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.

The Explicit decisions include everything to do with fixing the need (I call it an Identified Problem – certainly not ‘pain’ cuz they would have fixed it already if it were ‘pain’): making sure the issues are resolved and work far more efficient, possibly even Excellently; that the decision makers are happy and make sure the solution fits well and is affordable with minimum risk; that the sellers are available before, during, and after to manage the implementation, the fit, and making the buyers comfortable with their choices. Once the Explicit decisions are made, the solution is purchased.

But if that were all it took,  we’d be closing a helluva lot more sales than we’re closing. The problem is the Implicit decisions.

What happens when the guy in the next department doesn’t want to collaborate – and you share one tech team and budget? What happens when there is no precedent for bringing in an external vendor? How does it get managed when the Senior Manager wants a solution and has the budget for it, but the team doesn’t want anyone to come in. What about when the current vendor has been around for a decade, works in every department with great professionalism, and everyone wants this vendor to just design something new rather than bring in a new vendor? And what about the work-around that’s been managing the Problem Space until they choose a better solution – does Fred in Accounting get fired because the boss is bringing in a new accounting package?

Buyers have managed these decisions on their own while we wait. There is really no way that an outsider – even a smart one – can understand all of the unconscious, historic, hidden, mysterious, and highly personal decisions that need to get handled before buy-in can occur. Sales has had no model to help buyers manage these implicit decisions. One of the ‘dirty little secrets’ that I talk about in my upcoming book (The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it) is that the buyers have no idea how they are going to handle these decision issues either, if for no other reason than they don’t know what they are going to find when the start picking up the rocks. In other words, sales enters the buying decision cycle far too early.

One of the problems is that because the buyers don’t know the exact route they need to take, and sellers can’t know these personal and idiosyncratic systems issues, no one really knows how to manage the Implicit decisions. I’ve coded the system behind how decisions get made in systems (cultures, environments) and can lead folks down their decision cycle generically so they can pick up the pieces they need to address along the way and bring in the right people. Very often, they can figure this out immediately with me, rather than taking one month or one year, and deciding to bring together their buying decision team for a phone meeting (or whatever) within a week of our first conversation. And we do this consistently, time after time, in every industry or size of sale.

Buyers have to go down this route anyway, and goodness knows we sit and wait for them while they figure it out. This fact alone is the cause of the huge delay in the sales cycle.

I’m  not competing with sales; I’m adding a new piece – a front end, if you will – to the typical sales model. It’s not about gathering data. It’s not about understanding the buyer’s needs. It’s not about ‘being there’ when they are ready (Buying Facilitation teaches them how to be ready). It’s  not about becoming a trusted advisor or a relationship manager.

It’s about being a decision facilitator and taking a leadership role to help buyers walk through the Implicit stages of their buying decision process BEFORE they are ready to answer questions about their Explicit needs.

Let’s start using a two pronged approach to sales: first help buyers walk through their unconscious Implicit decisions; then they can walk with us through their conscious Explicit decisions. Because by not doing this we’re losing a lot of sales, spending too long in the sales cycle, causing objections (yes, we cause our own objections) and NOT serving our buyers.

So, do me a favor: start thinking of sales as a two-phased process, and the sales models we’ve been using for decades handle the Explicit decisions. And Buying Facilitation(R) – which is NOT SALES but a decision facilitation model that handles buy-in – can handle the Implicit. After all, would you rather sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities.

I’ve been teaching this stuff for over 20 years, and we have had quite extraordinary results (remember that it’s NOT SALES) with many global corporations in every industry.

For more, go to www.newsalesparadigm.com

Buying Decisions: The Implicit Vs. The Explicit is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Sales models to not have the capability to facilitate the buyer’s behind-the-scenes issues and activities to ensure they get the necessary buy-in to bring in an outside solution. But they should, because in the gap between the selling and the buying is where we lose our buyers, and they lose us.

WHEN DOES A BUYER  NEED TO BUY

Just because we perceive a need (And we are right! They do!) doesn’t mean our prospects  want it fixed, or fixed by us, or fixed now. We enter our conversations with a bias: we believe that our solution will rule the day: find the need, pitch the solution. Bingo. Except then we sit and wait. And wait.

But the last thing a buyer needs is a solution. In fact, buyers don’t want to buy anything – they merely need to resolve a business problem. If they are not able to resolve it with a familiar resource, they are forced to select a solution to purchase. But they don’t really want to.

When we enter with a solution – even one that is necessary – buyers have a problem: how do they solve their problem in the easiest, most cost-effective manner? It’s simpler to use an existing resource so less change is necessary. But if they determine they must find a new provider, they must bring in the new solution in a way that leaves their culture whole. All things being equal they really don’t want to disrupt their routines.

