Until or unless the entire Buying Decision Team is in place, the buyer will not know how to hear you: until everyone who touches a solution has had their voice heard, and adds their choice criteria to possible solutions, a buyer doesn’t know what they need to buy.

Let’s say you and your Partner have a brief, rushed chat as you leave for work, about the possibility of moving. When you return for dinner, you tell your Partner you’ve got a surprise: You’ve bought a great house on the way home from work and you’re moving next week!

You would probably have a massive fight: there are too many private, behind-the-scenes decisions that must be made to manage each person’s criteria, feelings, future plans. Bigger house/smaller house. Leave the city/move to country. Move to a different state/different country. Near one kid’s school district/near someone’s work. Will your house sell easily? Do you need to call the bank and get a loan/financing if you don’t sell your house first? When to put your house on the market?

Let’s say instead of coming home with a new house, you called a friend and said you might move, and the friend called me since I’m a realtor. I call you up the next day to tell you about this fabulous house.

Do you want to hear about the house? Why not? You’re not ready: you won’t have made all of the decisions you’ll need to make to have the relevant choice criteria to even consider the house. It’s too early.

SELLING VS. BUYING

There is a difference between your solution and what a buyer needs/wants to buy/is able to buy; between your selling patterns and a buyer’s buying patterns. And buyers will only buy according to their buying patterns. If you use selling patterns, you are merely selling to those folks whose buying patterns are the same as your selling patterns.

Think of the telemarketing industry of a decade ago. Their solutions were fine. It was their selling patterns people objected to.

Until or unless buyers have all of their choice criteria ready, they won’t know how to hear you; won’t know the details to listen for; won’t know how your solution would fit. It’s like offering house details before they’ve decided to move. And they won’t use your criteria to make their choices.

When you contact a prospect, if you’re attempting to gather data about their ‘needs’ before the entire Buying Decision Team is on board, you are only hearing one set of possible buying criteria, from one person who may or may not be on the Buying Decision Team, and who probably doesn’t know the full set of criteria. It’s a waste of your time and theirs – hence, a tiny fraction will speak to you, and a smaller fraction of possible buyers will give you an appointment.

When you call just to make an appointment, you are getting rid of a minimum of 90% of your list because they don’t want, or aren’t ready for, or see no need for (whether they need your solution or not) a new solution. And those that will agree to see you are already in the market, so you enter in a competitive situation.

You are wasting over 50% of prospects by trying to get an appointment before they have determined their buying criteria. And at this point in their buying path, you can’t help them choose to see you, or decide to purchase, using the sales process.

YOU CAN HELP BUYERS BUY: BUY NOT WITH YOUR SOLUTION

The last thing buyers do is choose a solution. My latest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it explains all of the off-line decision issues buyers must address before they have the full set of criteria to know what solution to choose.

Instead of calling them to ‘understand need’, call them to help them navigate their buying decision journey. Instead of trying to get an appointment, use your connection to help them figure out what Excellence would look like for them. And once you’ve helped them put together the full Buying Decision Team, then the whole team will be eagerly waiting to meet you.

Buying Facilitation® will give you a skill set to start your conversations differently and facilitate the buying decision journey. Use Buying Facilitation® first, and then they will be happy to meet with you.

sd

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

To learn more about Buying Facilitation®, read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, or hear Sharon Drew use the model with prospects.

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

Wait until the Buying Decision Team is in place to visit or pitch is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But, while seemingly doing different jobs, they are really doing the same thing: finding and creating the environment for the right people to purchase the company solution. But as we know, there is great failure built in to both jobs: marketing has no idea who it is reaching, and sales only closes a small fraction of those who appear to need the solution.

The failures do not lie in the job descriptions, but in the sales and marketing skill sets: neither have the ability to go inside the buyer’s environment with the buyer during their meetings or discussions or planning sessions. Both sales and marketing are external – outside/in – and therefore have absolutely no idea what is truly going on behind-the-scenes, nor an ability to actually be there. They work with guesswork (good guesses, but guesses nonetheless) and hopes. Demographics provide good guesswork, recognition of need; relationship building and great solutions provide the hope. But at no point – no point – until the check has been sent (and cleared!), do sellers actually know which prospect will end up buying: All prospects seem like buyers….until they’re not.

CHANGE THE GOAL

Imagine if both groups could add another goal? Imagine if the over-riding belief was this:

until or unless buyers figure out how to recognize and manage all of the internal elements – relationships, politics, initiatives, vendors – that maintain their status quo and figure out how to change (buyers must go through some sort of  ’change management’ internally to mitigate the habitual activities that comprise the status quo) without disruption, they will buy nothing, do nothing different.

Both sales and marketing operate from the underlying belief of Build it and They Will Come: if we offer good data to the right people in the right way, find a ‘need’ we can target, and make our presentation or relationship trustworthy while differentiating ourselves from the competition, buyers should know to buy. But we all know that isn’t true or we’d make a lot more sales and buyers wouldn’t seem so ‘stupid.’ (See my latest book Dirty Little Secrets to understand exactly why, when, and how buyers buy.)

If sales and marketing professionals change their goal to actually helping buyers figure out HOW to buy, rather than WHY or WHAT to buy, they work together to create a plan that manages both ends of the sale.

For marketers: Maybe an ad that says

How will you know when it’s time to buy a luxury car? on a car ad. Or a set of facilitative questions on a site: What is stopping you from being as effective as you’d like? And what would you need to see from us to think we can help you?

When doing demographic testing, rather than pull data, find out what would cause a buyer to do something different (note that whatever they are doing  is successful-enough or they would have changed it already). How will you know when it’s time to change to an X system? What will you need to be facing to consider making a change? Of course, marketing and surveys are often one-sided but it’s possible to shift the questions to help people think about change rather than give you data on their status quo.

For sales folks: Use the beginning of your conversations to help buyers elicit their change criteria. I’ve written extensively on this, so go back to my historic blog posts and books.

WORKING TOGETHER

Once you’ve both figured out how and why to shift your job descriptions, sit down together and formulate an action plan. 1. what are the new goals? 2. what do buyers need to change internally before they will be willing/able to make a purchase? 3. how can sales and marketing act together to help buyers manage both ends of their buying decisions - first managing those pesky personal and political issues they must manage privately to get the buy-in to add something new, and then choosing the right solution.

Then you’ll be able to be more successful and sell more product. Not to mention that buyers will be happier knowning how to get what they need in the way they need it. You may have to change your site, your marketing materials (when I train Buying Facilitation™ my clients end up changing their marketing materials), or your pitch. But you’ll close more sales, faster. And you’ll work together.

sd

Have Sharon Drew help you design a survey that will gather buy-in data. Or coach your sales and marketing teams to work together on a project.

Sales and Marketing CAN support each other is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But the model is fraught with guesswork and hope, manipulation, bias, and persuasion, white lies and exaggerations – not to mention highly ineffective when the time spent vs sales closed ratio is examined [sellers waste approximately 40 hours a month on sales that never close, with an average close rate of 7%].

Because of the global nature of our staffing patterns, with decision makers in different time zones, it’s taking 30% longer to close sales these days. As a result, the seller’s job of gathering data, understanding needs, pitching and presenting product data, gets mitigated by time and space. And the very nature of the web makes most pitches and presentations moot. In fact, many buyers know more than sellers.

