By any objective standard, I’ve been successful: It’s been a blessing that an out-of-the-box idea has had the opportunity to have a world forum – imagine: one woman with a revolutionary idea making a difference in an age-old field. But my active outreach to gain a broader market is now complete.

I not only have said all there is to say (my latest book Dirty Little Secrets presents the complete strategic thinking), but my Asperger’s makes it difficult for me to do what’s necessary to take the idea further. Indeed, the more I procrastinate leaving, the more harm I’m doing to Buying Facilitation® - fine, important material that is being underutilized, possibly because of my lack of appropriate communication skills.

THE LIMITS OF MY CAPABILITY: THE ROLE OF ASPERGER’S

I suspect I”ve done a bad job helping mainstream sales understand how Buying Facilitation® offers sellers tools to help buyers navigate through their behind-the-scenes decisions and why it’s a necessary part of the sales process. I’m guessing that it might have taken a non-Asperger’s person less time (with more success) to get the thinking into the field. Maybe someone less pushy, or less obnoxious, less direct, or less annoying - all traits of my Asperger’s that I’ve spent decades learning to contain (sometimes successfully, when I’m aware), but are impossible to  eliminate.

But maybe it took my focused personality, determination and vision to develop the full set of skills and design learning programs that have achieved the global success we’ve had. Maybe this time line has been appropriate and necessary. I’ll never know the answer to that, of course. It is, as they say, what it is.

Frankly, I have to work hard to not blame myself for Buying Facilitation® not being in the hands of every single sales person by now. My rationale is that it’s not unusual for a new concept to take this path. It took the telephone over 60 years to be adopted. That’s right. People preferred Morse Code over the telephone. For 60 years. I guess my 23 years wasn’t enough :) But maybe the field of sales truly doesn’t want to add the capability of facilitating the buyer’s change management issues. Or maybe a combination of it all.

I’ll never know the answer. What I do know is that it’s time for me to move on. I’ll continue working with coaching clients, do occasional keynotes, and do Buying Facilitation® training for a few select companies if they are ready and the opportunity is fun. I’ll continue supporting my licensees to make sure the work stays alive. And although I won’t be writing much fresh material, I’ll keep my blog up, and regularly change out articles: with over 550, there is plenty of reading matter for those interested in learning.

But I will end my daily activities around placing Buying Facilitation®. If anyone else wants to carry the ball forward and make the material ready for mainstream, that would be great. It’s a model that can be trained for decades, with conventional sales models, and it’s now at its Breakpoint. Fingers crossed it crosses the chasm and eventually gets trained along with sales training in both companies and in universities. I understand it might not happen.

I am clear that I’ve done the best I could and feel quite proud that I’ve made a contribution to the field.

Hopefully, I’ll be remembered as the woman who first discussed ‘helping buyers buy’ or ‘the buying decision path’ or ‘the buying decision journey’ or the Buying Decision Team. Or the concept that a purchase is a change management problem. Or that by using Buying Facilitation®, sales becomes a servant-leader practice. Or that a buying decision is 90% based on what goes on behind-the-scenes and is not solution-related.

MOVING FORWARD

I’ve recently become excited about putting my model into Marketing Automation, and I’ve developed the EXpediter©, an intelligent contact sheet that actually leads buyers through their buying decisions using technology. I’m still getting pushback on this idea, but far less than from the sales field.

I’m also putting together the skeleton for my life-long dream: The Institute of Practical Decision Making in Abu Dhabi, so I can offer my collaborative decision making system to teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, negotiators, coaches, parents, couples, or teachers. (My material was never meant to remain in sales.)  Maybe I’ll sit on a mountaintop in Peru and let my brain create something wild. Or catch up on my reading, and write a book on practical decision making.  Or just languish in Paris eating crepes and getting fat.

Whatever it is, I’ll hopefully still be making a difference in the field of practical, collaborative decision making, as that is my life’s work. But I must rediscover my creative spirit that has been lost over the past few years.

So if you’re looking to learn Buying Facilitation® read my books and articles. Or get the Guided Study program. Or one of my licensees can teach Facilitating  Buying Decisions. Or listen to me use the Facilitative Questions on an MP3.

Thank you for the opportunity you’ve offered me to make a difference and help make sales a spiritual practice. And what a fine opportunity it has been.

sd

For those of you wishing to learn Buying Facilitation®, the best course of action is to get the Guided Study program. It’s quite a serious program, for serious learners. It takes a bit of time do complete, but by the end you’ll be almost as good as me ;)

For those of you just wishing to dabble, and learn just a few new skills, get the Automated Learning modules, or the MP3s, or the flash drive with both the Ebook Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions and the MP3s.

There is plenty of material to read, especially articles on how Buying Facilitation® differs from sales, and the skills necessary to learn it. It is not just an idea – it is an actual skill set that involves wholly different thinking and behaviors (and outcomes) from sales: Buying Facilitation® and Sales: The Dynamic Duo; A Buying Decision is a Change Management Problem;  Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying; The Buyer’s Buying Process vs. The Sales Model: Two Divergent Roads; The Heart of Sales; Buying Facilitation® is a Method, Not Just a Term

Good luck, folks. And for those of you who are serious students, I’m here for you.

sd

—————–

Sharon Drew,

What a beautiful, happy, sad, thoughtful email you sent Friday. You’ve carried the Buying Facilitation torch for so long, courageously and intensely.…  You’ve given and written and spoken far beyond generously….So many articles and books and tools… So many “almosts” and dead ends… You’ve been a model for others of us who are trying to bring ideas to market.  And you have moved the sales field forward.   I can’t imagine your sadness and disappointment. I admire your courage and resolve to let it go and move on with your health intact (I hope), focusing on clients that are fun, developing the Institute for Practical Decision Making, and restoring your creativity. We’ll strap ourselves in when we feel the earth rumbling again.