BUYERS LIVE IN SYSTEMS

There is a disparity between the selling model and buying behaviors: solutions are ‘things’ and a buying decision is a change management issue. As per my latest book Dirty Little Secrets, buyers (like all of us) live in systems of people, rules, relationships, history and policies. Any ‘problem’ becomes part of the system, which develops work-arounds so it can keep on keepin’-on. So when we gain weight, we buy new clothes rather than change our eating habits, work out more, stop drinking our wine. And daily, the system wakes up doing the best it can.

When we approach prospects using the sales model (i.e. a search for a match between the need and the solution), we are acting as if the problem were an isolated event rather than a part of a larger system of people and policies that maintain it. We don’t realize that they have already created a ‘good enough’ work-around for it.

It is only when – and if – the group of folks that touch the problem daily decide that a work-around isn’t good enough AND they cannot fix it with a familiar resource, that they seek an external fix. Then, regardless of how well we’ve been selling, they have work to do: 1. they have to figure out how to ‘go outside’ for a solution; 2. they have to figure out how to get internal issues prepared for change.

HAVING A NEED DOESN’T MEAN A NEED FOR A SOLUTION

Our selling doesn’t provide us with another tool kit for change management – what buyers do when they go off-line to manage their internal politics and relationship issues.

So what are we supposed to do?

Here are our choices:

• we sit and wait until they figure out how to get everyone together to decide;
• we sit and wait until they get the full Buying Decision Team on board;
• we pitch, send data, nurture, and hope we’ll be top-of-mind when they’ve put all of their ducks in a row;
• we begin with a different focus: we help them navigate through their buying decision path and shorten the sales cycle AND get onto the Buying Decision Team and thwart competitors.

The last option sounds the best, right? And yes, my Buying Facilitation® model is an add-on skill that works with sales to do this.

Given you work within a sales system, let me ask you to consider adding Buying Facilitation® skills to the sales skills you use:

How will you know when it’s time to consider adding a new skill to what you’re already doing successfully?

What skills/activities/beliefs do you want to keep so anything new will not disrupt your normal functioning that you’ve become familiar with? And how would you like something new added in a way that maintains your activities and motivation?

What would you need to know about Buying Facilitation® before you consider an addition, to know if it would work for you? How difficult it would be to learn/add? What the downsides and upsides would be? How your boss/team would react when you begin selling differently?

What would you need to know from me, as the developer/seller, to know if you’d get the support you need to be successful?

It’s not about your solution. To really sell well, you must have 2 skills: helping buyers navigate through their back-end change management issues; place solutions.

Or just sit and wait for the low hanging fruit to drop. Remember that 80% of your prospects will buy a solution similar to yours within 2 years. They have the need – they just haven’t figured out how to manage the change. Help them. And close more sales, quicker.

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Read sample chapters of Dirty Little Secrets. Or buy the book.

Hear Sharon Drew make cold calls, prospecting calls, and qualifying calls, live.

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

A buying decision is a change management problem is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

When I Google it, I get: ‘markets propostions while measuring success’, ‘track opportunities from lead to close,’ ‘meet your clients’ needs’, ‘forecast sales activity and revenue,’ ‘marketing validation,’ ‘market sizing,’ ‘cost of entry,’ ‘establish brand and positioning.’

Really? Gosh. It seems to be the perfect widget to do whatever needs to be done, using marketing automation and crm.

Cool, right? Except it’s not. All of this has the following problems:

1. names coming in (and, yes, they are merely names, not leads or prospects) are largely amorphous and there is no way to know where the person is in their decision journey or their place on the Buying Decision Team;
2. it may or may not be an opportunity (i.e. folks who are curious about a topic or want a take away or are junior people), and you have no way of knowing;
3. even if you know one of your ‘opportunities’ is a real lead, you are not (through any form of sales model) able to understand their decision points, or be at their meetings, or be part of their discussions with other vendors or current suppliers.
4. the data you send out may or may not meet their criteria for the sort of decisions they must make and they were just dipping in a toe.

Just because someone has shown up on your site, or called you, or are even in discussion with you, doesn’t mean they are ready, willing, or able to buy. They might be doing research for the future, or giving your data to their current vendors, or worse, to their own internal group to develop a solution.

I’ve read research that says that 80% of our leads buy something within 2 years. That means they are leaving behind a trail of dead sales people as they determine who should be on the Buying Decision Team, all of the internal decision criteria that must be resolved (from everyone who will touch the final solution)  before they can buy.

So you have a choice. You can either spend a whole bunch of money following, managing, manipulating, tracking, forecasting names, or you can learn Buying Facilitation™ and put automation to use to help the person BECOME an opportunity.

Buyers must do a series (and I’ve coded the entire series – read my latest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) of idiosyncratic tasks before they can buy. To name a few, they must

• make sure that everyone is on board and that they know the ‘right’ everyones to include in any sort of buying discussion;
• make sure there is a way to implement the change a new solution will bring them;
• get buy-in from the right people and departments;
• make sure the right policies are in place to manage the new solution to reduce fallout.

Using sales you cannot ‘manage’ these things, regardless of the opportunity. But adding Buying Facilitation™ to your skill sets and to your CRM technology will give you additional capability. It’s not sales, but sales is only closing 1% of your marketing automation names.

