One thing that has bothered me about sales training for a long time is how much we focus on selling and how little we focus on buying.
We teach salespeople how to prospect, pitch, run discovery, handle objections, negotiate and close. We teach them sales methodologies, CRM processes, competitive positioning and product features. But how often do we actually teach them how their customer makes a buying decision?
That is a very different question.
A salesperson might spend weeks or even months trying to move one deal forward. From the salesperson’s perspective, the objective seems relatively straightforward: identify the opportunity, build the business case, get the stakeholders aligned and close the deal.
The buyer, however, may be dealing with an entirely different level of complexity.
They may need to involve multiple stakeholders, justify the investment internally, find or allocate a budget, work with procurement, get finance approval, involve legal and security teams, satisfy technology requirements and convince senior management that the decision is worth the risk. Depending on the size of the purchase, there may also be internal politics, competing priorities and concerns about what happens if the decision turns out to be wrong.
The salesperson is trying to win a deal.
The buyer is trying to make a decision they can defend.
That’s a very different problem.
Salespeople Understand Their Product. Do They Understand the Buyer?
This is where I think many salespeople struggle.
They know their product inside out. They know the features, pricing, differentiators and competitive battlecards. They can demonstrate the platform and answer detailed product questions.
But they don’t always know enough about the business they are selling into.
They may know the person sitting across the table is the decision-maker, but not understand who else can influence that decision. They may know the customer’s business problem but not know how that problem connects to the organisation’s larger priorities. They may know the customer has a budget, but not understand where that budget comes from, who controls it or what competing initiatives are fighting for the same money.
Consider a large enterprise purchase worth ₹1 crore or $1 million.
For the salesperson, that may be a very large deal.
For the organisation buying it, however, the amount is only one part of the decision. The buyer may have to answer questions such as: Why this investment? Why now? What happens if we don’t make the investment? What alternatives did we consider? What risks does this introduce? Who owns the outcome? How will success be measured? What happens if the implementation fails?
The salesperson may have spent months getting the opportunity to this stage.
The buyer may still be trying to figure out whether making the decision is safe.
The Buyer Has More Than One Problem to Solve
This is why understanding the buyer’s business matters so much.
A sales conversation often starts with the problem the salesperson’s product is designed to solve. But the buyer is usually dealing with a much larger set of problems around that purchase.
Imagine a technology leader considering a new enterprise platform. The salesperson may focus on automation, efficiency, integration and cost savings. Those things may be important, but the buyer could also be thinking about implementation risk, internal adoption, security, data migration, compliance, vendor reliability and whether their own leadership team will support the decision.
The product may solve the stated problem.
The buying process may still fail because the organisation isn’t comfortable with everything else surrounding the decision.
This is one reason deals that appear to be “almost closed” suddenly disappear.
The salesperson thinks the opportunity has stalled.
The buyer may simply have discovered that the organisation isn’t ready to make the decision.
The buyer didn’t disappear. The buying process simply wasn’t understood.
Business Acumen Should Be Part of Sales Training
This is why I strongly believe that business acumen should have a much bigger role in sales onboarding and sales training.
Before teaching a new salesperson everything about the product, teach them about the business they are selling into.
Help them understand how their target customers make money. What does the leadership team care about? What are different stakeholders measured on? Where do budgets come from? What risks are they trying to avoid? What happens when a major investment needs approval? Which departments are likely to get involved? What happens internally after the salesperson leaves the meeting?
These questions change the quality of a sales conversation.
Instead of asking only about the customer’s immediate requirement, the salesperson starts understanding the business context behind it. Discovery becomes less about collecting information and more about understanding how the problem affects the organisation and the people responsible for solving it.
The business case also becomes stronger because the salesperson can connect the proposed solution to the outcomes that actually matter to the buyer.
The Best Salespeople Understand the Business Behind the Deal
I’ve always believed that the best salespeople aren’t necessarily the ones who know the most about selling.
They are the ones who understand the most about the business their buyers are trying to run.
That doesn’t mean every salesperson needs to become a finance expert or understand every operational detail of a customer’s organisation. It means developing enough business understanding to recognise that a purchase is rarely just a transaction between a seller and a buyer.
It is an organisational decision.
There are people who want the solution, people who have to justify it, people who have to approve it, people who have to implement it and people who will ultimately be held accountable for the outcome.
Once you understand that, your sales conversations change. Your questions become better. Your discovery becomes more meaningful. Your business case becomes stronger. You become better at identifying risks inside the opportunity, rather than assuming a positive conversation means the deal is progressing.
Most importantly, you stop looking at the deal only from the seller’s perspective.
You start seeing it from the buyer’s side.
And that may be one of the biggest gaps in modern sales training.
We spend enormous amounts of time teaching salespeople how to sell. Perhaps we should spend a little more time teaching them how organisations actually buy.
Because ultimately, selling is about persuading someone.
Buying is about getting an organisation comfortable enough to make a decision.
And in B2B sales, that is usually much more complicated.
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