Nick Miller, President, Clarity Advantage

Sharon Drew’s ‘retirement’ & the Future of Buying Facilitation® is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

‘Sharon Drew Morgen is doing some amazing things on selling…..she thinks of selling as a spiritual act. She’s also discovered an entire new way to get at what I call the ‘backstory’ (what’s going on behind the scenes) in a sale.”

I suspect if Martin – who has read a few of my books, and taken a program with me years ago – believes this is true, or if he doesn’t know how to say it better, it’s time for me to correct a few misconceptions.I think my new book Dirty Little Secrets addresses this topic thoroughly, but for those who haven’t read the book and who recognize that I’m the thought leader behind decision facilitation as an additional skill set for selling, let me take a few moments to explain.To begin with, I do believe my model is a spiritual one. By being a facilitator that is able to truly lead buyers (and coachees, and employees, and and and) through their unique issues to enable them to recognize and manage all of the behind-the-scenes issues they need to address prior to making any change (like purchasing a solution or changing a behavior or managing relationship issues or or ..) and become the unbiased GPS system to navigate the change issues, we are truly being servant leaders. And this skill is useful for any influencing situation – one in which an unbiased outsider can help Others make their own decisions, based on their own criteria. A servant-leader skill set.

Next. In sales, we understand need/pain and attempt to place solution. What sales does not do, however, is manage the off-line, idiosyncratic, private, personal decision issues that have nothing to do with a need or solution and everything to do with change management as the status quo gets reconfigured.

OUTSIDERS CANNOT INFLUENCE OR UNDERSTAND THE BACKSTORY

Even if we were able to understand or ‘get to’ the back story, we would not be able to influence it due to the idiosyncratic nature of the political, systemic, relational, private, and emotional underpinnings that are so difficult (even for those within the system) to address.

A problem that may require a solution sits comfortably within a status quo that needs to be willing to shift to allow in something new, otherwise it will fight to maintain itself. We all see this as we each individually battle our own change issues. And an external solution is irrelevant if we are not ready or able to change.

One of my dirty little secrets is that when buyers begin their process of trying to resolve issues, they themselves don’t understand the full back story or its relevance to change.Indeed, outsiders can never be a part of this, and certainly can never understand or influence it.

Sales just does not handle this. But Buying Facilitation™ does; based on recognizing and managing internal change issues that buyers must address privately,  it is a wholly different skill set with different rules, outcomes, skills, and goals.

Buying Facilitation™ not only ‘gets to’ the back story, it provides a neutral capability to help buyers manage it and discover their own route through.

To conclude, I do believe the selling process – with the addition of Buying Facilitation™ as the front end – is a spiritual practice. On it’s own, as a solution placement tool, it is not.

So for those of you wanting to sell better, and ‘get to’ the ‘back story’ to help buyers buy, you’ll just have to add Buying Facilitation™ to what you are doing.

sd

Buying Facilitation® is not sales; it is a spiritual practice and leadership model is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our favor. We certainly would not lose as many sales as we do. The problem is that the buying decision is so, so much more complex than we can imagine as we stand on the outside looking in.

Sales mysteriously treats an Identified Problem (my word for ‘need’) as if it were an isolated event. But it’s not. There are ramifications to any change, and the ramifications are ones only buyers can see from the inside and we will never be privy to.

WHEN DO BUYERS START FIGURING OUT STUFF?

Buyers don’t start figuring out their behind-the-scenes issues until after we’ve met them, except in cases when buyers call us and buy… in which case they’ve made all of the behind-the-scenes buying decisions before they contacted us and we are just lucky.

We come in at the wrong time, pitching a solution to a small portion of the ultimate Buying Decision Team, and have no tools to help buyers do what they must do first: manage all of the off-line buying decisions that need to happen for them to get buy-in for change.

I have said this over and over: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. Before they can buy anything they first look into their current teams, partners groups, rules, historic decisions for a simple resolution to a business problem. They come to us by default, and even then end up going back inside (to their old vendors, or the other department heads, or the tech team) to do an internal check on resources before placing an order.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE SCENES?

I’ve fully described the actual steps that happen behind-the-scenes in my new book coming out soon (Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it). To think about this, let’s start with this question: How did a buyer’s ‘need’ get there? It didn’t arise overnight, and people and policies inside agreed to allow it to happen. So the ‘need’ got created behind-the-scenes.

Not only that, the system and rules and people and policies have allowed it to remain as it is – or they would have changed it already.

Before a buyer will buy or choose any solution at all, they must first figure out and manage the very idiosyncratic and mysterious ramifications of change. What will a solution change internally? How will the people and policies interact differently if/when they decide to resolve an Identified Problem and bring in something… something different that isn’t already there? Obviously, the sales model doesn’t equip us with the tools to help buyers manage these issues, and we cannot do it for them.

And no solution will be purchased if there is any possibility that the client can resolve their problem on their own.

As we think about sales, and wonder how to close more sales, quicker, we must realize that by merely focusing on the solution-placement area, and we do our ’understanding’ – understanding need, understanding the decision making, understanding the requirements, helping buyers understand our the judiciousness of our offering - we are not helping the buyer do the behind-the-scenes work they must accomplish before making a buying decision. That work is private, idiosyncratic, personal, unique, and not open to outsiders. And, unfortunately, buyers don’t know how to do this work easily because it’s new to them. But we can help – with a different set of skills.