AS IS, SALES IS UNNECESSARY

Indeed, the job of ‘sales’ is unnecessary – so long as it retains its original focus. But what if we could harness the ‘manpower’ and positioning of the person who is the only company representative to walk between the company and the client, and make sales a spiritual practice.

There is a way to have sellers be true spiritual guides and servant leaders, and not only sell more product, and sell more quickly, but also become part of the buyer’s team with commensurate integrity and values. But we’d have to change what we’re now doing.

What would be the difference between what we’re doing now and what sales would have to become in order to have sales be a spiritual practice? To begin with, we’d have to shift our beliefs about our jobs, our ability to collaborate, and our outcomes. Then we’d have to learn the new skills that would create a collaborative dialogue that would truly serve each end of the equation.

First things first. Let’s start by defining ‘spiritual’. To me it means:

• always having a win-win (there is no such thing as win-lose);
• understanding that the whole is greater than the parts;
• understanding that we are all here to serve each other;
• recognizing that there is no right answer;
• believing that no one has an answer for someone else.

Different from sales, which

• sometimes has a ‘win-lose’,
• believes that the parts might be greater than the whole,
• seeks to serve the buyer but ends up serving the seller,
• has the ‘right’ answer in their solution,
• might have the buyer’s ‘answer’.

Let’s change the focus of sales. Instead of making sales about placing a product/solution, let’s give sellers the role of a facilitator. Let’s make the sales job one of a Guide to leads buyers to their best decisions, based on their own criteria. Then the seller becomes a Servant Leader to the buyer, and the buyer gets to make better, quicker, more congruent decisions – and there will be more buyers, less tire-kickers, better differentiation, and no competition, and sales close in 1/8 the time. And it is a true Servant Leader role at the same time.

What would our jobs look like with this new set of beliefs? Let’s begin by making sure we all agree as to what ‘spiritual’ looks like.

Always have a win-win

Having a win-win means both sides get what they need in equal measure.

I realize that sellers tell themselves that by placing product, there is an automatic win-win. But the dialogue is much, much bigger than product placement or problem resolution. The dialogue must include resolving the entire system that created and maintains the status quo. And it is only when this system is repaired, and the buyer knows how to fix the obvious problem while repairing the bits that got it and keep it that way, does the buyer have a true win.

[How did the Identified Problem (IP) show up as it does? How is it kept in place daily? Why hasn’t it been resolved until now? What are the issues that would have to be managed in order to bring in a new/different solution and not create havoc? What sort of decisions would the decision team need to address to consider a new vendor and solution?]

Until now, sales has handled only the solution end of the equation, not the buying decision end. Yet a complete sales process is not so simple as placing a new solution to resolve what looks like a problem.

Buyers can’t make a decision until or unless buyers address the internal systems that not only created but maintain their status quo. All of the time sellers spend before this happens is misplaced, mistimed, and misguided, leading to the win-lose quality of sales: sales becomes a product/solution push into a closed and idiosyncratic system, rather than a collaborative experience between seller and buyer.

Imagine having a product-needs discussion about moving an iceberg and discussing only the iceberg’s tip. That’s what the conventional sales model does, ignoring the entire range of hidden, unique systems issues that created and maintain the policies, relationships, and rules that make up the status quo.

Having a win-win means that not only will the seller supply the product solution, but the buyer will successfully manage all of the necessary internal decisions and create minimal disruption as they adopt a solution.

Internal issues that buyers must address prior to being able to make a purchase: Must the current vendor relationship be shifted somehow? Does one department, or do people, have to relinquish a job function? What about changes in policy? Or people’s egos? What about historic rules that have kept the Identified Problem in place? Or how have departments and job descriptions evolved so that the status quo is relatively functional – and would need to unravel once a proper solution gets brought in? How do they replace the item or skill that they’ve been using until now and the people or policies or habits around that?

Having a win-win means that all of these issues get resolved first so the buyer is free to make a good policy decision. It’s not about product, problem, or need.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

There are several pieces to the puzzle here. There is

• the buyer and the system the buyer lives in, including people, policies, job titles, egos, relationships, politics, layers of management, rules, etc.
• the historic issue (the Identified Problem) that needs a solution and still resides relatively comfortably (or they would have changed it already) within the buyer’s system
• the seller and the seller’s product
• the seller’s relationship with the buyer
• the purchase and implementation and follow up.

The sum of all of these parts is the Whole. And each of the parts must work congruently together for there to be a win-win.

Generally in sales, sellers see the IP, recognize their solution can fix it, and go about creating a relationship that appears trustworthy (along with the product data), so the buyer will choose them for the fix. But because the sale is solution based, they are left out of the entire internal decisioning process that the buyer goes through and instead wait for the call to come in.

For the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, the seller and buyer must work together at both ends of the decision cycle: the first decisions to manage, regulate, and resolve the systems issues that created the problem, keep it in place, and need to change in order to accept a fix, and then the final decisions on product features that meld the seller’s solution into the buyer’s solution design.

We are all here to serve each other

Right now, sellers believe they are meant to serve the buyer through their product placement. And what if that were expanded to serving them by being neutral navigators to their decision. Additionally, imagine the buyer serving the seller. What would all that look like?

By inviting the seller onto the buyer’s decision team, by offering the seller respect, by choosing the seller’s solution, the buyer is serving the seller. By helping the buyer line up their internal decisions and to recognize all of the issues that need to be resolved before any change can happen, and by supplying a fairly priced and supported product, the buyer and seller are serving each other.

And when this occurs, and both recognize the value of the other, price is never an issue. And the sale is made quickly, with no competitive issues.

There is no right answer

Sellers often believe that buyers are idiots for not making speedy decisions, or, worse, for not choosing their product. The solution seems obvious to sellers who have seen the same ‘problem’ so many times. But they have never gone beyond the tip of the iceberg as they don’t have the skills, the tools, or the motive.

It’s necessary for us to expand the definition of a buying decision to include management of the people, policies, relationships, and history – the systems issues – that keep the buyer’s status quo in place and are responsible for the Identified problem. Until now, sales has only concentrated on product placement and the surrounding issues that sellers feel they need to manage to sell. This includes managing gatekeepers, closing techniques, objection handling, for example. What they never realized is that once buyers can figure out the necessary underlying systems decisions, they have nothing to object to, will close themselves, and everyone involved knows what to do (therefore no gatekeeper problems or competition issues).

Working with the buying decision in addition to the product sale eschews having the ‘right answer’ and replaces it with having the ability to support the buying decision.

No one has anyone else’s answer

As per the previous discussion, by adding decision support to the seller’s tool kit, no one is working with answers: everyone is working together to uncover the right questions, and make collaborative decisions that will serve everyone.

THE NEW WAY

Buying Facilitation™ is a collaborative decision making model that sellers use to help buyers recognize, align, and manage all of the internal, and sometimes unconscious, systems issues that need to be addressed before any change is possible. Until now, buyers have fumbled around, doing it themselves: they get to their answers eventually, and the time this takes is the length of the sales cycle.

What Buying Facilitation™ does is codes and sequences the unconscious decision making issues that people filter through on their way to some sort of change or decision. Make no mistake: until they do this, they will take no action. Until you know when or how or if you are ready to move, you will not abruptly purchase a new house, or car, etc. on a whim. When there are others involved, an intricate dance happens in which buy-in occurs before action is taken. And whether someone is purchasing a lipstick or a hammer, a house or a horse, and whether a team is purchasing new software or training, there are unconscious criteria that need to be addressed before any change will take place.

