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GullySales

The sales process · Customer research

Every enquiry you lost stopped at a particular step, and you can name it.

A buyer journey is the sequence a person moves through from not knowing your business exists to signing, written as the steps they take rather than the steps you take. Mapping it shows where most of them stop, which is rarely the place the owner expects.

A pull-down wall map of a town with a route strung in thread between five pins, the thread knotted off at the last pin

In one paragraph

A buyer journey is the sequence a person moves through from not knowing your business exists to signing, written as the steps they take rather than the steps you take. Mapping it shows where most of them stop, which is rarely the place the owner expects.

Draw it as a line with stops on it. Saw a board on the ring road, searched the name, opened the website, read two pages, left. Came back nine days later, sent a WhatsApp message at ten at night, got a reply the following afternoon, asked for a price, went quiet.

Written out like that, a journey is a list of moments where a person can walk away, and most businesses lose the same people at the same stop every month. For a job shop it might be the week between sending a sample and hearing anything back. For a diagnostic centre in Jayanagar it is the phone ringing out between one and two.

Take your last fifty enquiries and mark where each one stopped. That is the map. No software, no diagram tool, one spreadsheet and an afternoon with whoever answered those calls.

Customer behaviour explained what pushes a buyer. This arranges the pushes in order, and buyer context, which follows, explains why two people standing at the same stop behave nothing alike.

Where this sits

Stage 2 of 10, customer research. Who buys, why they buy, and what they are comparing you against while they decide.

The stage before
Strategic plan
The stage after
Prospecting

If you want this done for you

Find the exact step where buyers currently give up on you.

The work

What this step is actually like.

  • Use the buyer's words for the stages, not the textbook ones

    Awareness, consideration and decision tell you nothing about where to act. Saw the hoarding, asked the family WhatsApp group, took three quotes to my father, asked for a site visit. Those you can do something about on Monday.

  • The drop is usually at a handover

    Between the advertisement and the person who answers the number on it. Between the receptionist who took the message and the engineer who was meant to ring back. Journeys do not break in the middle of a stage, they break between two people who each assumed the other had it.

  • Half of it happens before you exist to them

    Buyers ask a neighbour, read reviews, look at two competitors and form a shortlist without contacting anybody. You cannot measure that half, so map it from what customers tell you afterwards and accept the map is rougher on the left.

  • Count them, do not estimate them

    Ask five people in the office where enquiries are lost and you get five confident and different answers. Fifty rows in a spreadsheet settles it in an afternoon, and the answer is frequently something nobody suggested.

What we do

What you end up with.

The artefacts this step produces, what each one is for, and how you know it is finished.

  1. The stage line

    Five to seven named stages on one sheet of paper, in the buyer's language, from the first time they hear of you to the order. Write the stages before you look at any data, then correct them once the data disagrees.

    Result: Finished when two people in your office describe the stages the same way without looking at the sheet.

  2. The drop-off count

    One row per enquiry for the last fifty. Columns for source, date, last stage reached, hours until the first reply, number of follow-ups, and what the person said when they stopped.

    Result: Finished when you can say which single stage loses the most people and roughly how many.

  3. One fix per stage

    Against each stage, a single action with a name and a date. Not a project. A different voicemail message, a price sent the same evening, a photograph of the last job attached to the quotation.

    Result: Finished when every stage has exactly one action and none of them needs a budget approval to start.

  4. The reply clock

    A standing record of how long each enquiry waits for its first human answer, kept from now on. It is the one number on the map that moves within a week of anyone paying attention to it.

    Result: Finished when the clock is recorded for every enquiry this month, including the ones that came on WhatsApp after hours.

Why us

Why owners pick GullySales over an agency.

  • Marketing and sales, as one job

    Most agencies stop at the enquiry. We also fix what happens after it: the reply, the follow-up, the quote and the CRM.

  • The person on the first call does the work

    No account managers in between. You are never handed to someone you have not met.

  • A baseline before anything starts

    Your numbers are written down on day one, so every monthly report compares against something honest.

  • The fee in writing, split three ways

    Our time, your media spend and production on separate lines. You always see what goes to us.

  • No lock-in, no guarantees we cannot keep

    Three to six months at a time. We never promise a ranking or a lead count, because nobody controls those.

  • One office, and we say so

    Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru. We work across India by call and WhatsApp and travel when a session needs to be in person.

#257, 3rd floor, Sri Nanjundeshwara Complex, Nagarbhavi 8th Block, Outer Ring Road. How we work.

The offer

Start with a free audit of how you sell.

It is useful on its own, whether or not you hire us.

What you receive

  • A 90-minute call with the person who will do the work
  • A written, scored report on the six places orders leak, within a few working days
  • Every fix ranked by what it returns and what it costs
  • The one thing to do first, and why
  • An honest line on whether you need outside help at all
  • If you do, the scope and the fee in writing

No invoice. No obligation. No sales script.

We call and WhatsApp on this number.

We use your details only to reply to this enquiry. See the privacy policy.

FAQ

Questions owners ask before they call.

Not here? More answers, or ask on WhatsApp.

How many enquiries do we need before the map means anything?
Fifty is enough to see a pattern in most small businesses, and twenty will already show you the worst stage. If your order value is large and you get six enquiries a month, use eighteen months of them instead of waiting.
Is a buyer journey the same thing as a sales funnel?
No. A funnel is your shape, drawn from your side, counting what you did. A journey is their shape, in their order, including the fortnight they spent asking a cousin who had the same work done. The two rarely have the same number of steps.
Our buyers take six months to decide. How do we map that?
Map backwards from the last three orders you won. Sit with the salesperson and reconstruct the dates from the CRM, the call log and the WhatsApp history. A long journey is easier to reconstruct than a short one, because every step left a message behind.
Who should draw this?
The owner, the person who answers the phone and one salesperson, in the same room, in one sitting. Doing it separately produces three maps. The argument between them is the point of the exercise.
When is it worth buying this as a service rather than doing it?
When the honest answers have to come from your customers rather than your team. People say different things to an outsider than to the firm they are about to buy from. The spreadsheet half you should always do yourselves.
How much does it cost?
There is no price list, because the work differs by business. The fee is scoped in the free audit and put in writing before anything starts. For sales work it is mostly our time, with production only where scripts, decks or CRM setup need it.
How long is the contract?
Three to six months at a time. There is no twelve-month lock, and renewal is decided on the numbers against the baseline recorded at the start.
How soon will we see results?
Fixes to reply time and follow-up usually show in weeks, because the enquiries already exist. Process, CRM and training changes show as the team uses them. The monthly report tracks each one against the baseline.
Who will actually do the work?
The person you meet on the audit call. We work from one office in Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru, with no account managers in between.
What do you need from us?
For the audit, last month's enquiries in any format and 90 minutes with whoever handles them. After that, access to the accounts the work touches, such as the website, Google Business Profile or CRM, and time for the monthly review.

Get a free audit of how you sell, and a scored report of where the work is.

Book a free audit