We can help them by being true servant leaders, true trusted advisors and relationship managers, and guide them through their systemic, off-line, buying decision issues. But it’s not sales. In this time of economic uncertainty, add Buying Facilitation™ and differentiate from your competition – and truly help your buyer buy. And, stop selling.

sd

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

Buying Decisions: What Happens Behind-The-Scenes is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

David Sandler called the buyer’s need ‘Pain.’ But think about it: If you broke your arm, would you wait weeks/months/years to get it fixed? Of course not. So how can buyers wait to resolve their need when it’s so obvious (to us, of course) that using our solution would create a state of excellence that they are not experiencing?

Because of their system. The system that has created the ‘need’ is the same system that is holding it in place. Think about any extra weight you might have, or your inability to stop smoking, or your reluctance to work out as much as you know you should, or eat healthier. You’ve been talking about managing those issues for…for how long?? SOOO why aren’t you? You have the need, right? You have the “pain,” right? What’s the deal?

You will change – just like your buyer – when the system you live in (your work hours, your family issues, your identity and ego issues) is willing to be or do something different. Having a great gym near-by, having great clothes a size smaller, having a doc tell you you must shape up – none of those things are enough to get you to change (or you would have).

Unfortunately, sales only manages the need/solution part of a buyer’s buying decision, and has no tool kit to help the buyer recognize and manage the off-line, behind-the-scenes issues that must be addressed before the system is willing to make a change. Is the other department ready to bring in a new X? What about the old vendor? How will the team know how to choose between resolving This problem or That?

Sales doesn’t manage those issues. But decision facilitation does: Buying Facilitation™ is a change management, decision facilitation model that is NOT SALES but is a model sellers can use to help buyers recognize and manage their internal issues in order to insure buy-in for change. Just like you won’t lose weight, or work out more, or eat healthier unless you have internal buy-in (we don’t make decisions to change based on good data, or someone else’s opinion), so buyers won’t buy until they know that their system will remain intact and healthy after the addition of the new solution.

Buyers will buy when the team buys-in to adding something new and getting rid of the old, when it’s clear the regular vendor can’t do the fix, when the other departments know how they are going to work alongside of the new solution. Sales doesn’t handle these issues, causing us to wait forever for buyers to decide, or to lose really good prospects that seemed a good fit.

Have a look at some chapters in my new book Dirty Little Secrets coming out October 15. I hope you like them. In addition, I’ll be doing a book launch for the entire week, with podcasts, radio shows, guest bloggers, etc. and wonderful freebies from good friends like Tony Parinello, Jill Konrath, Alen Majer, Anne Miller, and Lee Glickstein.

How would you know that adding a new skill set would help you get the results you deserve? Stay tuned!

sd

When Does A Buyer Buy? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Recently, a CEO of a smallish company – a man familiar with my books - called me to do some work. Given the difficult market, he wanted to use Buying Facilitation™ to differentiate from his competition, and have his existing customers buy more product.

As with everyone, I led him down the buying decision funnel and he figured out 1. how he needed to go about getting buy-in from his managers; 2. how he’d know before we started that he’d have a good chance of getting the results he desired; 3. how he’d recognize the value of any money expenditure.

Through the questions, he realized the managers who would have to be involved with the decisions to bring me in, what he and I would need to do prior to any training to give him the best shot at success, and what he’d walk away with when we were done.

The next day, I had a conference call with two of the senior managers, and they bought in to my program. My prospect then moved forward, and together we designed a program to suit his needs. Then he asked for price. I gave him a price that I thought was fair – the price I was willing to do the work for, for his size company. But in this economy, it was more than he had available in his budget. He asked if I could come down in price. I guess you could call it a price objection.

I thought for a moment, and realized that the price I gave him was the price I felt comfortable with for the use of my time and IP.

“I can understand your problem,” I said. “Why don’t we just take the last coaching piece out, and that will match your price.”

He was silent. “What do you mean? You mean take out the last 8 weeks of coaching?”

“Yes. That’s a lot of work for me, and I love getting paid for the work I do. I think that’s a win-win: you’ll save some money, and I’ll save some time.”

Silence. “Let me think about this and get back to you.”

I WANT TO GET PAID FOR MY VALUE

I thought about the situation that night and sent him an email, saying I’d come up with a great idea. He could go with the lower price, and we’d put a rider in the contract stating that his folks could call me whenever they wanted coaching, and I would bill him for just the hours used, rather than have a full-time retainer. It was a perfect solution: I would get paid for my time, and he wouldn’t have to be out of pocket up front, and possibly his folks would use less hours than the initial amount, thereby saving him money. No price objection, and no unpaid work.

He said, “I’ll get back to you. I’m going to the bank to see how much I can borrow.”

Next day he called: “We’re good to go. Let’s write up the contract.”

“How much should I bill you for?”

“The whole amount.”

“But I gave you a creative way to spend less and still have a win-win,” I said.

“I know. But I want the whole thing. I want everything you’ve got. And I’m going to pay for it.”

PRICE OBJECTIONS AREN’T ABOUT PRICE

Next time you hear your prospects give you price objections, it’s not because of the price. The give price objections because they don’t know the full value proposition that they’d be paying for. And it’s not based on their need, or your features and functions. It’s based on the buying criteria they want to meet internally.

At the end of the day, buyers buy using their own buying patterns, based on their buying criteria. Help them figure out how to decide that you will offer them the value they seek; it may be different from the need they are trying to resolve.

When you enter the buying decision process and start with understanding needs and placing product, before the buyer has figured out how to recognize all of his/her buying criteria and before they have actually bought-into change, the buyer hasn’t determined what you are worth to them yet.

