Their own process

Every buyer is doing something when they buy. In consumer markets that something is usually short and private. In project markets it is long, formal and shared between several organisations — a building, a tender, a certification, a funding round — and the purchase is one small event inside it.

The distinction from the buying stages is the whole point of this module. The buying stages are the journey you have with the customer. This is the journey they are on regardless of you, and it decides when your journey is even allowed to begin. Where the two are drawn on top of one another, the map explains timing that the funnel alone cannot.

Formal requirements are the part most often missing. A phase frequently carries obligations the customer must satisfy — a specification, a standard, a documentation format, a classification — and a supplier who cannot satisfy them is excluded before any argument about value is heard. In Danish construction the ICT specification is exactly this kind of obligation: it is set early, it binds everyone downstream, and it settles who can be considered.

The reason to record all this is not the map. It is that the customer’s process presses on your own business, and until the pressure is written down it is felt without being named. A market that demands a documentation format is a market where documentation is a product, where someone has to produce it, where finding it is part of the experience, and where usage of it is a number worth watching. The same company selling the same thing into a market without that requirement has a different business, and neither of them usually notices why.

The map is worth drawing even when it is partly wrong. A phase list assembled from three conversations and marked as uncertain is more useful than the shared assumption it replaces, because it can be corrected.