You can either manage your opportunities, or help buyers manage their buying environments and facilitate their off-line buying decision journey. Your choice. Call me, and we’ll put together a program for you or develop unique, simple facilitation tools to help your buyers buy.

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Opportunity Management is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• what buy-in means in terms of the change management process
• how and when buy-in occurs
• why people do not buy-in
• how a leader can get someone who is resisting to not only buy-in but to do so happily
• when the change agent should begin to seek buy-in from the various stakeholder groups
• what skills change agents need to gain employee buy-in and how can they acquire these skills
• what leaders can do to programmatically embed the buy-in approach to their change management policies

Listen now:

For the full series, go to: www.facilitatingbuyin.com

Note: these podcasts are equally relevant for sales as well as change management: our buyers must get buy-in across their Buying Decision Team members before they can make a purchase. This free series will explain just what’s going on in the buying process.

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Making Change Work #5: why is buy-in necessary and how to make it work is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Just like the ‘push’ of the sales model creates objections, so the ‘push’ of the typical change management methods create resistance. Change management  is an attempt to place something new into something old, it forgets the systems nature of the status quo: everything is part of a system of interdependent parts that all have agreed to common rules and practices. Whenever anything – anything- new tries to enter this system, the system does what it is designed to do – push the intruder away. It’s scientific name is homeostasis. So to retain balance, the system must, by its nature, push away the offending element.

The field of change management is awash in ways to manage the resistance. It never has realized, for some reason, that it causes the resistance just by the nature of the frontal attack. Whether the proposed change is efficacious or not is immaterial. It doesn’t fit. Or at least the old bits that have maintained the system through time don’t know if it fits or not. Just like buyers who might need a solution object and resist purchase until there is internal buy-in from all of the people and policies that maintain the status quo, so a change environment resists. Until or unless all of the parts that will touch the intruder buy-in to it being let in, it will be kept out.

There is a very neat, simple to make it possible to achieve buy-in. I call it Buying Facilitation™ when I use it in the sales industry, but decision facilitation is another way to label it. It’s entirely possible to create buy-in before the change is attempted, and get everyone inside bought-in to the change and doing leadership activities to welcome the change. And avoid resistance totally.

I have been recording podcasts with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven magazine. I’ve included #3: The Problems of Change Management, and #4: Managing Resistance. If you missed the first 2, here they are: podcasts one and two.

Enjoy listening. And please feel free to contact me to have a dialogue on this important topic. I have an article coming out soon in Pegasus (the magazine about systems thinking) called Buy-In: a radical approach to change management. If anyone would like me to send them an advanced copy, email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

The change management/decision facilitation model I’ve developed has universal application. I’d be happy to discuss it with you.

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Making Change Work 3 & 4: The Problems of Change Management & Managing Resistance is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Let me pose a few questions for you to help you think through the issues you should be thinking about now.

Is your branding and marketing being done in a way that the buyer can make sense of — their way (not your way)? How do you know? What flexibility do you have to make the necessary changes?  And how will you choose the right changes to make – and know they were the right choices (and if not, make changes quickly)?

What sort of model do you have in place to help sellers and buyers collaborate around the sorts of issues buyers have to manage behind-the-scenes?

What’s the difference between what – and how – your buyers want to buy vs. what – and how – you are selling?

How is your sales effort enabling the buying decision process rather than just pushing solution?

How are you positioned to enter the buying decision issues earlier in the buyer’s journey – you know, that human side of decision making that sales doesn’t handle very well?

How accessible are you – or do you have one of those gated community/sites that no one can get through?

How are you serving your prospects in a way that makes you THE solution choice over your competitors – and not just because of your solution?

How are you enabling the Buying Decision Team to work with you to help them get the buy-in they need to move forward (Hint: giving them data about your solution does not work here).

If you start by answering these few questions, you’ll have some idea of the position you are in to move forward and be flexible during these interesting times. There is plenty of opportunity for creativity here. So enjoy.

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And for those wanting more information about the Buyer’s Journey, listen to me and Mark Sellers on a live webinar on August 19.

Change, change, change is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

This one starts, like DLS, with what a system is. Our buyers, our colleagues, our clients, all operate as part of a system, and the system is what resists change. Once we understand the makeup of a system, we can move forward with helping the system manage change.

Part 3, to come out in a couple of weeks, is about resistance and bias: why do people and systems resist change, and how do change agents bias the results, actually creating resistance.

For you sales folks reading this, the exact same issues apply with buyers: buyers work in a system of rules, relationships, politics, tech folks and engineers – and this system will fight to maintain itself rather than bring in a different solution. So in addition to listening to my Podcast series on Making Sellers Relevant, you may enjoy this series also.

For those of you who have missed Part 1, here it is.

To join a conversation about change, buy-in, and systems thinking, visit my new site: Facilitating Buy-In.