When you name a price too early, they only know to compare it with other similar solutions – not against your intrinsic value. So price objections have much more to do with buyers not understanding how to evaluate their own criteria, and little to do with your worth or price.

Help buyers figure out how their criteria match your value. And then name your price. They’ll go to the bank and get the funds.

sd

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.

Price Objections Aren’t Price Objections is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I hate to be a contrarian (Oh. Ok. I love it. Why change the habits of a lifetime?) but… it’s not the end-all and be-all that it’s being touted as.

Here’s the good news: Sales 2.0 is good for driving people to you. By simply offering a webinar, a free e-book, a White Paper, or some incentive, you can get folks to your site. If your material is good enough, they will Twitter about you, put a TinyUrl about you, link to your site, write you up on their blog. You can gather their data, have some sort of passive or active follow up, use the names on an opt-in list, and get hundreds or thousands of new names on your database.

If you want new names and a large database, Sales 2.0 is for you. I know many, many marketers pouring their hearts out to develop wonderful content to send out as bait to attract attention. And it works: after your event, you can follow people up with an email, or hire a telephone sales group to follow up with a phone call. Allegedly, SalesGenius has a dedicated phone sales crew that will call up a new contact within minutes of them signing up on their contact form.

And, what does that give you? An opt-in list (a different question – did the people opt-in for you to contact them after the event?) to send marketing material to. If you don’t actively follow up, you potentially have a new group of people who have been introduced to you and your material, and will hopefully go to your site and learn more or buy something. Hopefully is the operative word here.

And here’s the bad news: how do these folks decide to convert? How do they choose to make a purchase once you’ve captured their name? After you’ve sent them emails (and emails and emails)? Because this is still a one-way pitch: they are basically unknown addresses, who will  interact meaningfully only if they choose to, and only make a purchase if they need exactly what you are offering at the exact moment you are offering it.

Solution data is the last thing buyers need when making a decision to purchase.

People only use data to make decisions with at the point they need the data – usually as the last act in a purchasing decision. Not before. Primary decisions are made on values. With lots of buy-in necessary.

Let me say that a different way. Sales 2.0 suffers from the same problem that all sales suffers from: the assumption that because there is a need, or a problem, the only thing that must occur is some sort of hook-up between the need and the ‘right solution’ and, miraculously, a purchase will occur.

We all know that, sadly, there is a less than 10% conversion rate in sales. And yet the myth persists: great product, trusted partner, perfect solution, good prospecting, great closing techniques, getting past gatekeepers, getting to the decision makers, understanding who the decision makers are, having a great price or a special deal – yup. Sales keeps coming up with ways to persuade, manipulate, position. But still, after centuries of lots of new, new things, there is still a <10% closing rate.

Why, you ask? Ah. I’m going to tell you why. Because (obviously) that’s not how people buy.  Because the sales model only manages the solution-decision end of the buyer’s buying decision. Because a buyer – whether an individual or a group – has a bunch of internal, subjective, hidden, mysterious, unconscious (Are you getting the point? There is no way an outsider can influence this using the sales model.) factors and criteria they need to  address internally in some way, before a purchasing decision can be made.

And many of these factors are deep within the buyer’s culture, and have nothing directly to do with the Identified Problem. It’s the lunch meeting with the boss’s boss that was canceled; the fight your prospect is having with the next department. It’s the relationship and rules and people stuff we can’t control with the sales model. But has to get done.

Your buyer needs a new piece of software? or a team building course? But they have been doing what they doing for quite a while and haven’t changed anything. Obviously, the status quo will continue until it gets enough buy-in to agree to a change.

Indeed, making a purchase is a change management issue – a systems issue, if you will, that can be influenced by Buying Facilitation™. It’s not so simple as problem/need + solution = purchase or we’d be closing a lot more than we close.

Like sales, Sales 2.0 is a push modality, even though it professes to be a pull model. Because it doesn’t help buyers maneuver through their unique and idiosyncratic hidden dynamics that need to buy-in to making a change at this time – independent of the need.

So Sales 2.0 is basically a great tool for sales using a numbers game: have enough names, throw enough spaghetti on the wall, and some of it will stick.

So: don’t expect:

1. people who aren’t ready to buy to buy you because they opted in to a free webinar;
2. people who signed a contact sheet to read your emails;
3. people to know how to buy you because you’ve got their name from a cookie;
4. your sales to increase if you don’t find a way to help the buyer facilitate the unique change decisions (NOT buying decisions) they need to make that will ensure their system will be intact after purchasing your product;
5. to automatically convert an email address to a buyer.

Ask yourself this: why do you assume that the webinar, or the White Paper, or the Podcast you are offering is a precursor to a buying decision?

Just some food for thought. And because I like being a contrarian.
sd

Sales 2.0: 5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

What a waste – not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation™, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of stuff’ that needs to get figured out before they can make a buying decision. It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, that historic problems are managed. Unfortunately for us, sales doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation and buyers need to do this on their own.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match – but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem!

So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good, or because our solution doesn’t match their need. It’s because their internal issues haven’t been resolved, and buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t: they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions: it’s certainly difficult for sellers to understand the buyer’s buy-in issues, management decisions, technology factors. But it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.

Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

Why is a 90% failure rate ok? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

This, said by sellers blaming buyers for not behaving as sellers would prefer. Or not responding appropriately to seller’s selling patterns.