What’s been missing from sales has been the concept of systems. Each buyer lives within a system of rules and roles, policies and relationships that both create and maintain the status quo. As seller’s our tools have helped us help buyers recognize the Identified Problem (IP) and how the seller’s solution could manage the IP. But the buyer has remained on their own, figuring out how to make their decisions. And sellers sit and wait for the call back, occasionally getting on the phone and leaving helpless messages.

Now we have a new model that sits on top of the product decision portion of the sale and leads buyers through their internal sequence of decisions. They need to do this anyway – with a seller or on their own. But now, using Buying Facilitation™, sellers can actually be a part of the process from the first call. And become servant leaders.

No longer do we need to just sell: we can actually serve the buyer buy aiding the unconscious decision process without bias and without manipulation.

Indeed, sales can be a spiritual practice.

For those of you wishing to learn more, please visit www.newsalesparadigm.com or purchase the Buying Facilitation™/Dirty Little Secrets Bundle.

Sales As A Spiritual Practice is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I know that Dale Carnegie told you to meet face-to-face. But what else are you doing that was initiated in 1937? Oh. That’s right. The typical sales model of focusing on solution placement.

Buyers only buy when their entire Buying Decision Team is on board and when there is buy-in to bring in something new without causing major disruption. Trying to make an appointment before they know how to manage the elements that will touch the final solution will incur the following problems:

• It’s a double sale
  - first selling an appointment and then attempting to sell the solution to only those people who will see you (although many who don’t want to see you still need your solution). You will lose over 90% of your prospective buyers this way. [But if you begin by helping them first recognize their own excellence/change criteria, you can begin your sales job immediately - and without an appointment.]
• You will end up seeing only one or two people at your appointment and may need to make several visits. Trust me: the Buying Decision Team is much, much larger than the folks you will initially meet — although a prospect will probably not know the full complement of Decision Team members until they are almost ready to buy. [Until buyers know all of the idiosyncratic and political issues that might be involved with bringing in a new solution, they cannot know who needs to be involved in the final decision. You can help them, starting on the first call.]
• You are turning off people that can and might buy you. Buyers buy using their buying patterns, not your selling patterns.

2. Treating the ‘need’ as if it were an isolated event. A need never exists on its own. It sits within a system of people and policies and workarounds and relationships. Until everything around it has a plan to get resolved simulteneously, they will not fix ‘the problem’:  there is no such thing as one issue, sitting and waiting to be fixed. And the adjacent issues are not part of your solution or your sales initiative.

3. Offering solution data too soon. Until or unless the entire Buying Decision Team is ready and willing and able to purchase a new solution, the data you are offering them is too much, too soon. They do not need the data. For example: You don’t need data about the new gym until you have already decided to lose weight, get fit, get up at 3:00 a.m to get to the gym before work, etc. It’s not about the gym. When you start by gathering/sharing data, you are beginning at the wrong end of the buying journey.

4. Assuming the need should be resolved on the sales person’s time frame. Contrary to your belief, the buyer is not sitting and waiting – with bated breath – for you to show up as SuperSeller and fix their ‘problem.’ If they had such a strong need, they would have fixed it already. They are managing fine without you. Maybe not perfectly, but well-enough to maintain their status quo while getting the necessary buy-in for change.

5. Trying to find The Decision Maker. The Decision Maker? What does that MEAN? If the gatekeeper doesn’t let you through, she’s the decision maker. If the CSO suddenly and inappropriately gets involved and disrupts the forward trajectory – and it isn’t even in his/her area of responsibility – s/he is the decision maker.

Every. Single. Person. Who. Touches. The. Solution. Is. A. Decision. Maker.

Clear?

Two things need to happen before you can sell a solution: 1. the buyer has to figure out how to get appropriate internal buy-in and traverse the route (not merely understand it) from where they are to where they want to be; 2. the buyer must choose a solution and manage all of the fallout that bringing in your solution would involve.

No matter what their need – which they’ve lived with until now – or how well your solution fits, nothing will happen until the buyer’s decision journey is complete.

Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy? They are two different activities.

sd

Read my latest book for more on these topics: www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com or buy some of my learning accelerators so you can learn how to add a new skill set www.buyingfacilitation.com

The 5 selling mistakes that lose business is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

What, exactly, are the skills we need to help make a difference, to help people choose to do ‘the right thing’? I’m going to offer some new thinking that’s in line with my biases.

WHAT SKILLS ARE THE DIFFERENCE THAT MAKE THE DIFFERENCE?

At the very least, we need to be able to influence/lead with integrity. What does this mean? It means we don’t push change, or buying, or ideas just because we believe they have merit, without enlisting buy-in from our audience. I’m suggesting that along with our beliefs about doing the right thing, we must consider changing some of our long-held beliefs about how to influence others.

Unfortunately, we have a belief that if we offer the right data, in the right way, to the right demographic, that people will buy, or acquiesce, or agree. Yup: I”ve got the important data that you need - now let me tell you about it and explain to you why you need it.

But that premise is false as we’ve seen time and time again: in our daily lives, in how we run our businesses and how we sell and market. Yet we  continue to use the same approaches and expect different results.

Why doesn’t this model work? Because people don’t make decisions based on data: we listen through biased filters, and all decisions are made according to our internal values/criteria/beliefs (There is no such thing as an emotional decision, even if it looks that way to an outsider.). We do not choose to do something that goes against our values, so all behavior is a rendition of our beliefs in action. It’s a problem because often, our choice criteria are unconscious.

When we create data-driven vehicles for marketing or change management, we have no idea if the mode, the message, the presentation, the actual verbiage, go against someone’s internal criteria. As a result, we have no idea how our message will be received. That means, we’re either lucky or we’re unlucky. Bad odds. And it also means that with the best will in the world, with the best message, we are dependent on luck for our results.

THERE IS A WAY TO INFLUENCE WITH INTEGRITY

But there is a way to have folks open to change and use their values. Instead of offering data, let’s help them decide to make a difference, choose to treat their colleagues with care and respect, lead with a collaborative spirity and trust, donate because it’s the right thing to do, turn off the water because the world needs each of us to be sustainable.

If people don’t already have those values, or have these values stored in some unconscious way, how do we help instill them? Because that is what we need to do. And not by giving them good data.

Let’s help them recognize all of the internal decision issues they need to address in order to come up with sustainable, values-based behaviors they can buy-in to and take action on. Let’s use Facilitative Questions (a new form of question I’ve developed to help people uncover their unconscious criteria so they can examine it or change it) to help folks make new decisions, or re-weight old beliefs. Questions like:

How are you playing your part to help the earth – our habitats and animals – thrive? What would stop you from being an active participant in a sustainable universe?

How would you know that collaborating with employees in a way to allow them each to be a leader will give you and your company a richer environment in which to grow? What would you need to trust to recognize that by facilitating leadership and creativity among all levels of staff your business can make more money?

What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to contribute more to organizations that are helping the environment or problems experienced in disaster areas? How would you know that you could trust that your money would be used in a way that would make a difference? That a contribution would make a difference to you, personally?

What would need to be different for you to be able to meld your company’s work-life balance recommendations with your need for revenue – and how would you know that employees who have a balance will offer you (and your clients) a greater level of commitment and creativity?