Part 2 of Making Change Work

And when you are done, Part 3 of Making Change Work.

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Making Change Work: Part 2 – What is a system, and how does change happen? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

1. getting internal buy-in from colleagues, bosses, and budgets to decide to make a change, figuring out how or what will be included in the change, and agreeing how to move forward;

2. choosing a solution and vendor.

In today’s buying decision journey, technology is beginning to ably handle the solution choice: Since sales focuses on the needs analysis and solution choice end of the buying decision, it’s easy-enough for the process of selection and information-gathering to be co-opted by the web.

That leaves the seller not meeting quotas, not involved until the very end after many of the decisions have been made, and not using their talents as purveyors of industry knowledge. Sellers are not entering the buying decision journey early enough, are too often reduced to order takers.

WHAT’S A SELLER TO DO?

The choices are:

• have many sellers leave the profession as there just isn’t going to be enough work;
• have sellers play musical chairs as they get fired/hired/fired/hired etc.;
• learn new skills to change the sales job to better accommodate the front-end of the buyer’s buying decision journey.

About 20 years ago, I wrote a column for Telemarketing Magazine. I had written a book called Sales on the Line in which I introduced Buying Facilitation™ as a sales tool for the phone. In the book I told telemarketers that unless they used their brief phone time helping prospects navigate through their decision issues quickly (i.e. “Hi, Mrs. Jones. Is this a good time to speak? I’m selling magazines. I’m wondering how you are currently choosing to add new subscriptions to the ones you already have?”), they would be out of business.

The editor of Telemarketing loved my stuff. Of the 4 telemarketing magazines on the market in those days, he (Robert – forgot his last name) was the only one who thought my ideas were print-worthy. I yelled and cajoled and begged and offered and wrote and taught. I said, over and over and over: If you don’t change your ways, you won’t be in business in 10 years. Few listened.

OK. I was right. Now I’m going to say that again to the sales field: If you don’t shift your jobs to managing the entire buying decision journey – not just that end that is concerned with the solution purchase – you won’t have a job. As we speak, I know of 2 tech companies working very hard on creating a Q&A capability for a piece of software to replicate a buyer-seller conversation.

ENTER THE BUYING DECISION JOURNEY EARLIER

Now is the time. Get ahead of the curve. Learn Buying Facilitation™. Read Dirty Little Secrets and Buying Facilitation™. Take the Guided Study program or training with me, or get the Modules. But add this new skill to what you’re doing, and

• get onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call;
• become necessary for buyers as a consultant who can be a real asset during the early parts of the buying journey;
• use your skills and industry knowledge to truly become servant leaders to your buyers.

I’m not talking about choosing a solution or vendor - they can use the net for that. I’m talking about a change management skill set: to help them bring together the people, the decisions, the policies, the tech solutions, the partners, the buy-in/resistance issues, so they can quickly, effectively, make a solution choice – with you on their decision team and then, naturally, their provider.

Here is my 2nd podcast in the series: Keeping Sellers Relevant. This one explains the buyer’s journey. Enjoy. And please, take this to heart.

Previous: Podcast 1 | Next: Podcast 3

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Here are chapters from Dirty Little Secrets to better understand how Buying Facilitation™ helps buyers decide.

The Buyer’s Buying Journey – Podcast 2: Keeping Sellers Relevant is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

And, why am I recording a Change Management series? For those of you familiar with my decision facilitation model, you’ll recognize that it’s basically a change management model that helps buyers (or teams, or patients, or or) navigate through all of the unconscious, behind-the-scenes, private issues they have to decide on, en route to doing something different. After all, anything different means change. And any time we change, we have issues to manage within our status quo, so we don’t create chaos unduly.

ALL DECISIONS ARE CHANGE MANAGEMENT ISSUES

Whether you’re going to change your hairstyle, or buy a house, or adopt a new ERP system in your company, or bring in new staff, anything that will shift the status quo is a change management issue. Because the status quo is happy with whatever rules or relationships or technology already exists (or it would have been changed already), adding anything new upsets the apple-cart, so to speak.

Until now, the change management model has focused on designing the change and managing the resistance. But I believe that resistance isn’t necessary if the change agents first seek buy-in. Interesting, that when a search is done for the term ‘Buy-In’ in the change management field, only one instance came up! Yet every book on change management is about, in large part, managing resistance.

In this series, Nathan and I discuss change from a systems standpoint, and how to achieve buy-in by getting systems to agree to change – before even introducing the change initiative. Is it possible? Listen to the podcasts and let me know. We’ve got a new site dedicated to buy-in, discussions around buy-in, and creating community to help buy-in become a recognized aspect of change management.

