Buying progress is how far the customer’s organization has actually moved toward a purchase decision. It is measured by what the customer side has done and committed to — finishing a trial evaluation, submitting a purchase request, getting onto a committee agenda — not by the sales stage a rep records in the CRM.
Put simply, a sales stage describes how far the rep has gone; buying progress describes how far the customer has gone. In a complex B2B deal, the second decides whether it closes.
What It Is Often Confused With
Buying progress is not the sales stage. “Quote sent” and “Negotiation” are labels for the seller’s process. They show what the rep has done. A quote can be sent while nothing has yet happened inside the customer. Buying progress looks only at the customer side: which decision unit has agreed, who has submitted a request, which condition has been met.
Buying progress is not activity. Five meetings and ten emails show a rep is working hard, not that the customer has moved. If no meeting changed the status of any decision unit, the deal is standing still.
Buying progress is not win probability. The probability in a CRM is often a number filled in automatically from the stage. Buying progress comes from specific evidence, and is closer to “how many gates have been passed, and which remain?”.
An Example
A regional hospital is evaluating new infusion pumps. The rep has sent a quote, and the CRM shows the stage as “Negotiation” — apparently one step from closing.
From the customer side, though: nursing has agreed, the department head is supportive but has not submitted a purchase request, IT is waiting for specifications, and finance and procurement have not been approached. In terms of buying progress, only one of five decision units has really agreed, and the deal is still at a fairly early point. A rep who prepares a contract because the stage says “Negotiation” is wasting effort. Going by buying progress, the next step is to send IT the specifications and start engaging finance.
Read Next
For a full comparison of sales stages and buying progress, and how to judge where a deal stands using customer-side evidence, see sales stages vs buying progress. Buying progress is usually read unit by unit, across the decision-making units, and what holds a unit in place is usually a sales blocker.
VINEQRA records the status of each decision unit, so you see how far the customer has actually moved, not just the stage of your own process. See how VINEQRA works