Those are just a few of my Facilitative Questions to help you think about raising awareness. My material (Buying Facilitation™ ) has been used in the sales environment until now. But the premises and skill sets are meant to be universally applied: until or unless people choose to reconsider all of the elements within their status quo, and can find a way forward that doesn’t disrupt their status quo irreparably, they will do nothing.

Rather than push data and attempt to manipulate the situation through good content or placement, help buyers manage the idiosyncratic decision issues they must address internally. It’s a good way to help people get to the very core, the very heart of the matter and create real change.

sd

The Heart of Business is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

We are all very familiar with the latter: that’s what sales handles so well. But sales does not handle the former at all:

• we are not there when buyers choose the Buying Decision Team, or the machinations of  how they will work together;
• we are not there when the powers that be decide it might actually be time to resolve a problem that has been working well-enough;
• we are not there when internal politics get into gear and people jocky for position in re a new initiative or resolving an historic problem;
• we are not there when the decision is made to either use a familiar provider, or go outside to seek a new one, or do nothing.

To give you some understanding of the order of the steps buyers go through to make the above decisions, think about a time when you decide to purchase a new car, or a new house (or a new something). The very first thing you did was NOT seek out a solution or a vendor. Let’s walk you through the process.

1. consider that maybe, just maybe, your current situation isn’t good enough. Just a thought.
2. take a look around at the ramifications of the existing situation vs what a different  solution would do to your status quo.
3. talk with your spouse, kids, friends – your Buying Decision Team. Is the status quo ok for a while longer? What would be important to consider in the decision: money? the time involved in figuring out a new solution? What do you do with the existing solution – keep it? get rid of it? how will you choose – do you need to do some research on the costs of having 2 solutions? And, what will go on with your daily lives when you decide to make a change? Is it a time issue? a money issue? a space issue? What is involved? And what criteria will be used to choose. What about the relationship issues involved? How does each member of the Buying Decision Team get weighted? involved? How do you know when you’ve got the right people in the team? How do you include those you’ve left out?
4. Figure out the costs (time, people, money, resource, political/relationship capital) in change. It’s easier to remain with the current situation – but is the status quo too costly? Is the cost too high to make a change? How do you and your decision team go about assessing your internal costs? And whose needs are weighted higher than others? How will you know when one of the Buying Decision Team members is resisting – and how do you all handle that?
5. Figure out all of the criteria that will have to be met to keep everyone happy. Everyone. Including your bank.
6. Once everyone has agreed to
   a. changing the status quo;
   b. the type of solution;
   c. the criteria that the change/solution must meet;
   d. the roles people will play in a purchase choice and adoption activities,

then it’s time to start researching solution choices and providers, get agreement for action from Buying Decision Team.

And this is where sales takes over. Not before.

OUR CURRENT STEPS MISS THE IMPORTANT DECISION FACTORS

Here is what is happening now — and you’ll see why it doesn’t work. Let’s again assume you’re buying a new car, and let’s assume a car sale is similar to other sales calls (a bit of poetic license, please):

1. car dealer contacts you to see if you need a new car. Invites you down to showroom to see the car, take you to lunch, sit down and chat with you, etc.
2. you have nothing better to do, and the showroom is near your work. You’re thinking of a zippy car for this time in your life. You visit during lunch. You get the whole schpiel – car details, price discussion, a few drinks.
3. you are excited – but you’re not sure if this car will be acceptable to your spouse. You sit down with your spouse to discuss your desire to get a new, zippy car.
4. spouse is not happy. Spouse wants to buy a vacation cottage with that money; you have an arguement. You decide to put it on the table for a few days and think about it.
5. lots of discussion. After three weeks of discussion and no agreement, you and your spouse haven’t gotten further. Your current car is ‘fine’ although with the kids gone you were hoping for something sportier. Your spouse reminds you of the grandkids that now live around the corner. Is there enough money to have two cars?
6. seller calls you. What’s up? Great price for the car if you want it. Want to come back in?

See the problem? We wouldn’t buy the way we sell – why do we think our prospects will? Why do we forget the basic facts about people? Why do we treat a problem/need as if it were an isolated event? Why haven’t we adopted new skills to help buyers manage their off-line, private, personal decisions, in the way we would need to for ourselves?

Why do we forget that just as we discuss decisions with family, our buyers discuss decisions with colleagues, and weigh several types of considerations (internal stability, balance of internal political/relationship/timing factors, maintainance of status quo) before they can even consider a new solution?

We forget that if they had found their situation terribly problematic they would have changed already. We forget that choosing our solution – like choosing the car to purchase – is the last thing that goes on in a buyer’s mind. We forget that sales doesn’t offer a different set of skills to help with the different set of decisions.

Think about it. How will you know when it’s time to add Buying Facilitation™ to your current skill set, and help buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decision issues before you sell? How will you know that learning an entirely new skill would sit comfortably with your current skill set and enhance your success?

sd

I’ve developed a new set of learning Accelerators for those folks seeking to put a toe in the water and just learn a few of the skills to add to their sales skills. Have a look.

And, of course, my newest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it will explain it all – and give you an intricate case study to follow each aspect of the decision making with Facilitative Questions to help influence the decisions. Enjoy.

The Steps to Buying: remembering the human element is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

To help you understand how foreign systems are to outsiders, here’s a personal story from a trip to India that made me realize I’d never understand another system as an outsider…. and what I needed to focus on instead of trying to manipulate or make sense of a situation that I wanted to effect change over, but was foreign to me.

In this funny story I was so confounded by my inability to understand another culture that I ended up having a spiritual experience.

INDIA HAS NO SYSTEMS

I was on a speaking tour through India titled Spirituality in Business. India is a wonderous place that teaches you how to be authentic: there is no other way to be, since the only system they live with (outside of the strict rules of relationships) is chaos. And with my systems-thinking Asperger brain, that makes me horribly uncomfortable.

So I was going nuts. Absolutely bonkers. Nothing worked as I thought it should. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. No one did the job they were supposed to be doing. There were no rules, far as I could tell. I had no idea what to do, how to fit in or act. I was living in a state of confusion that hurt – every moment of every day.

I decided that the best route would be either murder or suicide. I didn’t much care which, so long as there was death involved.

I made such a fuss that the organizer of the speaking tour got me the name/number of a travel agent who would get me to HHDL (the Dalai Lama) in Dharamsala in North West India. One of the things to note about India is that your plane/train/bus will be late – or early, who knows – but whenever it does show up it will be yesterday’s transport, or tomorrow’s, and you’ll have to wait til, til who knows when. People wait for days. Calmly.

Anyway, I took the number and went to a nearby village to stand on line (with the goats and chickens, babies and arguing adults) to use the phone – a make-shift deal tied around a tree. It was probably the only phone for miles.

When it was my turn, I contacted Mr. Singh. “Ah, Miss Morgen. Yes. I have your plans to Dharamsala. Please hold while I get your file.” As I waited, watching some children play with a dog, I began smelling smoke. I looked around and saw nothing burning, until I looked down: the phone cord was dangling off of the tree, and on fire. That’s right. And that’s not even possible.

Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere. No phone, no transport, no way out, no understanding, no choices. Typical of every moment in India: total confusion, all the time.

I sat down on a nearby rock, rolled my eyes upward, defeated: “OK. I’ll stay.”