The titles for the 6 part series are:

• What is change? And why is it so difficult?
• What are systems, and how do they influence change?
• The historic problems with change management models: bias, resistance, and push
• What is resistance, how do current change management models create it, and how can it be avoided?
• Why is buy-in necessary and how to achieve it.
• Putting it all together: a radical approach to change management and real leadership

STRATEGYDRIVEN

For those interested in change management, have a look at www.StrategyDriven.com. It’s a truly neat site. Here how it is described:

StrategyDriven represent tried and tested business world methods based on years of business planning and execution experience and founded on solid research and academic principles. We provide readers with the best practices needed to create the high level of organizational alignment and accountability characteristic of world-class organizations and introduce warning flag processes and behaviors that signal a retreat from world-class standards. Our framework not only addresses performance of discrete planning and execution functions but also the interrelationships between an organization’s mission and objectives to its executable programs, budgets, and procedures, and finally to its products and services and the market it serves.

At a more granular level, our framework and supporting practices enhance organizational alignment by reinforcing business process interrelationships from strategic planning and resource management to tactical execution and evaluation and control. We also discuss the management and leadership practices needed to bring employees and the system together; all running smoothly and seamlessly with one another. And all of these practices focus on achieving the organization’s vision, values, and mission goals.

Go to www.strategydriven.com. Have a look around. You’ll be filled with new thoughts, find all sorts of articles, and leave the site hungry for more. Enjoy. And, make sure you listen to our Making Change Work series. We’ve worked hard to provide some new thinking.

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Once you finish this podcast, check out part 2 of making change work.

Making Change Work: a change management podcast series with StrategyDriven is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Recently, a student of my Guided Study program thought that her clients – franchisees who sell her product – might do well to add Buying Facilitation™ to their sales skills so they could close  more sales.

I sent a couple of blog posts for the folks to read, and then had a phone conference with them. My job was to help them understand more about the model, and to use Facilitative Questions on them to not help them decide if adding new skills would help them sell better, but actually give them the ‘feel’ of how helping manage the buying decision worked.

What happened during our meeting is something that occasionally happens when sales folks first consider working first with the buying decision: they defend their status quo.

With a close rate of well under 10%, these folks defended their current skills: by any rational standard they rejected the possibility of being more successful, preferring to maintain their status quo. Are they being irrational? We generally think our prospects irrational when our solution can solve their problem and they don’t choose us, don’t we?

But I do not believe in the words ‘irrational’ or ‘rational.’ Like all decision makers (yes, even our buyers) these folks have made the best decision for themselves at this moment: they are being totally rational – within their unique system.  These folks are more comfortable with their status quo, regardless of their success rate, than they are with the prospect of change, even at the expense of more money and more clients.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

For those of you interested in deeply exploring change and how new decisions get made, my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it minutely depicts how people make the internal decisions necessary for changing congruently - and making a buying decision is more of a change management problem than a problem resolution issue: until or unless the status quo gets buy-in from the appropriate people and policies, the risk of change is greater than the risk of doing what they’ve been doing (the results of which are already built in to the system).

Suffice it to say, that change isn’t just a matter of having a new thought, or adding a solution. The reality is that if we really, really thought there was something THAT wrong we would have changed already. The fact that we (and our buyers) are in the environment that we’re in, is a testament to the decisions that have already been made: the status quo is a sum total of all of our decisions to date.

When it’s time for us to change, we must make sure that we somehow integrate the new with the decisions and behaviors we’ve already created and maintain daily. Until or unless we are able to figure out how to reconfigure our rules and roles and relationship and ego issues, we will take no action at all – even if it means sticking with something that’s less than successful. That’s right: even with a 7% closing ratio, many many sales professionals would prefer to continue doing what they are doing rather than change and mess up what they have grown accustomed to and have rationalized and internalized.

THE SALES MODEL IS BROKEN

But the truth is, the sales model is stupid, not our buyers. It only manages the needs assessment and solution placement end of the buying decision, and leaves the buyer to manage the hard part alone. So I can sit and listen to how inefficient a prospect’s sales model is, and I can have the absolute perfect solution (and I DO, I DO), and they won’t/can’t buy. Because until or unless there is buy-in throughout the relevant parts of the system, the buyer CANNOT take action.

Sales does not handle this dilemma. But it’s possible to work first with the decision making/change issues that buyers must manage before they can even begin considering a solution.

Before you decide on learning Buying Facilitation™, or adding it to your current skill set, answer the following Facilitative Questions:

• What would you need to know or believe differently about what you are doing to be able to know when it would be time to add a new skill set?
• What is it about your current skills that you’d like to maintain so you can ensure that anything new wouldn’t destroy what you already do successfully?
• How would you know that Buying Facilitation™ could fit with your current skills in a way that would maintain your personal integrity and beliefs about who you are as a sales professional?

Because until or unless you can be assured that you can make a change that is integrous with who you are, you will do nothing.

Are you willing to help your clients work from inner choices rather than need/solution, so they won’t resist?

