome.

It’s funny – sometimes I’ll ask basically the same question at different points in the conversation, and I’ll get a new answer the second time around, just because the thinking juices are flowing. As the brain activates and focuses on the problem, it starts to recall more things and see more connections.

See, the thing is, most organizations have a feeling of the buying barriers they encounter, but they’ve just never thought of them in those terms, the knowledge is scattered/shared, and they’ve never written them down. I was meeting a client the other day and we were talking about buying barriers, and he said, “We probably already know of most of these…but we’ve never really written them down.”

And that’s a crucial point: writing down buying barriers – I mean really documenting them with discipline – empowers you to address them. They go from being annoying, but unavoidable, characteristics of your sales experience to specific items that can be overcome with conscious effort.

And that’s a crucial point: writing down buying barriers – really documenting them with discipline – I mean empowers you to address them. They go from being annoying, but unavoidable, characteristics of your sales experience to specific items that can be overcome with conscious effort.

Just Enough Documentation

You don’t need reams of paper, complex spreadsheets, or endless wiki pages to document your buying barriers – everything can be captured in a simple table.

So open Excel, or Numbers, or Sheets, or whatever, and create a table with these columns and a row per buying barrier:

• Name and Description (summary description alone is fine): enough information that someone unfamiliar with a buying barrier can understand the issue
• Severity: is a particular buying barrier a deal blocker? a staller? an inconvenience? a gigantic PITA?
• Frequency with which a buying barrier’s encountered: not some fancy histogram, just something as coarse as Almost Always, Most of the Time, Sometimes, Rarely
• Markets: some buying barriers pop up in some markets and not in others, or maybe they appear in large customers but not small ones; it shouldn’t be hard to develop a shorthand notation to capture in what circumstances you’ll encounter a particular buying barrier

From your conversations, you’ll probably already have an idea of what to put in the Severity, Frequency, and Markets columns, but you could also build the table with just the Name and Description columns completed and then send it around for folks to fill in the blanks. Then just compile the results, and you’re ready to rock.

Buying Barriers? Pfft!

Let’s go ahead and add two more columns to that table: Strategy and Resources.

We’ll use the Strategy column to briefly capture the general approach to address each particular buying barrier; give it some thought, and jot something down, even if it’s just vague directions about what to aim for and what to avoid. You can always tweak it later as you learn more and develop more resources.

We’ll use the Resources column to house links to specific pieces of content (whether public-facing or not) that help to execute on our strategy. As you list specific buying barriers, ask yourself if you have any existing material that can address, whether partially or wholly, the barrier in question.

These two columns work in tandem to help you overcome buying barriers. Your near-term mission is to make sure every Strategy and Resources cell has something in there, and completing them should be prioritized by examining the Severity, Frequency, and Markets columns.

It’s likely that most of the benefit you’re going to experience will come from effectively addressing just a handful of buying barriers.

It’s likely that most of the benefit you’re going to experience will come from effectively addressing just a handful of buying barriers, so take care of the big items first, and maybe throw in a low-hanging fruit here and there to get some quick wins if the bigger ones will take some time.

Broadly and imperfectly speaking, your buying barriers can be divided up into a number of categories, for instance:

• Informational: barriers that show up as questions, misconceptions, knowledge gaps, requests for real-world examples, etc.
• Procedural: barriers resulting from gates and hurdles within the prospect’s buying process
• Commercial: all things pricing, licensing, business case, ROI, etc.
• Solution: mismatches between the prospect’s problem and your solution

Of those four, informational barriers are usually the most straightforward (easiest, fastest, cheapest) to overcome, because it comes down to getting the right messages in the right content, which is really just an effort and prioritization exercise.

As for the others: legitimate solution barriers are usually the toughest, because they might require some engineering or professional services effort; legitimate commercial barriers can be thorny, and might require you to revisit your pricing or licensing model; procedural barriers just kind’ve exist, and you won’t have much ability to influence them, so your best bet here is to make sure your sales engagement model matches the prospect’s internal procedure and anticipates every need.

Of the four, informational barriers are usually the most straightforward (easiest, fastest, cheapest) to overcome, because it comes down to getting the right messages in the right content, which is really just an effort thing.

