Buying Checklist Examples

As a seller, a buying checklist is a powerful tool to guide your buyers through the decision-making process, especially in B2B sales where decisions are complex and involve multiple stakeholders. Here’s how and when to use a buying checklist to nudge buyers toward your solution (if it’s the right fit):

Early in the Sales Process (During Buyer Research): Share a buying checklist early on to help your buyer identify key decision criteria. By providing a structured framework, you position yourself as a helpful, trusted advisor while subtly steering the conversation toward the strengths of your solution.

• Example: Include criteria like “ease of implementation” or “scalable pricing,” ensuring that your solution stands out when they’re ticking boxes.

When Buyers Are Comparing Options: Buyers will inevitably compare you to competitors. Give them a checklist that ensures they’re evaluating solutions based on metrics you excel in. This keeps your product top of mind while keeping the focus on what really matters to their business.

• Pro Tip: Add a column for ROI, and provide pre-filled numbers or templates to make your solution’s value crystal clear.
  

Facilitating Stakeholder Alignment: Decision-making often involves multiple people, and it’s easy for buyers to get bogged down in internal discussions. A buying checklist can be shared with the buying team to align priorities, streamline conversations, and ensure they’re evaluating solutions objectively.

• Tip: Include prompts for things like “does this solution align with our current tech stack?” and “can this vendor provide references in our industry?”

During the Final Stages (Pre-Purchase Review): When your buyer is close to making a decision, a checklist can help them feel confident about moving forward with you. It ensures they’ve considered every factor, from pricing to customer testimonials, and reinforces the value you bring to the table.

• Example: Use your checklist to highlight must-haves (that your product delivers) and nice-to-haves (that you also cover).

With Dock or a Similar Tool: Embed your buying checklist into a centralized workspace like Dock. This way, buyers can interact with the checklist alongside supporting materials, like ROI calculators, videos, FAQs, and testimonials—all of which make it easier for them to choose you.

By proactively sharing a buying checklist, you guide the buying process, reduce decision-making friction, and build trust. You’re not just pitching a product—you’re helping your buyers make a smarter, faster, and more confident decision (one that just happens to favor your solution).

Using a tool like Dock can enhance the process by embedding your checklist into a centralized workspace, along with supporting materials like ROI calculators, videos, and FAQs. 

Additionally, you can access analytics on who on the buying committee is looking at it to tell if the deal is progressing and whether or not people are generally engaging with that content.

A well-designed buying checklist should cover all the key elements of the purchasing process while keeping the buyer’s priorities in mind. Here are some must-have sections:

1. Criteria for Success: Outline what the product or service needs to achieve, whether it’s reducing costs, improving efficiency, or solving a specific pain point.
2. Pricing and ROI: Include sections for evaluating pricing models, potential ROI, and total cost of ownership.
3. Features and Functionality: Ensure buyers assess features that meet their needs, including integration capabilities and scalability.
4. Stakeholder Input: Add a section for gathering feedback and approval from all key decision-makers.
5. Customer References and Case Studies: Prompt buyers to look for success stories or reach out to existing customers for validation.
6. ‍Implementation and Support: Include a checklist for assessing onboarding ease and ongoing support options.

1. Customize for Your Buyers: A generic checklist won’t work for everyone. Tailor your checklist to the specific buyer's needs, whether they’re evaluating SaaS, hardware, or consulting services.
2. Keep It Simple and Organized: A checklist with too many steps can overwhelm buyers. Focus on key priorities and break the checklist into easy-to-follow sections.
3. Embed in Dock Sales Rooms: With Dock, you can create a tailored digital workspace where the buying checklist sits alongside other helpful resources, like pricing quotes, product videos, and testimonials. Buyers can access everything they need in one place.
4. Make It Shareable: Buyers often need to loop in others, so ensure your checklist is easy to distribute and collaborate on.
5. ‍Focus on Decision-Making Needs: Include practical tools like calculators, use cases, and benchmarks that directly help buyers make confident decisions.