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Microsoft is putting on a virtual event that you might want to be a part of. They are going to be discussing how to improve your sales organizations, through briefs, presentations, and forum discussions. Also, as an added bonus, another one of the Focus Experts (I’m one as well), Dave Brock, will be giving his thoughts on high performance sales training.

http://crm.dynamics.com/DynamicsBusiness

Resistance to change: inexplicable, irrational, and real is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Without buy-in, nothing changes. If the group or person deemed change necessary, it would have happened already. So whatever state the status quo is in is the preferred state: no matter what you think is wrong, or how your wonderful solution would make it better, it ain’t going to happen unless the status quo is willing to change. And change means change management is necessary.

As sellers, we forget that buyers must do some sort of change management before they’ll make a purchase. Their ‘problem’ is being resolved somehow and rules and relationships are holding the work-around in place. And these rules and relationships have to buy-in to shifting or they will resist change.

It’s frustrating when you just know your solution will help your prospect enormously. I hear from sales managers daily who bemoan the length of the sales cycle, and the inferior solutions prospects sometimes choose. But the solution is never the issue. Never, never, never.

INSURANCE USES AN OLD SALES MODEL THAT LOVES IT’S INEFFECTIVE STATUS QUO

Years ago – maybe 18 years – I taught Buying Facilitation™ to the CEO of a mid-sized, public insurance company specializing in corporate insurance – large policies for lots of people. He became very very successful using the model to help him open some very large accounts. He kept in touch with me occasionally over the years to fill me in on his success. Last year he called with a problem.

JOE: My folks are having even more trouble than usual. The economy sucks, and companies are canceling insurance. It’s getting harder and harder for us to get our appointments, and almost impossible to close. I’m losing good people to other job opportunities. Can you help?

SDM: Sure. You know my stuff. What has stopped you from training your folks before now?

JOE: We were doing well-enough – just above industry standard (Note: with Buying Facilitation™ the numbers are much, much higher, so obviously Joe wasn’t interested in closing a lot more business, OR his revenue concerns took a lower priority than something else in his system as we’ll see.). I guess I didn’t want to rock the boat. But now things are so bad that I must do something different.

SDM: If you were going to learn the model, there would be disruption and a few weeks of learning and integration. How would you and your decision team know that bringing in Buying Facilitation™ would be worth the risks?

JOE: I know your stuff is great and it works. I’d just have to convince them. But you’re right: we can’t tolerate too much change.

SDM: That’s a hard one. You say that what you’re doing isn’t working, but you don’t want change. How can we change without changing?

JOE: You like to use the phone to start prospecting. I know it works the way you teach it – get buy-in for my solution on my first call, and when I get there all of the decision makers are there and they are ready to sign. I did it myself. I saw the numbers. I saw the difference in the success rate, and how quickly buyers were buying.  But I don’t know if I can sell it to my guys. They still call to get an appointment, and hate the phone. But now they are not getting the appointments, so I can see how using Buying Facilitation™ from the start of the call would work. Nothing else is working. And I’m dyin’ here. Not to mention losing some really good folks.

SDM: So I’m hearing that there may be resistance, but you think it would be necessary. What would you need to know about me working with your folks to know that it would be possible to get buy-in before we began, and pick up resistance along the way, to ensure you’d get the results you’d want?

JOE: I know you’d get us where we’d need to be. But I’d have to speak with a couple of my managers to find out what buy-in would have to look like. Let me call you back.

Joe never called me back. A month later I called him.

SDM: What happened? I never heard back.

JOE: The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much resistance I’d get, so I took no action. And I’m letting people go because of our situation. I’m going to have to keep the lights on until the economy turns around.

MAKES NO SENSE

This makes absolutely no sense. None. People were being let go or quitting, the revenue was horrid, no new sales were coming in (and in insurance, this has a long term consequence). But Joe was not willing to risk change. Willing to risk his business, but not change. And what was even more perplexing was that Joe knew my material and enjoyed working with me. He loved me, my solution, and knew it worked. But it went against the status quo. As I say repeatedly in my new book Dirty Little Secrets, the system is sacrosanct, and all else will be sacrificed if the system doesn’t know how to change without major disruption.

Think about this next time you think your solution is perfect for a prospect. And remember: the need would have been resolved already if they knew how to fix it. The problem is change. Help buyers manage change before you try to sell anything.

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Note: we still have a contest going on. I’d love more participation. Click here and win a copy of Dirty Little Secrets.

All Decisions Involve Change Management: an insurance case study is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

So whether a buyer seeks a new solution and must get buy-in from the relevant people, or a user needs to use the new software, or an initiative needs agreement from the relevant team members to move forward, or a person may want to donate to one charity rather than another, new decisions are necessary or change won’t happen.

What, exactly, is a decision? In Dirty Little Secrets, I define a decision as: “…a series of conscious and unconscious choices that result in change that maintains the integrity of the whole. In other words, decisions must be congruent with the rules and agreement of the underlying environment, and certain not to create chaos for the system.’ (pg 239)

INFORMATION DOESN’T TEACH SOMEONE TO DECIDE

Decisions must maintain the congruence of the system they are being decided in. So if you’re going to decide to lose weight, your proposed changes must maintain the underlying beliefs around your current food choices, or you won’t change your habits. If you are starting a new initiative, you must make sure the folks know how to align their beliefs, ego issues, job identity, and social identity, with the proposed change, before they’ll make a creative effort to support you.