Let me reverse the issue: Sellers do not respond appropriately to buyer’s buying patterns! Indeed, have they helped their customers:

• manage the range of internal decisions they need to make as they construct a buying decision?
• discern their criteria for resolving a need that resides within a tangle of other problems?
• identify the criteria for adding a  solution to their status quo in a way that won’t create disruption?
• discover the most efficient route through the breadth of decisions and decision makers, to help them manage their newly-challenged organizational issues with stakeholders, budgets, and personnel issues?

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE BUYING DECISION

I suspect buyer’s criteria for buying are different from what sellers would like them to be. It’s always been that way (which accounts for sales’ abysmal closing ratios) given sales is based on product placement and need, rather than systems management.

How do I know? Because after 15 years as a very successful sales person, I became a customer and realized what the problem was.

As an entrepreneur of a start-up tech company, my problem was never the ‘need’. The ‘need’ was just the observable factor (think tip of the iceberg) of a conglomeration of internal issues within my system of people, policies, relationships, and initiatives; it was never resolved so simply as finding a solution to one of the elements. There always seemed to be a trickle down factor.

Indeed: there are a few givens that sellers forget when it comes to customers ‘knowing’ how to buy:

1. buyers don’t want to buy anything. They want to resolve a problem. Period.  They will resolve their problem with the most efficacious means, so long as it happens with a minimum level of internal disruption. If it means using a work-around that might fit better into the existent system of people and policies than bringing in a new solution or vendor, that’s the decision. If the status quo – incomplete and problematic as it might be – is better than having to shift initiatives, dislodge jobs, or uproot long standing and collegial vendors, then the status quo is the best resolution. An outside observer, such as a seller, cannot understand the ramifications of a customer’s decision when there is so much more than just the Identified Problem at stake.
2. sales treats an Identified Problem as if it were an isolated event. It forgets that the Identified Problem was created over time, by a series of idiosyncratic decisions and adjoining elements that continue to hold the Identified Problem in place. Invariably, there are a series of problems – long standing personnel issues, problematic initiatives or relationships, new rules being developed but not completed – that circle the Identified Problem like a vine; one piece cannot be resolved without consequences to the rest. Think Pick-up-Sticks. When you played that childhood game, remember how many sticks you had to pick up before you got to the primary one? And remember how difficult it was to avoid moving the sticks because they were all so intertwined? This is what a client’s environment looks like, and the problem you can resolve with your product is that primary stick hidden within the tangle of others that need to be disentangled before they can buy. Remember that, when you think you have THE obvious solution to a buyer’s Identified Problem. The solution you have will only manage one single aspect of a buyer’s Problem Space, and the elements that caused it are so far afield of your solution that even gathering data about the buyer’s ‘problem’ will not elicit the necessary data to help you sell. This fact alone is responsible for the unnecessary doubling of the length of the sales cycle.
3. the job of sales has focused on uncovering need, creating a trusting relationship, and presenting an appropriate solution. It’s ultimately about product placement and need. But imagine if your job included helping buyers manage all of the non-problem-related internal issues they must manage BEFORE they were able to make a decision on the solution. Imagine if the first stage of sales was to teach customers how to manage their internal people/policy/personnel/political decisions, much like figuring out how to safely uncover the lead pick-up stick. They have to do it anyway – with you or without you. They might as well do it with you.

The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle.

SALES DOESN’T SUPPORT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Instead of blaming customers for not knowing how to make a buying decision, maybe you can blame the sales profession for not giving you the skills to truly support and manage all of the decision criteria that buyers must address before they choose you.

No matter the industry or the size of the sale, whether it’s on the phone or in person, buyers have to somehow resolve a problem by not upsetting the rest of their status quo, and by managing the adjacent problems simultaneously. And your solution is merely one aspect of the types of decisions necessary.

Buyers must figure out how to solve their entire tangle of issues that have created their imperfect status quo. Your solution may be one of the elements that will address their resolution. But they also may discover that buying your product – or any product – may not be their best solution.

Your choice is to sit back and wait for them to buy – or not – or call and call and call, and lower your price, and make-nice, or add another set of skills to your sales skills. You can use Buying Facilitation to help buyers recognize and manage all of the internal, idiosyncratic, systemic issues they need to address as they resolve their Identified Problems. It’s not sales – it’s a precursor to sales, but a skill you might want to consider in this new economic environment. Again, buyers have to do this anyway. They might as well do it with you. What else do you have to do now anyway?Every sale is now a complex sale due to internal, endemic issues that we (as outsiders) can not understand. Enter the buy-seller relationship as a decision facilitator first. Then you can either accelerate the ultimate decision one way or another, or you can get on the decision team.

Customers know how to buy. They just aren’t making the decisions you want them to make in the way you want them to make them. And, by focusing on product sale and need, you’re not helping them.

Customers Don’t Know How To Buy – Or Do They? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• Your product is the same
• Your pitch/presentation is the same
• The buyer’s need is the same

What’s different is the decision making process the buyers need to go through. Do they have a problem that needs to be resolved now, and the economy has mitigated the types of solutions they seek? Do they have a problem that can be fixed with a partial, cheaper solution, or with internal resources that can be modified to create a solution? Do they wait until…. until they have some belief that their business won’t be at risk?

NEW BUYING CRITERIA

Your wonderful product data or needs analysis are moot here: they need you, they need your product, and they need a solution. But they now need additional levels of buy-in before they can spend money: it’s no longer ‘who’ or ‘what’ or ‘how much’, it’s ‘when’ or ‘if’. ‘Solution’ is not their criteria, ‘Preserving Assets’ is.

There is a way you can help buyers decide to choose you now. But it will mean a shift in focus – from the problem solving/solution providing outcome that you are currently familiar with, to a decision-support focus that will enable a possible purchasing decision:

1. until your buyer figures out what immediate needs must be addressed – whatever that means to them – they will take no action. In other words, getting their ‘needs met’ might include resolving the problem with a creative or temporary solution rather than a product purchase.