1. Too Many Details: Overloading your checklist with excessive items can distract buyers. Keep it focused on what’s most important.
2. Neglecting Stakeholders: Failing to account for input from decision-makers can delay the process. Include sections for stakeholder alignment.
3. Missing ROI Metrics: Buyers need to justify purchases internally. Make sure your checklist includes items for evaluating ROI and cost-benefit analysis.
4. Ignoring Post-Purchase Needs: Don’t stop at the purchase decision—include items for implementation and onboarding.
5. ‍Not Tracking Engagement: Use tools like Dock to monitor how buyers interact with your checklist and other resources. If they’re skipping certain sections, you’ll know what to adjust.

Sharing buying checklists effectively within your organization is critical for ensuring sales teams and marketing teams are equipped to use them consistently and effectively. Here’s how to do it:

• Store Checklists in Dock: Centralize all your buying checklist examples in Dock’s content library to make them easy for both sales and marketing teams to find and use. With Dock, your checklists won’t get buried in email threads or scattered across shared drives. Plus, you can keep all versions updated in one place, so your team is always working with the most relevant and accurate resources.
• Train Sales Teams on Usage: A buying checklist is only useful if your sales reps know how to use it. Hold short training sessions to walk your team through the structure and purpose of each checklist. Show them how to customize checklists for specific b2b buyers or industries. For example, SaaS buyers may need a checklist focused on integrations and ROI, while a hardware buyer might prioritize installation and support. Encourage your sales reps to use checklists as part of their sales process to guide conversations and keep buyers aligned.
• Create Marketing and Sales Alignment: Collaborate with your marketing team to ensure that the buying checklists align with messaging and other sales enablement tools. By including marketing in the process, you ensure the checklists not only help salespeople close deals but also reflect the brand voice and value proposition.
• Gather Feedback for Improvement: No checklist is perfect on the first draft. Use Dock to gather real-time feedback from salespeople who are using the checklists in the field. They can share which sections resonate most with buyers, suggest additions, or point out what isn’t working. Marketing teams can also weigh in to ensure the content matches buyer personas and addresses buyer needs. Continuous iteration makes your checklists more effective over time. 
• Make Checklists Shareable Across Teams: Enable cross-department collaboration by making your checklists accessible not just to sales teams but also to account management, customer success, and other departments. For example, customer success teams might use the checklist to ensure the handoff from sales to onboarding is smooth and covers all buyer expectations.
• Monitor Usage Across Teams: Use Dock’s engagement analytics to track how often sales reps or marketing teams use the checklists. If certain teams aren’t adopting the tool, dig into why—whether it’s a training gap or the need for a more tailored version of the checklist.

By following these steps, you can ensure your buying checklists become an integral part of your team’s workflow, helping salespeople stay organized, align stakeholders, and guide buyers through the decision-making process with ease.

• Embed in Dock Sales Rooms: Share the checklist in a Dock sales room, alongside other resources like case studies, ROI calculators, and product demos. This gives buyers a centralized hub to evaluate your offering.
• Send Follow-Up Links: After a meeting, include a link to the checklist in your follow-up email. Dock’s engagement analytics let you see whether buyers opened it and which sections they interacted with.
• Use During Calls: Walk buyers through the checklist in real time during a sales call to address their specific concerns.

1. Engagement Metrics: Use Dock’s analytics to track how buyers interact with the checklist—what sections they use most, how much time they spend, and what they skip.
2. Impact on Close Rates: Measure whether buyers who use the checklist are more likely to close deals.
3. Feedback from Buyers: Ask for input on how helpful the checklist was and what could improve.
4. Sales Team Adoption: Ensure your sales teams are using buying checklists as part of their process and track how it affects deal progression.
5. ‍Stakeholder Alignment: Monitor how well the checklist helps align decision-makers during the buying journey.