In fact, all decisions must be based on the underlying criteria (of the system) or they will either not be carried out or they will be sabatoged in some way. In other words, without buy-in, change can’t happen. And buy-in demands a new decision.

Unfortunately, leaders often assume if they focus on the correct result, offer the best information in the best way (rational, well-said, well-presented, nice) that folks will agree and follow. Or should. But we all know that’s not true. When we work hard at presenting rational, good data as the means to align behaviors, and then get push-back, we often blame the ‘follower’ rather than realizing that possibly we haven’t managed our leadership skills effectively. Not to mention that we’ve never been offered the skills to actually teach people how to make their own best decisions, separate from our biases.

HOW TO INFLUENCE WITH INTEGRITY

Imagine if you believed that folks only made new decisions when their beliefs were engaged, and not on the relevancy of your request or information. What, then, do you do to ensure buy-in? Let me ask that another way: How can you make sure that you get creative buy-in for any change initiative that gives your folks not only a leadership role, but the opportunity to truly leave an imprint on the change?

Here are a few Facilitative Questions for you to consider:

What would you need to believe differently in order to see your role as a neutral navigator – a GPS system if you will - and lead change from ‘structure’ not the ‘content.’  What would you need to believe to be willing to give up your personal view of what the change should look like and be willing to allow the change to take shape from within by aligning all of the ideas and creativity of the followers?

How would you know that you could get the most creativity and leadership from folks without reverting to compensation, stories, rules, demands, or presentations?

What would success look like if one of your goals were to help your ‘followers’ discern how to add value to the change in a way that served themselves AND the initiative AND the corporate entity?

In the Argentine Tango, the leader is the vehicle for the follower to shine. If you notice the leader, the leader is not doing his job. In fact, the expression goes like this: the leader opens the door, the follower goes through (using her own personality and presence), and then the leader follows. The entire dance is based on ensuring the follower looks her best, and grows in the process.

Join me tomorrow at my webinar. Let’s continue our conversation in an open format, where all of us can figure out how to move forward.

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Leadership Involves Helping Others Decide is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Because we continue (against any rational measure) to focus ‘sales’ on solution placement (yes, yes, that includes uncovering needs and understanding buyers) when we have all of the data we need to understand that 1. we close a small fraction of our prospects; 2. we waste a huge amount of time for the relative success we get; 3. buyers who need our solutions do not necessarily buy.

SALES RESULTS ARE THE SAME ACROSS DECADES AND SALES MODELS

Yup. With all of the new bells and whistles, the new funnels and influencing models and questioning models, the percentages we close remains the same as it did decades ago. And we actually throw away prospects we can be closing because we don’t have an additional skill set.

I recently spoke with Graham Yemm, a man in the UK who has been talking about the buying side of the seller/buyer equation for about 20 years. How are people there accepting his ideas? Slowly, he said. That’s a sad commentary on sales.

When I train folks in Buying Facilitation™ and we get 200, 500, or 900% increases over our control groups that are using the group’s regular sales models, we get told that we cheated, that it’s not possible. And, I agree: using conventional sales you cannot get any more than a 30% overage when you use questions optimally (this number comes to you from my friend Neil Rackham).

But that resistance and doubt is based on the sales model. And sales merely handles the need/solution part of the buying decision – the very very last thing that the buyer does.

What sales totally ignores is that the ‘need’ sits in a system that not only has created the ‘problem/pain,’  but maintains it daily. The buyer’s problem is actually part of their daily operations (those of you who understand technology know that you cannot just pull one line of code and replace it with something different without affecting the rest of the system, without somehow addressing other lines of code). In other words, nothing exists on its own. And sales does not address the intricate, intimate issues that must  be shifted in order for something new to come in.

A NEED IS NOT AN ISOLATED EVENT

Sales treats the problem as if it were an isolated event, not realizing that it is one of a myriad of things that work together to keep the company (or any environment you are selling into) going along comfortably.

Sales doesn’t handle the change management issues buyers must go through before bringing in a new solution. Imagine serving your family a raw food dinner, and telling them at the meal that from now on all of their food will have to be raw. Imagine coming in to work and telling your team that tomorrow you’re going to be transferring everyone to a different location 2 hours away.

Of course you can’t do either of these things: there is a system – a set of givens, of rules and expectations – that everyone operates from, and when something is going to be changed, the system must have time to regroup, rethink, reconsider, and buy-in to the change or the change will be sabotaged. It’s the same with any new solution a buyer brings in.

Sales skills include gathering information, understanding need (as much as it’s possible to understand a problem from outside the system and asking biased questions), introducing and placing solutions, and managing the sales process issues (objections, closing, etc) that occur because the sales process ignores the systems issues.

Think about it. You know this is true, yet you are comfortable doing what you’re doing and don’t want to change. I have some Facilitative Questions for you:

How would you know when it’s time to add another set of skills to what you’re already doing?