   If you can help buyers actually figure out their immediate needs (i.e. staffing might be a priority, or outsourcing, or finding an alternate route to a problem resolution), and the appropriate choices using the criteria they must work from– separate from focusing on a product sale or the criteria you would prefer they work from – you will be in line as the first vendor they will connect with once they decide to purchase a product.

2. until the buyer’s entire decision team agrees to take action, no action will be taken. That means that your regular contact – who may have been the driver in the decision to purchase your product – now has a larger buying decision team: any decisions now must include corporate economic factors: the risk is too high for anyone to make decisions without agreement from the team.

   If you help your buyer bring together their entire decision team so they can reach agreement – even if their ultimate solution cannot be to purchase your product at this time – there is a greater likelihood of a quick decision to act, although the action might not be the one you would prefer. But it puts you in high regard with the buying decision team.

3. until the entire decision team recognizes that it would make economic sense to resolve the problem using an external solution such as your product, no action will be taken. After all, they have been resolving the problem in a less effective way in their current daily activities, and there is a case to be made for continuing the status quo until the economy gets stable.

If you help the decision team evaluate the difference between the cost and results of continuing doing what they are doing vs. the COST (human, time, political, organizational) of reorganizing around a new solution that ensures the people involved with the status quo are stable, you will become part of the buyer’s decision team. And, if the client sees that all COSTS can be mitigated, or seen in a way that overrides their economic concerns and leaves them better off, they will be able to choose to make a purchase now. But it would be vital for them to understand the full picture of ‘givens’ and include the human systems as well as the financial ones.

A NEW APPROACH

If you can augment your job to include being a decision consultant, you can make good use of this time of economic uncertainty.

Buying Facilitation™ is a model that works with the buyer’s buying decisions and is a perfect add-on to the sales process at this time. In a world where buyers are inundated by choices, Buying Facilitation™ gives the seller a new set of tools – different from selling methods – that provide a decision support capability for buyers to help them understand, manage, and regulate their new economic environment.

Use this time to differentiate yourself as a true consultant. You’ll not only get more business (and faster as you help prospects shorten their decision/sales cycle) than you otherwise would in a gloomy economy, but you’ll also gain access to the buying decision team, line up future business that will close once the economy turns around, and be seen as an important company resource.

Learn more about the modalities you and your team can use to learn Buying Facilitation™ at www.newsalesparadigm.com. Start by reading the e-book: Buying Faciliation® : the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions at www.buyingfacilitation.com. Then, consider if you wish to have MFI develop scripts for prospecting or decision support, or developing the appropriate Facilitative Questions to lead your buyers through the necessary decision issues.

Selling In A Gloomy Economy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

“How can they start earning money if they won’t get their training for several months? And what skills will you offer them, given they will now be learning Buying Facilitation™ after they’ve already begun selling the conventional way?”

My prospect gave me very short, almost unintelligible responses. Finally, he admitted that the COO called him in as my contract come over his desk, saying that if they were going to spend ‘that kind of money’ on sales training, they had better have a team in place that was worth it and had earned it. Joe was both angry and embarrassed: he had thought he was the decision maker, given it was his own budget, etc. and “Frank” hadn’t exhibited any interest in sales training before this.

For me, what appeared to be a ‘closed’ sale, had just become a money objection from a “C” level executive who had no idea who I was, what I was offering, or how to put a value on it.

Joe and I put our heads together, and decided to have Frank call me to discuss it. We believed that if I could lead Frank through the Buying Facilitation™ Method system, he’d be able to decide for himself.

I knew I’d have to handle both the money objections and the phone objections, as Frank believed that no business could be handled on the phone. I also had to walk an interesting line in re Joe: indeed, Frank was stepping on Joe’s toes and superseding Joe’s authority as a seasoned VP of Sales.

Here is what happened. Here is the call, and I’m including commentary for those times during the call when I had decisions to make. To help you follow along the Buying Facilitation™ Method, the questions are, for the most part, Facilitative Questions, and the summaries are Presumptive Summaries.

THE CALL

As per arrangement, Frank called. His voice was tough, crisp, and in charge.

“I understand you’ve been speaking with Joe about doing some training. I’m OK with that [If he were “OK with that” we wouldn’t be having this conversation.]. He’s got his own budget, but with so many new folks, it’ll have to wait until they prove themselves. And if you want to have a discussion with me about it, you’ll have to come here to visit us (a three hour drive each way). It would probably be a good idea for us to meet anyway. I’m curious to meet someone who charges that much for a training program.”

“Gosh, I hate to drive. Hmmmm. How ‘bout if we meet halfway – we’ll each drive one and one half hours,” I said.

“You want ME to drive??”

“Oh. You hate to drive also. Hmm. I have an idea. Since neither of us want to drive, how ‘bout if we spend a few moments on the phone, and see where we stand. We might end up hating each other and there won’t be any need for either of us to drive.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said Frank.

SDM: I hear you are having thoughts about my prices.

F: Well, they are higher than I’ve ever heard of for sales training. But of course, if we end up getting fair value for it, it would have been worth it.

SDM: Given you don’t know who I am, what I’ve developed, what your folks would learn, what it is about the system that is worth more than conventional training, or how to know upfront if you’d get value from it, you must be uncomfortable.

F: Not uncomfortable, exactly, because I trust Joe’s decision making [He obviously didn’t trust Joe enough!]. But you’re correct. I’m not happy spending that kind of money for something I believe I can get cheaper. [Good for him. He’s put his cards on the table. Shows a certain level of trust.]

