RSSAlltop – The Place To Find Out What’s Happening
Jun 30, 2009 Favorite URLs
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“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.”
Buying Decisions: The Implicit Vs. The Explicit
Jun 29, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management
When I began talking about ‘helping buyers buy’, or ‘decision facilitation’ in 1988, people thought I was a bit eccentric, to say the least. “I help buyers buy too,” I used to hear. “I find out what they need, position my solution in a way they understand that it will resolve their pain, and give them a good price.” And this has basically been the accepted norm throughout the history of sales. Except, of course, sales fails 90% of the time. So something is broken that we don’t really talk about.
What has finally become obvious (and I’d like to think that I had something to do with it being so obvious) is the yawning gap between the Implicit buying decisions buyers must make on their own, and the Explicit ones that sellers play such a large part in helping them make.
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Tags: budget, buying decisions, collaboration, Decision Facilitation, decision facilitator, Dirty Little Secrets, explicit buying decisions, fixing the need, helping buyers buy, how decisions get made, implicit buying decisions, pain, sales cycle
Sales As A Form Of Change Management
Jun 26, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management
As sellers, we forget that when buyers make a purchasing decision, they are bringing our solution into their environment. And, trust me on this, their environment is not sitting and waiting around for us to show up.
The Identified Problem – need, or pain, as some of you may call it – has been there for some time, and the culture has already developed work-arounds for it. So if they have needed an accounting package, someone is doing that while waiting for the new software. If they need a leadership training, the folks are doing ‘leading’ in the best way they know how until the training.
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Tags: change, decision making, facilitating, identified problem
Science and Art of Selling: Meet Alen Majer
Jun 25, 2009 Sales Related
“Did you know that 40% of sales forces will miss their quotas this year; four out of ten salespersons will lose their jobs this year; and over 25% of sales people do not sell enough to cover their cost?”
Alen Majer is a sales professional. His company, Science and Art of Selling, manages many sales-related issues that conventional sales companies don’t touch. By diagnosing each aspect of the seller’s behavior – from how s/he handles objections, to what questions s/he asks – Alen makes sure that the solution-placement end of a buying decision is done professionally, and manages the company brand by ensuring all sellers use a professional approach. He even does diagnostics that will tell you how your competition is winning business from you, and how you lost your last deals. Impressive.
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Why Are Questions Important?
Jun 24, 2009 Sales Related
Since 1989, I’ve been writing about, teaching, and extolling the virtues of questions. Although I’ve developed a new form of question (the Facilitative Question) that uses Decision Facilitation and brain sequencing to help folks recognize all layers of criteria that need to be met to make a new decision
(Facilitative Questions don’t gather data: they help the brain think and are used in sequence to how brains decide. Example: How would you know when it was time to reconsider your hairstyle? teaches the brain how to think about When, If, Why, How, Who needs to be in the consideration process.)
and use conventional questions just to gather/share data, I recognize how important even conventional questions are in the sales process. So many sales people use questions manipulatively, as a way to open up the conversation so their solution will be an obvious answer.
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Tags: action selling, assessment tool, contentional questions, decision criteria, Decision Facilitation, Duane Sparks, Facilitative Questions, online training, questions
Optimizing People
Jun 23, 2009 Friends and Partners
People are the backbone of our companies. Even if we run net-based companies, without our people – their ideas, their hard work, their commitment, their creativity – we have nothing. Yet they are always a challenge: they don’t always get along, don’t communicate the way we’d like, don’t finish jobs on time, interpret our wishes differently than we’d like.
People-management is difficult at best, mainly because we each have our own biases and maps of the world. And goodness knows, in our own minds we are ‘right’ and everyone else ‘wrong’ – or questionable at best.
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