ONE STEP . AND THEN ANOTHER.

What had to be true for me to remain in India and not commit Death of some kind? I had to learn how to take one step at a time, put one foot in front of the other, have no expectations, and live totally in the present without needing anyone else to behave in any particular way and without needing to understand anything. One step. I’m OK. One step. I’m OK.  One step. I’m OK. The anger, fear, rage, confusion slipped away; each moment was just fine.

After a day of taking very small, slow steps, I realized that not only was I (and folks around me) still alive, but that I felt free: I realized that much of my life had been based on assumptions of what I wanted to happen – what I expected, and what I thought I could influence, and the frustrations and annoyance when I didn’t get what I expected.

I took this lesson back to my life and job as a seller. I realized it’s not possible to understand a buyer’s systems. Sure, I understand the facts about a need and how it fits with my solution, but my ability to understand ends there.

What are the systems in your client’s environment? They must navigate their daily routines, decisions, jobs, relationships so that work gets done and excellence accomplished. But you don’t understand their system. So, what has to be true for you to help prospects traverse their systems and consider purchasing something?

sd

Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. Read two free sample chapters.

Buy the MP3′s of Sharon Drew making live phone prospecting and qualifying calls.

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

We can never understand a buyer’s buying environment is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Yes. It is easy. But not with the sales model alone.

THE JOB OF THE SALES MODEL: LIMITING THE PURCHASE CHOICE AND BUYING DECISIONS

The sales model is meant to place a solution. It was designed for a simpler time in history, when there were fewer solutions, precious few ways of marketing them, no internet or FEDEx to get solutions from China delivered to your front door in two days. It was not designed:

• to bring together disparate players on a Buying Decision Team,
• to circumvent many creative solutions that can address a problem besides yours,
• for a bad global economy.

Sales places solutions. But if it were that easy you would have closed more.

You know those sales where the buyer shows up and buys almost immediately? What’s the difference between them and others who take forever? The difference is they are one of the 80% who will buy a solution within 2 years of working with a solution provider (and left behind a trail of dead sales people) and NOW is their 2 year mark: they have finally discovered and gotten agreement on a route to move forward and all of their ducks are in a row. Their need is defined; the new job descriptions are described, the users are ready, the new material will fit comfortably with the old so as to avoid disruption.

The last thing the buyer does is find a solution. Sales enters at the wrong time, offering the wrong data, to the wrong people. If you do the exact same thing you’re doing now, but after you use Buying Facilitation® to help them navigate through their behind-the-scenes decision path, then you’ll close quickly.

MUCH SHORTER SALES CYCLES USING BUYING FACILITATION® AND SALES

Here are some numbers that my clients (using Buying Facilitation® AND sales) tracked against their control groups:

• A large insurance company went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits and 25 closed sales.
• A large tech company selling a small piece of software ($10,000) went from a 6 month sales cycle to a 3 call close.
• One of the Big 3, with a $50,000,000 solution went from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle.
• One of the world’s largest banks went from closing 2% with an 11 month sales cycle , to closing 37.5% in 2 months.
• One of the well known boutique brokerage houses when from $400 Million to $1.2 Billion in revenue in 4 years.

They did this by become true Trusted Advisors; they used Buying Facilitation® to facilitate the buying decision, and then they sold.

Your sales cycle is long because buyers have to figure out how to get the right people and policies aboard before they can buy. It’s not about your solution. Do you want to sell? Or have someone  buy? They are two different activities. Which do you want to focus on? And how will you know if it’s worth adding something new to what you are doing?

sd

Get a hold of Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and read it. Then contact us so we can train you.

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

Why Your Sales Cycle is So Long (Hint: It’s Not About Your Solution) is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

In other words, when choices are made that go against what the world deems rational,  they are, by definition, irrational. So if we get accepted to Harvard, for example, and choose to go to Podunk, we are being irrational.

HOW WE DECIDE

As a person who thinks in systems (I have Asperger’s), I’m here to tell you that decisions do not get made based on information but on beliefs – personal, idiosyncratic values that we each uniquely hold dear: what may seem rational to one person is not rational to another. And  it’s all subjective regardless of what end you sit on.

If you have good data that the new software you’re being asked to use will be superior to what you’ve been using, the rational decision would be to accept/adopt the material. Yet you have a fear that when using the new technology your job will change, you won’t be competent at your job, you’ll suffer some diminished deference from your colleagues, and you won’t be able to ever get as competent as you are now with the existing software. Those internal voices – the fears and the resistances, the avoidance and the confusion – are what determine your decision, not the ‘rationality’ of the potential solution.

Your ability and willingness to change – to buy, to learn, to choose – is directly proportional to your skills at examining and shifting our criteria. You weight/re-weight your beliefs regularly. So if I asked you if you wanted to learn to kill someone, you’d probably say ‘no.’ But if you knew that someone were going to come into your home to harm your family members, you might re-weight your beliefs about knowing how to kill.

When you assume you understand what a ‘rational’ decision should be, and notice someone making what you deem an irrational decision, you have no ability (as an outsider) to understand what might be appropriate for that person, at that moment, living as they are living, with the people, policies, relationships, emotions, and history of their lives.

SALES TREATS NEEDS AS IF ISOLATED EVENTS

When there are others including in decision making – a team, for example - the range of decision criteria gets complex. And buyer’s decision paths are no different from any other decision path: the time it takes the person or team to recognize and manage the full extent of their decision criteria, and come up with a way to enable the appropriate buy-in from the appropriate people at the right time, is the length of the buy/decision cycle.

The first phase that buyers address as they start their buying decision journey involves lining up their internal criteria, the players, the old vendors, and understand relevant systems issues that have maintained their status quo.

The need we can resolve with our solution  actually sits in a tangled web of gooey systems issues that not only created their problem, but maintain it every day, and until or unless there is appropriate buy-in for systemic change, the problem will remain as it is: the need is thrown under the bus if a solution will severely disrupt the system.

In fact, buyers buy solutions with personal criteria that usually has nothing to do with a need or a solution. People buy homes with personal criteria that usually has nothing to do with the details of any specific house; software often gets purchased only when the tech team is willing to work with the marketing team – none of which is directly related to a specific solution.

So what’s rational?

There is an assumption that with the right data, at the right time, offered in the right way, to address the right solution, the person receiving the data will accept it. But that doesn’t happen as often as we would like. As a result, we often judge the person ”stupid” or irrational. But what is happening is not information-based.

As you move toward making new decisions, or helping buyers manage their buy-in cycle, start off with helping them manage their decision criteria, rather than beginning with the last thing they do (choose the solution). Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation model that actually teaches buyers how to walk through and reweight their decision criteria. Help them discover their own ‘rationality’ so they can buy. They must do this anyway – with you or without you: it might as well be with you.

sd

My newest book: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it is about how decisions get made. While seemingly about the buying decision path the book is usable for any people involved in decision making  and it breaks down the root all decisions take. Read two sample chapters free.

Listen to  Sharon Drew’s podcast series called Making Change Work.

Buying Facilitation® licensing program: July 1-7, Austin TX.

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

Behaviors aren’t rational is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

The problem is they are working from a sales model; but buyers buy using a change management model as they must address their internal, human, unique decision issues prior to a solution choice. Here is where the real influence happens.