What would you need to know/understand/believe differently to recognize that buyers must manage their private, internal change issues before they can buy, and sales doesn’t address this?

What would you need to know about Buying Facilitation™ to know if it would fit on top of what you are doing now and help you be successful?

What would you need to believe to recognize that it is indeed possible to double or triple your sales by adding a decision facilitation skill to what you are doing?

What would you need to see to believe that you could close a lot more sales a lot faster if you had the skills to help them manage the internal decision issues they must address before they can buyer?

Get ahold of my new book Dirty Little Secrets and it will explain all of this for you. Or keep doing what you’re doing if you are happy with your results.

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For those of you who are interested in learning about book publishing, go to my new site: www.publishingchoices.com

Sales is resistant to change is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

It’s a myth that change is difficult. Indeed, it’s not the change itself that’s difficult, it’s the underlying systems issues that balk, not the new idea or request. Here is why – and there is a very specific reason.

Systems – those interdependent rules, roles, politics, assumptions, and relationships, that make up the teams and families, companies and groups that we each belong to – are designed to operate as a whole, with all moving parts bought into the idiosyncratic rule that govern that entity.

To do that, it’s necessary for these systems to bond/work together like cogs in wheels. In fact, when any part of a system is out of whack, the entire system has to focus on, manage, and work-around that problem as it becomes a glitch in the system. Think of a time when a family member is ill, or someone on the team gets fired and there is no replacement… or a bad one.

Any time something is added or subtracted, a system will fight to remain stagnant, otherwise the entire reason for the system is in question. That means, any sort of change, whether a new product/solution, a new member with different beliefs of skills, a new rule, a new strategic plan, will put the entire system into some sort of defense. After all, the status quo is what ‘IS’ and the system will fight to maintain congruence. No matter what the reality is.

The problem with sales – and negotiating, and coaching, and advertising, and marketing – is that it pushes new solutions  (i.e. change) into an existent system without helping manage the elements that will need to change before the ‘new thing’ is accepted. So the system pushes back, even if it needs the new thing and is broken without it (don’t forget that the ‘need’ is already imbedded in the system and part of its daily functioning).

As we go through these ‘interesting times,’ let’s start thinking about the process of change. Current change management models are based on the details of the need and the efficacy of the solution. There is a lot of data gathering (generally biased) so the initiators ‘understand’ the need or the environment. But can an outsider ever, really, understand an environment – a system – that they are not part of? Even those involved have a hard time understanding themselves! Would the owner of a gym benefit from understanding why you don’t go as often as you should? Would you? Understanding a ‘need’ or offering a new idea or skill does not teach the system how to change. They are two different things.

Imagine if you had the skills to actually lead the systemic elements through their own change issues, so they can change from within, according to their own nuanced values, beliefs, rules, politics, and relationships; not as a provider, but as a change facilitator. It will actually give you more control, and truly help manage the change process.

Take a look at my Buying Facilitation™ method. It is not a sales tool but a decision facilitation skill to help achieve buy-in. It is used to help meetings run smoothly, help work through fights or team problems or leadership issues or customer service problems. It can be a change management tool, a coaching skill, and a negotiating skill — all because the premise is systems based; until or unless an underlying system of any kind, will open for, and accept change, it will close ranks and maintain the status quo.

Let’s learn how to help real change happen. The interesting times we are now facing needs the help.

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Change is necessary. How can we make it fun? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Where they go, in fact, is to get ahold of their colleagues and figure out how to get agreement for whatever outcomes the new solution will cause within the  buyer’s environment. We rarely think that way as sellers: we see a problem, figure out if we have the appropriate solution, and go forth, fearlessly, to match the need with the solution.

We forget the vast amount of internal politiking, or behind-the-scenes jockey-ing, or deals, or relationship management issues, that go on in the prospect’s environment around their search for a solution. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to be intimately involved with these off-line discussions and are left with the results.

It looks like this: hot prospects don’t return and go quietly into the night, never to be heard from again; prospects purchase a small portion of a solution with some excuse as to why they can’t buy the rest  (budget, timing, partners, initiatives, etc);  prospects return to discuss price; prospects want their internal folks to join the effort and work with you to implement.

In other words, they aren’t purchasing what you think they need. Why? Simple: Because they haven’t gotten the buy-in they need. It’s got nothing to do with your solution or their need. The tech team shows up and wants to do the project; the HR department wants to be involved; the old vendor develops something new that might take care of the problem.

It is possible to help the buyer choose you – but approaching the need resolution with the sales model doesn’t help much to help with the buy-in process.

Have a look at my video and send in some comments. Let’s begin a conversation about the buyer’s off-line decisions and how to help them make their best decisions.

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If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

Check out my new book coming out October 1: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read a free chapter. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements. I’ll be doing a webinar on the material close to the launch date, so stay tuned.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that inluences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

Managing Off-Line Decisions is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com