RSS‘Ready To Sign’ Accounts Are Not ‘Ready To Sign’
Mar 26, 2009 Sales Related
‘but if they aren’t ready to buy, you’ll waste precious time that could be better spent pursuing accounts that are ready to sign.’
I read this quote above as an intro to an ‘expert ‘ webinar, and it embodies the problem with the sales model’: it treats a need/problem as if it were an isolated event.
‘Ready to buy’ merely means that the internal decisioning hasn’t taken place within the buyer’s decision team. It has nothing to do with ‘need’ or ’solution’ – they’ve got the need, you’ve got the solution; but neither the need nor the efficacy of the solution are the issue here.
Instead of running around ‘pursuing accounts that are ready to sign’ (many of which will be face the same internal problems during this economy), why not help the buyers manage the buying decisions – including stakeholders, politicies, politics, initiatives, fears, initiatives, rules, etc. – they are facing now. The problem, and your solution, are not at issue. The buying decision is.
Buying Facilitation gives sellers a new set of tools to enter the Buying Decision Team and join them in recognizing and managing their decision strategies to help them achieve buy-in. It’s not a sales skill, but a decision support skill; it helps the buyer manage the underlying systems that keep the ‘need’ in place and frees up the purchasing decision. You may not be able to ’sell’ now, but you can sure as hell help someone reach a buying decision.
Customers Don’t Know How To Buy – Or Do They?
Mar 26, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management, Top Posts
My friend Jill Konrath returned from the recent Sales 2.0 conference and told me of a complaint she heard several times from attendees: “Customers don’t know how to buy.”
This, said by sellers blaming buyers for not behaving as sellers would prefer. Or not responding appropriately to seller’s selling patterns.
Let me reverse the issue: Sellers do not respond appropriately to buyer’s buying patterns! Indeed, have they helped their customers:
- manage the range of internal decisions they need to make as they construct a buying decision?
- discern their criteria for resolving a need that resides within a tangle of other problems?
- identify the criteria for adding a solution to their status quo in a way that won’t create disruption?
- discover the most efficient route through the breadth of decisions and decision makers, to help them manage their newly-challenged organizational issues with stakeholders, budgets, and personnel issues?
Tags: Buy-In, buying decisions, customers, identified problem, prospects, systems
What’s new in Sales: Sales cannot be same-old same-old
Mar 25, 2009 Random Thoughts
It’s a frustrating time for me. Several issues are getting my goat.
- So many people are finally speaking about the importance of helping buyers make buying decisions – and yet they are focusing only on the eventual product sale. They don’t understand that buying decisions must include the management of the entire inter-related systems issues that created and maintain the problem/need. But sales doesn’t manage that. And instead of seeking new tools to add to their current skill set, sellers are blithely continuing in the direction they are comfortable with, rather than shift gears.
- Conventional sales folks are coming around proclaiming they are thought leaders – and then talk about conventional sales. Please!
- Some folks forget that I have been training and writing books for 20+ years about helping buyers buy. Point of fact: I am the thought leader behind the buying decision process, and if folks have real interest in learning how to help buyers make buying decisions, go to my site and have a look ’round. www.newsalesparadigm.com. Plenty of articles and papers on the new thoughts. Of course if you want to learn the ‘hows’, you’ll need more help than just an article. Go to www.buyingfacilitation.com and see if there is something there that will help you learn.
Net net: if you want to add Buying Facilitation to your skill set, we can figure out how to get you the skills. But it won’t be through anything you’re used to now. Everything is changing – and you must change as well. Otherwise you’ll keep getting the same results.
Buyer’s Buying Decision
Mar 24, 2009 Sales Related
With so much interest in the buyer’s buying decisions, it’s important to note that the field of sales has concentrated on understanding need, and placing product. There has been no model in place that actually teaches buyers how to navigate those internal systems issues (having to do with the internal people and their relationships, the internal policies and politics that too often define possible choices, or historic events that keep the status quo in place). Until or unless buyers get buy-in from within, they cannot make a buying decision on choosing a solution, or it will create chaos. The time it takes buyers to do this is the length of the sales cycle.
Until now, sellers have sat and waited for buyers to call back, not knowing what they were doing. But it’s possible to lend a hand, so long as they use a different method, other than ’sales’. Sellers must add a new element to their sales process. Not only must they understand need and what problem the buyer needs to resolve, but they must also help buyers manage their unique, idiosyncratic systems issues internally, to free them up to make a buying decision. The hard part here is that sellers have no way of understanding these private internal issues because they are not problem, need, or solution based.
What Should I Title My New Book?
Mar 5, 2009 Random Thoughts, Sales Related
I’m having such a hard time titling my new book. I’m writing a new book that brings Buying Facilitation into mainstream thinking to be one of the solutions for the problems that sales folks are facing in this economy.
For those of you who have been following my work, you know how I feel about conventional sales (i.e. all sales as we’ve known it): because the basic sales model is based on placing product (ok, ok, on discovering need, making nice, finding a solution…. but net net placing product, right!?) and the underlying systems issues don’t get managed, sales is an outside-in model. And systems spend so much time rejecting anything from the outside, that sales only closes appx 7% (from first call. And for those of you who think you close, say, 15% (from first prospecting call), you STILL waste 85% of your time!!!).
What this means is that sales doesn’t give sellers the ability to manage all of the different people/roles/rules/politics, etc. that created and maintain the Identified Problem to begin with, and until those issues are managed, no purchase will take place. btw this is where clients go when they say ‘i’ll call you back’. But sales hasn’t been able to follow them there, or know what’s going on. Buying Facilitation manages all that. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: new book