But by using the underlying assumptions of the sales model – with the right need and the right solution, there will be a sale, or if someone signs up for a webinar or white paper, they have a certain amount of interest in a purchase – the automation process is limited to push technology.

And the lead scoring assumptions fail also: by assuming a prospect has a higher value if they do several activities, we are not supporting or influencing the entire decision journey, but waiting to close the low hanging fruit. There should be a higher close rate:  of 10,000 names, approximately 400 are scored as viable, and of these, 2 close. How many of the 10,000 might be buyers? How many of the 400 might be buyers if approached or supported differently?

WHERE MARKETING AUTOMATION IS GOING WRONG

There is something obviously wrong with this picture.

• Just because someone visits a site or signs up for something, doesn’t mean they are a buyer or a prospect;
• Just because someone only visits a site once doesn’t mean they aren’t a buyer;
• Just because someone has a low or high lead score doesn’t mean they are/aren’t a buyer;
• 98% of prospects who are approached for an appointment after they score high enough to be considered a real prospect decline the appointment: this does not mean they aren’t buyers…just that they don’t want an appointment;
• Prospects need different types of data at different points along the buying decision path, and using current technology there is no way to know, or influence, where the buyer is on his/her decision journey – so companies inundate site visitors with junk – um, I mean nurture material – hoping to hit the sweet spot.

SHIFT THE FOCUS TO CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Imagine if marketing automation used change management thinking: until or unless buyers manage the behind-the-scenes change issues that will be effected when/if they make a purchase, and until or unless all folks who will touch the new solution get their voices heard, no purchase can happen.

Current marketing automation does nothing to address the real buying decision journey – the 90% of the purchase decision that is change related, internal, and idiosyncratic - as it’s not solution based. It certainly does nothing to move prospects along each type of decision to help them.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. What do prospects need to do to get the right folks involved to give their buy-in for a purchase? Until they do, they won’t buy regardless of how great your white paper is.
2. How does someone take an idea from a thought in a shower to getting folks to start thinking about making a change? Until people back the idea, they won’t get the buy-in to make a purchase.
3. How does the Buying Decision Team evaluate solutions? Until they know how, they won’t make a purchase.
4. What sort of data does any site visitor need to make a final purchasing decision? Until they have the specific data needed by the entire Buying Decision Team, they won’t make a purchase.

Using the underlying tenants of change management as per my Buying Facilitation® model, I have developed an Intelligent Contact Sheet called the EXpediter© that gets the appropriate data to site visitors at each stage of the buying decision path, starting from an idea. And it leads them from one step to the next. Some facts:

• It’s easy to slip into your current marketing automation set up.
• You will know exactly what stage the visitor is at, what specifically to send them, and whether or not the Buying Decision Team is already on board.
• You will be able to lead site visitors through the range of their off-line decisions.
• You’ll be able to follow the site visitor to other sites, know how/if they are evaluating your solution, and help them move to the next stage of their decision.
• You will know who to call to make an appointment with, at what point to place the call, and your success rates for appointment-getting and closing will be much higher.

I’ve got the content. I can work with your tech team to implement it. Or my technology partner Genoo can lend a hand. Interested? Let’s speak.

sd

Discover how Buying Facilitation® works with marketing automation and can help you close more sales.

Wanting to learn more? Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. In addition, you will also receive a bonus illustrated booklet.

An Intelligent Contact Sheet is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

These numbers are far lower than they need to be: so long as your primary focus is on making a sale and you focus on needs assessment and solution choice (factors which are the buyer’s final considerations), and ignore the change management issues buyers must handle before they choose a solution, you are delaying a close by a factor of 8.

By using a different focus and changing your ‘first contact’ criteria, you can enter your prospect’s world and get onto the Buying Decision Team much earlier. And close more/quicker. But it requires a new skill to add to your sales model.

WHAT ISN’T WORKING WITH CURRENT APPROACHES

Here are some numbers my clients have given me over 20+ years:

When using a non-marketing-automation selling model (any form of needs-based consultative selling), and your first contact is to make an appointment as your first outcome, you close 2% from first call (with no idea who might be a prospect, you must start counting your ‘close rates’  from this first call – not from your appointment). It might show up as 15% if you track from first appointment.

When you go through lead scoring and lead nurturing, and then attempt to make an appointment, you are closing much less than 1%. And when counting from first appointment, the close rate shows up as 17% — real, only if the names ignored by lead scoring had no probability.

As a rule of thumb, any time you begin your sale with an attempt to get an appointment, you are being rejected by approximately 90 – 97% of perfectly good prospects.   

At least 50% of the people you are calling are viable prospects. Easily half of  these can close. Are you closing at least 25% of all of your raw leads? These folks are going to buy something similar to your solution within 2 years – but not from you. If you employ a change management model from the first call rather than attempt to get an appointment, you will close more, help put together – and become part of - the Buying Decision Team on your first call,  and making you invaluable immediately.

Note: until or unless the entire Buying Decision Team is on board, buyers will not have the full fact pattern to understand what a solution must include, regardless of what their need or ‘pain’ looks like to us. And generally, buyers do not know all of the Team members until they are close to the end, thereby delaying a purchase.

If you first connect using a qualification process that includes change management criteria, you can turn around a lead from ‘potential interest’ to ‘qualified prospect’ within 10 minutes, and reduce the sales cycle by 50% regardless of the size of the solution.

HAVING A NEED DOES NOT MAKE SOMEONE A BUYER

When you attempt to Qualify using need, purchasing capability, or timing,  or use a Trusted Advisor approach, you are omitting all of those people who

1. don’t know know exactly what they need yet and are not quite ready for solution data,
2. have not managed the off-line change and are not ready to buy – but are indeed buyers and know they have a need,
3. are doing their due diligence, but have assigned others to do on-line research for them and don’t seem to be relevant leads,
4. have not the full solution criteria because they are still getting their Buying Decision Team members on board.

The last thing buyers need is solution information, and they need very little of this on the first contact. Until or unless they get feedback on all who touch the solution, and then know how to move forward with change and solution adoption in a way that will create few ripples in their system, prospects cannot buy – separate from their need.

Personally, you may not care about the private, back-end buying journey. But by collapsing the buyer’s journey between first thought and purchase, by helping them get ALL Buying Decision Team members on board early to define the solution and change processes, and get the right policies in place quickly, you can find more prospects, close a lot more sales (400-800% higher close rate over sales alone) and waste a lot less time – not to mention forecast more efficiently.

THE BUYING FACILITATION METHOD® CHANGES THE NUMBERS

With a cold call and a good list, using the Buying Facilitation Method®, my clients close 35% from first call – often without an appointment, and always at least 50% quicker.

Buying Facilitation® facilitates the behind-the-scenes change management issues necessary prior to a purchase, puts you onto the Buying Decision Team immediately (first call) , and teaches the buyer how to recognize and manage their internal systems  issues up front. The model works in any situation in which back-end decisions get made:

• Periodic upsell  for new solutions
• Client recovery to re-engage with lapsed customer relationships
• Prospecting, telepromoting/telemarketing, and follow up from marketing automation
• Managing negotiations
• Pipeline reviews/management
• Qualifying – for proposal management, sales, marketing, pre-lead scoring

How are you currently adding new capability to your X?

At what point would you and your decision team be seeking to add something new to what you’re already doing successfully?