SDM: So how would you know that Buying Facilitation™ – the new paradigm selling model I’ve developed and will be teaching Joe’s folks – offers a new set of skills that would actually give you the type of ROI that you’re seeking?

F: I wouldn’t. I’d just have to take Joe’s word for it. [I recognized that he didn’t offer to read or learn anything. That gave me an interesting dilemma: he was leaving me no opening, wasn’t taking Joe’s word, and didn’t offer any opening to change his opinion.]

SDM: I wonder if there is a way that you could get to learn enough about Buying Facilitation™ to give you comfort, get you to recognize its value, and see if it’s the sort of model that would make it possible to get your numbers up to where you want them to be. What would need to happen for us to figure out a way for you to get comfortable here?

F: I suppose I should know something about the Model. Is there something you can send me so I can learn about it? [Ah. An opening.] Obviously if Joe is willing to use his entire training budget to bring this in, it must have value and it would probably be good for me to learn about it. What else would you suggest I do? [I must take care to continue helping his decision making process. If I pitch now, I’ve lost the beginnings of the trust he’s offering because he still doesn’t know how to choose me; giving him information here will be moot.]

SDM: I can send you some essays, and Joe has a copy of my ebook you can read. I hope you enjoy them. I understand that before we move forward, you’d have to figure out what my value is. [I’ve moved the conversation from ‘trusting Joe’ to the real issue: why would he be willing to pay a lot for something he perceived he could get cheaper?] How would you know that my program is worth what I’m charging?

F: I probably wouldn’t know until after the program.

SDM: And then it becomes like a Bungee jump – you won’t know if it’s going to work until after you’ve jumped. And then it’s too late.

We all laughed.

SDM: So, what would you need to understand about Buying Facilitation™ that would help you understand that it would give your people a new set of tools to double their numbers, as you’ve required?

F: You’re saying that it’s a different model from sales? That’s interesting. [I hadn’t told him that, but my Facilitative Question implied it.] I guess if we kept using the same selling model we’d keep getting the same results. Different from sales. Hm. And I’ll be able understand the Model from what I’m going to read? [Although I was absolutely dying to give a pitch somewhere in here, Frank never asked me to explain anything. All of his learning criteria were based on reading something, not hearing something.]

SDM: Correct. And it seems that prior to moving forward, you would like to understand the Model, who I am, and what the material will do for you. [I was pushing a bit here so I could name his apparent criteria for him, since he just gave me a bit of leverage.]

F: You’re right. But I bet Joe did his homework already, and has this under control?[His level of trust was now pretty high for both me and Joe. But he evaded my question again, so I had to let him off the hook to stay in rapport.]

SDM: I think we all hope you’re right.

We all laughed again.

SDM: What would need to happen for you to get comfortable enough for us to move forward in the time frame that best suits your company given the revenue increases you’re seeking for next year?

F: Tell you what. I’ll read whatever you send me. If it’s as good as I assume it must be for Joe to go out on a limb like this, given that he’s had to do some hard thinking to figure out how to meet the objectives I’ve given him, I’ll give Joe a tacit agreement to move forward when he thinks it would suit him best. [It seems I’ve proven myself, and the money objection is gone.] But I’d like to call you with questions if you don’t mind. And, when we’re ready to sign the contract, let’s do it over lunch – my treat – and we’ll drive up and meet you half way.

Joe and I burst out laughing. After a moment Frank starting laughing too.

F: I suppose you just used the model on me, right?? You haven’t sold me a thing – no pitch, no presentation. You just helped me decide how to choose you. And I’m hoping this is what you’re going to teach my folks. Not only did I not want to sign the contract when I began, but I didn’t believe it was possible to use the phone for anything more than getting an appointment. This conversation will also get me to reconsider my predisposition to using the phone only for making appointments. Thanks, Sharon Drew. I’m excited. And I’ll even pay for lunch when we meet.

MONEY OBJECTIONS

Objections happen only when someone’s criteria are being pushed; money objections occur when folks don’t understand value. And telling them what the value is by pitching, handling objections, or presenting, doesn’t help.

When two things appear equal, the only differential is money. When value is understood, money is not the criteria.

In this conversation, I had to deal with several things: 1. Frank’s fear of spending ‘that kind of money’ on something he understood to cost a lot less, over-rode his trust in a senior executive; 2. because Frank couldn’t say that he didn’t trust Joe, he used the excuse of working with a ‘proven’ team and moved the training forward several months – and we know what would happen then, given they’d be using the same sales skills they used when they weren’t getting the success he wanted; 3. he hated doing business on the phone; 4. he had no idea who I was, and was so confident in his understanding of the necessary criteria (i.e. ‘sales training’ cost X) that had no criteria around figuring out why I might be worth it.

If you go back to the conversation, you’ll note that I never made a pitch, that I kept going back into the issues and making Frank make his own decisions that would lead him to figuring out for himself how to choose me and my material. And although I never made a pitch, the way I worded my Presumptive Summaries and my Facilitative Questions led him to understand what I was selling, and my value as a Partner.

Also, it was a very ‘pushy’ dialogue. The conversation might appear at first glance to be soft, but indeed it was very controlled and relentless: I kept leading him into making the decisions he needed to make.

At no point did I defend my price or change it – we never had to get into that. Note that if I started pitching product, and defended price, the conversation wouldn’t have gotten very far. Price wasn’t the issue: it was his discomfort not knowing how to spend ‘that sort of money’ for something that was new to him.

