There is a portion of your customers’ buying cycle that you are probably ignoring today. It occurs long before any discussion of products, services, or RFPs—indeed, it occurs before customers have even begun to think about a purchase.

It’s the point at which customers come to the realization of an important business need—what we call the epiphany phase.

For example, it could be the moment when the executive team realizes that it needs to enter a new market or develop a new product. Or it could be the moment when the business unit leader sees how the innovative application of a newer technology can solve a previously unidentified business problem. It’s a golden moment for a provider to be there to offer valuable advice and support.

Helping customers realize that they have a business need confers a tremendous advantage. You have the opportunity to create a deeper, more enduring relationship with prospects and customers and to influence the direction of the project before competitors have even entered the process—perhaps securing a role as the preferred provider.

But this is about more than winning individual deals. Success in the epiphany phase will give you a reputation as a market leader—and for being two steps ahead of competitors in identifying and addressing important business needs. Market leaders generally command higher margins and increase their percentage of sole-source deals.

The epiphany stage is the opportunity to sell more by doing good—and for marketing to play a larger role in the sales process than ever before. Indeed, marketing will have primary responsibility for creating the environments for customer epiphanies.

But it isn’t easy.

Marketing needs to seed the epiphanies with deep customer and industry research and thought leadership that helps reveal business issues that customers didn’t even know they had.

Marketers are engaging with buyers too late in the game. Long before they begin thinking about buying anything, customers are trying to sense the next issue or problem that they will face in their businesses. They are conducting research, looking for thought leadership, talking to people, and looking for examples that will help them clarify their next move. Marketers need to get involved at this stage–long before a buyer approaches them with an RFP.

These people are not leads. They are researchers looking for content. This requires that marketers become educators and facilitators, actively helping customers articulate a need they may not have known they had. Not until the buyer has identified a need and wishes to make a purchase can marketing move into lead generation mode.

Of course, many marketers do some form of demand generation today. But to take advantage of the epiphany phase, marketers take those efforts to a higher level. Today, customers believe that solution providers are only moderately helpful when it comes to bringing them new ideas and showing them the possibilities to solve business issues. Clearly, there’s more to be done.

Trouble is, most providers have little or no involvement with customers during the epiphany phase. The traditional sales cycle does not kick in until a much later point in the buying process, when customers have already fully articulated the need and begun searching for products and services.

By then, the opportunity to be a preferred provider is gone—you’re just one more company responding to an RFP. More importantly, it’s a lost opportunity to build trust that could carry forward into other deals down the road. We have identified three steps to become a master of the epiphany phase:

1. Refocus your thought leadership strategy. In the epiphany phase, thought leadership should be focused on revealing future trends and articulating the business challenges and opportunities that will likely result from those trends. Thus, marketing owns the epiphany phase. It’s up to marketing to create a research network that generates the trends and business challenges that customers and prospects are looking for at this stage.

2. Align the sales and marketing processes with the customer’s buying process. The goal of the epiphany phase is to use thought leadership to get the attention of customers and prospects so that business developers can get a meeting with them. But the point of that meeting should not be to pitch anything. Meetings during the epiphany phase should be consultative and collaborative. The sales person knows the technology and what other customers have done. The customer knows his business. Together, they can identify solutions and opportunities that neither alone would see.

But don’t be surprised if sales’ initial reaction to the epiphany phase concept is skepticism. From sales people’s perspective, it may seem like little more than a needless lengthening of the sales cycle.

To counteract this criticism, it’s important to line up your sales and marketing processes with the customer’s buying process. By revealing the gap in time between when a prospect recognizes a business need and when sales typically engages them (in the interest phase), it’s easy to demonstrate that the epiphany phase represents a tremendous opportunity to gain an advantage over competitors. It shifts the relationship with the customer from reacting to their requests to helping them discover and respond to the most important business issues they face.

3. Change sales’ emphasis from transactional to consultative selling. The epiphany phase requires that sales takes a more collaborative and consultative approach. But salespeople sometimes resist the shift to a client-centric selling process because it requires that they become educated on much more than the company’s products and services. They need to develop deep knowledge of customers’ industries, competitors, and regulatory issues. This knowledge is critical in order to offer the kind of unique insight that reveals needs that customers cannot envision or articulate themselves. It also requires a high degree of integration between the marketing and sales processes so that customers’ needs, once articulated, don’t languish—or worse, fall into the hands of a competitor.

The goal for salespeople shifts from making the sale to building trust. Customers invest their trust in the relationship when they see that a provider is willing and able to provide knowledge and experience that rivals and exceeds their own—in other words, to put the needs of the customer first. That trust increases when the provider does not allow knowledge and experience to be bounded by its own four walls.

We’re working on developing these themes more deeply over the next few weeks. What do you think?