Conveniently, in many cases a barrier might appear to be one thing but it’s really informational. For instance:

• If your champion needs to win over the department VP, that might appear as a procedural complication, but it could be addressed by providing the right information in the right format (e.g., a case study that shows real-world ROI for a similar organization)
• Maybe there’s a misconception about product fit (i.e., perceived solution barrier) that can be addressed with a clear use case description and success story that shows the real-world utility of your solution
• Doubts about pricing models and value (i.e., perceived commercial barriers) can be suitably lessened with a case study or a business case calculation

In practice, a lot of informational barriers can be overcome through a combination of messaging and content.

For instance, some buying barriers might be proactively addressed with small revisions to your messaging to make certain points clear, or to explicitly mention things that always come up.

Other barriers can be addressed with specific types of content:

• Corporate Overview material can overcome barriers relating to concerns about company stability and legitimacy, or a general lack of market awareness
• Solution Overviews and Use Case Guides can overcome misunderstandings or lack of awareness about what problems you solve
• Product Overviews and deeper Product Guides provide detailed information that fills blanks about what your products are, how they work, and what features make them unique, all in service to solving market problems
• Platform Overviews and deeper Platform Guides often take a more technical approach and address barriers like questions or concerns around standards, interoperability (e.g., APIs), deployment models, scalability, and other specifications
• Technology Briefs shine a spotlight on a particularly important piece of your solution, which help to overcome misconceptions about how your solution compares to the competition, or whether or not you can solve a particularly thorny issue
• Success Stories provide evidence of your ability to solve problems in the real-world, overcoming barriers about your track record, qualifications, and real-world value or results

Having these basics in place means you can quickly provide answers to prospects (whether by sending them the resource directly, pointing them to the answer on your website, or copying-and-pasting into an email verbatim from the authoritative source); if these pieces are freely available on your website (hint: they should be), then your prospects can self-serve to quickly find answers to basic inquiries.

Sometimes, you’ll need to produce specialty content that specifically addresses a particular buying barrier. For instance:

• Blog Content: you can quite literally write blog posts that address them (e.g., “The Top Five Misconceptions About X”, or “How to Get Great Adoption from Day One”)
• Whitepapers: shape how a prospect views an issue or problem domain, which is especially useful if you’re getting the same difficult question relatively frequently (if you always need to get Person X on a call when a particular question comes up, consider taking the time to really answer the question well in a whitepaper or technical showcase)
• Technical Showcases: explain your technological solution in detail, ideally relating it to considerations or requirements exposited in a related whitepaper
• Case Studies: deeper versions of the relatively lightweight Success Stories, that might include data analysis, ROI calculations, technical diagrams, etc.

Crucially, make sure this material is put to use! That means:

• Putting it on your website: except for extremely high-value ‘premium’ content or NDA-level proprietary information, having your information available to prospects, customers, and search engines offers far more benefits than drawbacks…so don’t be shy
• Putting them in your champions’ hands: aside from actually creating the content pieces, this part might be the most important…your champion wants to buy a solution to a problem, give’m what they need to win over internal doubters
• Building it into the sales process: I never expected our sales teams to remember our messages and technical details; however, I did expect them to remember where they could find the material and when/how to use it within the sales process
• Promoting it: particularly if one of your buying barriers is a lack of awareness

Summing Up

Identifying, documenting, and taking steps to consciously address buying barriers are together a terrific use of your organization’s resources, because they direct efforts towards very specific issues that are holding back your sales.

To recap:

1. A buying barrier is anything that, from your prospect’s perspective, stops or slows their purchase of a solution. Understanding buying barriers puts you in a position to increase demand, enable self-service, improve sales enablement, and improve sales efficiency.
2. To identify buying barriers, speak with your champions and your team members who participate in customer-facing, revenue-generating activities, and ask a range of questions about the factors that can slow or stop a sale; to develop a complete picture, be sure to come at the issue from different angles, with different phrasing, etc. To document buying barriers, create a simple table with the headings: Name, Description, Severity, Frequency, Markets, Strategy, and Resources
3. Dealing with different types of buying barriers requires different approaches. Informational barriers are the easiest to address, as it basically comes down to first getting the right messages in the right content, then making sure that content gets in front of your prospects. Legitimate procedural, commercial, and solution barriers call for specific attention, but sometimes information barriers masquerade as one of the others, so be on the look-out! And, if creating or using content is part of your approach to overcoming barriers, make sure your prospects see it!

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Featured/Header photo credit: Photo by Alyssa Ledesma on Unsplash