Let’s add Buying Facilitation® to every sales process – as a front end to marketing automation, or a new skill for sales folks - and close in half the time, manage our pipeline in a timely way, find the right buyers immediately and get rid of the time wasters immediately. And start the process from the very first contact.

sd

Call me. I can discuss self-directed learning, or site sales training, or the development of custom playbooks and sales scripts. We can also design front-end technology to enter the buying decision journey earlier. To help you learn:

• Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.
• Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.
• MP3
• Learning accelerators

First Contact: What to Do, Why, and How to Get Better Results is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

There must be a better way to do this, no?

1. if we knew who would be a prospect on the first call, and get rid of those who will never buy, how much time would we save?
2. if most gatekeepers would get us to the right person, how much time would we save?
3. if we can connect with all of the folks who will ultimately be (or are already) on the Buying Decision Team, how many more sales would we close?
4. if there are no more objections of any kind, how much time would we save and how much more money would we make?
5. if buyers could make a buying decision in the time frame that we believe is possible (i.e. those buyers who call up and purchase quickly are good examples of what’s possible for every sale),

how much more business would we close? And why can’t we make these things happen?

THE REASONS YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE RESULTS YOU DESERVE

To begin with, you are beginning at the end of the buyer’s journey – the purchasing decision – and must wait while they catch up. As sellers, you have been trained to find appropriate prospects: you have not been trained to help them begin or traverse their journey through the behind-the-scenes decision path that is change-management/systems based, and has more to do with internal politics and time lines than it does with purchasing a solution or choosing a vendor.

As a result, you have learned ways to manage the fallout you’ve received from attempting to offer a solution at the wrong time. Or from attempting to offer a solution that folks might not know they need, or aren’t ready to concede that they might need. Or know they need but haven’t figured out how to get buy-in.

Pushback, objections, time delays, buyers who seemingly don’t know how or if to buy. Prospects that stop returning calls. Prospects who make promises they don’t keep.

The only reason you aren’t closing more sales, and the reason you end up wasting time with non-buyers and delayed sales cycles,  is not because of your solution. Your solution is fine. So is your care and respect and personality.

You’re wasting your time trying to place a solution before the buyer has lined up the change management issues they must contend with. But sales doesn’t offer you any other tools.

THE BUYING FACILITATION® MODEL WORKS WITH SALES TO MANAGE THE BUYING DECISION.

OK. I’m a hammer looking around for a nail. But it’s the truth. Buying Facilitation® is another model – like sales only different – that you must learn in addition to sales to manage the back end issues buyers must address privately before they can buy.

• Gatekeepers will help you find the right people to talk to rather than put you off.
• You can help buyers put together their entire Buying Decision Team on the first call.
• You will no longer get objections (fallout from the sales model) – price or otherwise.
• You will be differentiated from your competition immediately.
• Your buyers will buy in approximately 1/8 the time (sometimes with very large sales the number drops to 1/4).
• You will know who is a buyer and who is not, on the first call.

It’s not sales. But really – do you want to keep having those super long sales cycles and getting objections? Do you really want pipelines that aren’t converting? Take a look at my site www.newsalesparadigm.com and see what options you have to learn. There is no reason you shouldn’t be doing Buying Facilitation® AND sales, and stop wasting time. The sale model is great to understand need and place solution – but by using it too early in the buyer’s change management process, you’re not helping buyers buy. You deserve better.

sd

Read about Buying Facilitation® in these books: Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. Or buy the bundle with them both.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

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

How much time do sales people waste? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Confused? You’re accustomed to just using the sales model to place your solution. But the buying decision process is more complex than just choosing a solution.

Here is a graph that shows you the issues buyers must manage as they go from idea to purchase:

Unfortunately, we’ve tried for years to use just the selling model to help buyers choose our solution. But until or unless

• the buyer’s entire Buying Decision Team is on board,
• everyone who touches the solution is bought in to bringing in something new,
• everyone who will touch the solution is comfortable with their new roles and tasks,
• all systems issues (rules, roles, relationships, old vendors, etc) are in alignment with the change a solution will bring,

they will not, cannot, buy. And the sales model doesn’t manage that part of the buying decision path – hence your long sales cycles and paucity of closed sales relative to the number of prospects.

That’s where Buying Facilitation® fits in: it’s a wholly different model than sales; it’s a change management model that uses systems thinking (Ater all, buyers live in systems, and sales treats a ‘need’ as if it were an isolated event.) and operates as a neutral (i.e. not solution-directed) GPS tool to be the lighthouse, or neutral navigator, to steer our buyers through the confusing, non-solution/non-need related systems issues they must address behind-the-scenes.

ENTREPRENURIAL SELLING GETS YOU FROM BUYER’S IDEA THROUGH TO CLOSE

But on it’s own, Buying Facilitation® is incomplete. Buying Facilitation® works with the sales model, as sales does the needs assessment and solution placement. Obviously, we’ve got nothing to sell if we can’t understand our buyer’s needs and have the right solution – even if they’ve got the Buying Decision Team sitting and waiting to make a change.

It’s with this thought in mind – both/and rather than either/or – that I introduce you to a wonderful new product:  RAIN Group has developed  Entreprenurial Selling and includes the finest thinkers in sales today (including yours truly). It’s the definitive program for those  wanting the best.

I am lucky enough to be a part of this phenomenal group of sales leaders who put together a program that will bring you from the buyer’s idea, formation of the Buying Decision Team, and will get you in the door, with the right thing to say to the right people, to close the deal.

The folks at RAIN have done a lovely job of capturing the environment of today’s selling/buying experience. And not only do they have the top in the field represented, but they’ve put together a learning experience that fits nicely with a collaborative community experience for all who purchase. They use videos, exercises, and experiential learning to lead you through both ends of the buying decision path – from idea through to purchase.

Here is a link to purchase this training/learning package. It’s not inexpensive, due to the quality and depth of the material. But for 8 days, there is an introductory price.

Is it worth it? Well, here is a Facilitative Question:

What would you need to know about a learning package to understand if your sales might increase as a result of your investment?

Enjoy.

sd

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to learn all of the issues buyers face when they are considering a purchase.

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

Selling AND Buying Facilitation®: facilitating the buying journey from idea to close with RAIN Group is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

This guy was talking to me as if I had never been on a computer before: “Do you know where the backspace button is?” “Now hit Send.” I kept thinking that if I said, “Got it” ”Did it” enough times he’d understand that maybe I knew how to follow higher level orders.

Finally my patience wore thin: “I’m pretty computer savvy. Do you think  you could speak with me as if I knew how to follow higher level directions?” His response:  “But I talk to everyone this way.” And I, given my high annoyance factor by then, said, “How can you really serve your clients if you don’t know how to speak in the language patterns they listen in?”

SELLING PATTERNS VS. BUYING PATTERNS

So here’s my question: What’s the difference between your selling patterns and your buyer’s buying patterns? Because if you don’t know the difference, and merely use your selling patterns, you will only sell to those people whose buying patterns match your selling patterns, and will turn off the rest. Regardless of your solution. Regardless of their need.

Think about the old telemarketing industry. They folded. The entire industry. Why? Their products were fine. The problem was their selling patterns were annoying. So annoying they were put out of business.

I had a monthly column in TeleProfessional magazine in the 90s. Every month for 2 years I told them that if they didn’t adopt a new skill set they’d be out of business. Every once in a while the editor would write a column telling people to read my column and wake up. Between the two of us we tried to save the industry. But they liked doing it their way, all the way to failure.

Right now, sellers are losing a lot of business because of many reasons:

1. the vast array of choices on the  internet;
2. meeting clients too late in the sales cycle to have influence;
3. buyers find different/creative solutions they hadn’t originally thought of;
4. the economy is forcing them to use internal resources as much as possible.

Flexibility is urgent now.

WOULD YOU RATHER SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY

By using your conventional, habitual selling patterns – say, calling for an appointment, or calling and asking about needs immediately and THEN asking for an appointment – you will only sell to those prospects who buy the same way you sell. It’s uncomfortable otherwise, and given the range of possible choices they have, they would prefer not to deal with someone that makes them uncomfortable.

When you use Buying Facilitation®, there are no selling patterns. You are merely using Facilitative Questions to lead buyers through the behind-the-scenes decision issues they would need to address if they were to seek excellence. “How are you currently adding new sales skills to the ones you’re already teaching your sales folks?” “”How would your Buying Decision Team know if it were time to consider training a broader range of skills that would incorporate into what you’re already doing successfully?”

These sample Facilitative Questions (used in a specific sequence that matches decision making) show you how it’s possible to interact with a prospect to get them to begin their change journey. Because if they don’t know the answers, they can’t buy anyway.

Here are some Facilitative Questions for you:

What would need to happen to start using your buyer’s buying patterns from the first call? From the first moment of the first call?

What would that look like? What skills would you need? What would you need to understand before you begin learning Buying Facilitation® to recognize the possibility that you might get more business doing it that way?

What would you need to know or belive differently to be willing to begin your calls collaborating around excellence, rather than trying to sell a solution?

Stop trying to start your conversations with a solution/sale focus. You’re wasting a high percentage of your time with folks who will never buy (over 90%); you might as well start with helping them discover how to want to be excellent. And then you can sell. I’m not suggesting you not sell. I am suggesting that you first teach buyers how to buy.

sd

Listen to Sharon Drew do live prospeting/qualifying calls: MP3

Read 2 sample chapters of books on Buying Facilitation® and change.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

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

“But I talk to everyone this way”: the difference between selling patterns and buying patterns is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Too often, we position ourselves according to what we perceive our market will pay for, or what we must say to prove our concept, or our own biased belief of how our market wants to buy.

Sometimes we end up vying for customers in a price competition. Sometimes our offering seems similar to others - obvious to us, but indistinguishable to our prospective clients.

How do we develop a strategy that uses our competitors to help us get clients and differentiate ourselves according to how the buyers want to buy?

YOU AREN’T MARKETING IN A VACUUM

Let’s start by thinking about the areas of distinction between you and your competitors.

Who are you in the market?

Who do you want to be perceived as – the new ones? The young ones? The smart ones? The innovative ones? How do you want people to choose you over the competition – by price? By service? By capability? By brand?

How do your competitors do this? Do you want to be similar? Or do you want to be really, really different? What are your options for achieving this? And how/when will you know whether or not your choices were appropriate, or what you might want to change? And what is the fallout?

How do you want to be seen?

Do you want to be seen as The Experts? A lovely group of service providers to solve every problem? A collaboratory between customers and provider? A company that is always developing new capabilities?

Notice how your competition is perceived. Do you want to be different? The same only better?

Defining the market

Does your competition define the market differently than you? What demographic do they appeal to? How is this made obvious? Are there areas within the market that they aren’t addressing but are blazingly obvious to you? What modality are they using to position themselves within the market? Is it effective? What’s working? What’s not? Have you enlarged or diminished your solution to go after the corporate market or the small business market?

How similar/different do you want to be from your competitors – i.e. do you want to appeal to different market sectors or the same? What will you get from each?

Price

Is your solution is similar to your competitor but with different price points? Has your competitor priced their solution higher to go after the corporate market, or lower for the small-medium business market? Where do you fit in? How does your competition advertize on price – or not? Do you want to shriek with pop-ups, or quietly suggest a conference call?

How do you want to position your pricing in relation to your competitors? Note: I’ve always taken myself out of the price competition by pricing myself out of the market (i.e I’m more expensive). That way people buy my services based on quality. Or not.

Marketing

How are your competitors getting their name out? Ezines, blog, webinars, white papers, social media, discussion groups? Do you want to meet them head on?  Be different? How?

Websites

How can you translate who you are onto a one/two dimensional screen? How are your competitors using color, font, style, verbiage, other technology like chat avatars or contact sheets? Who are you, and how do you look/act on a site.

WHAT ARE YOUR COMPETITORS SAYING THAT YOU MUST HEED?

What do you like about your competitor’s sites? What do you not like?

Take a look at your competitors sites. Do some research on Google to find out where they are advertising, or who they are partnering with, or where they have articles placed or when they are doing webinars. In fact, sign up for a webinar of a competitor so you can get a good understanding of who they are and how they position themselves.

Use Google Alerts with key words to find out who is using the terms that are important to you. Decide if you want to use similar terms in similar ways, or re-orient the market to your way of thinking.

Go onto your competition’s site and see who their clients are. Are they the same as yours? Why? Why not? What are they doing/not doing that attracts those clients and how do you want to position yourself differently…or the same?

What is most important about how buyers perceive you or them? Do you want to change your image?

MY CHOICES, AND HOW I DEALT WITH MY COMPETITION

I have a very specific problem with my brand. I’ve developed a wholly original change management model that sits on the front end of the selling model to help buyers navigate through those internal, behind-the-scenes human/political issues they must go through to move forward. You know, that stuff they do while we wait and have little to do with our solutions.

Unfortunately, the material is in the field of ‘sales’ so my competition is the entire field of, and history of, sales. That’s right: every single sales method and sales training company is my competition.

So I have a solution no one wanted (i.e. the sales model has been ‘fine, thank you’ for centuries, regardless of the abysmal success rates) and no one wanted to change, regardless of the dramatic results my Buying Facilitation® model offers. In fact, the model itself is so different there are no points of similarity between my solution and sales. No competition, right? Wrong.

So I’ve had a multi decade problem. First, I tried to match my marketing materials to the field I was supporting (i.e. sales) and failed miserably because no one understood why I sounded so different if I were offering something so similar.

Then I decided to pit myself against my competition and spend years explaining how silly sales was. That just got me a lot of hostility.

Then I decided to align myself with the field and say that I had a complementary solution (this is true) and coined new terms that the field is now using (i.e. buying decision path, how buyers buy, etc.). In effect, I dumbed down my message.

I then began writing a blog that used my thinking to open up all of the problems with sales and position my material as as an adjunct to sales – thereby aligning with my competition fully. With syndications, webinars, podcasts, and articles in various ezines and magazines, I met my competition in all of the places it showed up (it’s SALES for goodness sakes!) and offered the counter viewpoint.

I had other, smaller decisions to make. How did I want to be seen? I decided I wanted to be accessible, since my solution was visionary and would attract other visionaries with lots of questions. I designed sites in a way buyers could find me easily, so my phone number and email address appear everywhere.

The main point is to be flexible and thoughtful. Be ready to change on a dime when something isn’t working, and know the difference between what success and failure look like.

sd

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

To learn more about Buying Facilitation®, read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, or hear Sharon Drew use the model with prospects.

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

How to use competition to win business is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com