I just lead Frank to all of the decisions he’d need to make to justify my price to himself. He had to recognize his own criteria – which he never really shared – and make a quick, internal, judgment call as to whether or not it was being met. I had no way of knowing if he successfully did this except by hearing how he eventually accepted my agreements with Joe. It was all hidden from me, and even if I understood what was going on for him, it wouldn’t have mattered. HE needed to understand, and make some sense of it all. And he did.

Once he found a route through, he could go back to trusting Joe’s decision. All I did was to facilitate his decision. I didn’t sell a thing.

BUYING FACILITATION®

In terms of the parts of Buying Facilitation™ that I used, I did a lot of Presumptive Summaries that showed Frank his unspoken beliefs, and then led him to the decisions he had to make to trust me and Joe. And most importantly, I taught him how to decide what ‘value’ he might get, even though he had no content to work from.

I operated out of the following assumptions:

• that any COO wants what’s best for his/her company;
• that Frank would have preferred to trust his VP, all else being equal;
• that money is an objection only when a product seems the same as other products in the same category and there is no means to differentiate;
• that if I could get Frank to figure out for himself how he needed to figure it out, he’d make the best decision (and telling him what I thought he needed to know to figure it out wouldn’t get either of us very far); that no matter where it went, I had to work with it: it wasn’t about my product, my price, or my delivery.
• Frank was smart. He figured it out. I didn’t pitch, present or propose. I didn’t have to handle objections or prove my value. I used the phone to help him make a six figure decision and didn’t have to meet him in person. All I did was lead him through his own decision criteria to his own best decision.

That is our new job as sellers: help our buyers make their own best decisions, using their own criteria, and use our Facilitative Questions to help them position our product as their own solution. It’s ethical, based on win-win, truly supportive of a collaborative Partnership, and uses no manipulation or influencing strategies. Ultimately, it trusts that the Buyer will come up with his/her own best answers, and if me and my product fit into the Buyer’s solution, I’ll be chosen.

Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy.

Money Objections: It Is Never About The Money is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But you didn’t close the deal.

Later you heard lots of conflicting stories: they already had a preferred vendor, the CXO had a friend in one of the competing companies, their inside folks were going to handle it, they decided to do nothing, you were too expensive, the competition came in lower than cost just to get the deal….

How am I doing here? Did I miss any of the excuses as to why you didn’t close?

But do you know the Real Reason you didn’t close?

WHY DON’T YOU CLOSE ALL YOUR DEALS?

It wasn’t your product, or your presentation, or their need. Your prospect just didn’t know how to choose you. And – another devastating fact – they didn’t need all of the information you gave them in order to decide. Their decision had nothing much to do with your presentation. In fact, you might not even have needed to do one to get the business.

Now that we’ve got the bad news out of the way, let’s look at the good news: you can use your time in front of the prospect to help them decide to choose you – not in terms of either your product or their need, but through a decision making exercise that will help them make the decision to choose you over the competition. You’ll save yourself a heep of time and close the deal.

I was training one of the Big Five – oops. That’s now the Big, um, Three?? Whatever. The highly paid consultants that come from Harvard and wear expensive watches.

So I was training these senior partners – smart folks all, obviously – and was shown one of their presentations You’ve seen them; they are gorgeous. Big fat bound books of pictures and graphs, charts and projections that cost between $350,000 and $1,000,000. It takes teams of Senior Partners weeks and weeks of full time work to put them together, not to mention all of the human capital getting friends of friends of friends who know someone ‘inside’ to give them the ‘skinny’ on the ‘facts’ that would ‘focus’ the presentation properly.

‘How many of these do you close?’ I asked. They were embarrassed. Less than 20%. Several highly paid consultants were taken off of paid work in order to create million dollar presentations and they wasted over 80% of their time! And they kept doing this? Why? Because they didn’t know how to do it any other way. And the excuses they had for the prospect not closing were fabulous: John heard from Mary who had a cousin that worked there, that they were going with their old vendors because the new CEO used to work in that vendor’s company 3 years ago.

The basic belief they held, as do all sellers who use Presentations as a route to a closed sale, was that if they could prove to the buyer that they understood the Need, and could address it from every angle to ensure the value proposition was obviously cost effective, and could prove their worth as a prestigious company (Don’t all presentations include the yada yadas that explain the vendor company??), they would be the Chosen Ones.

Yes, with good data understood and presented, the buyer was obviously stupid if they didn’t buy. Right?

WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING?

Here’s what happens. Let’s start with who is in the room.

Who are you presenting to? Always, in my history of working with my own clients around their presentations, always there is at least one person – sometimes more than one – who ‘shows up’ unexpectedly. And my clients never know the relationship this unknown person has to the recognized prospects.

It’s not about their job description or title, it’s about the weight this person’s voice has. If you don’t know one or two people in the room, you have no idea of the relevance of your presentation as you don’t know the filter this unknown person is seeing you through or how they influence the others. Are they in a different department and want to see what is possible for them when moving forward? Will they be moving in to the client’s department and working with you? Are they people with the PEN who sign the checks and give the final ok – and you weren’t aware of them? Are they consultants who help the buyer make decisions? Are they folks from a different department who use a different vendor that they like and want to challenge their colleagues to choose someone else?

And you have no idea of the political weight their opinions carry.

Next. Ask yourself these questions:

• How do you know that each person in the room needs the same information? Is your intent to throw it all at them – like throwing spaghetti on the wall – so something will stick?
• Are you presenting just to position yourself and your product and have no idea how the buyer will hear it? Or how they will weight different aspects of your presentation….in relation to the other vendors who come in with great presentations and good suits?
• How do you know that the prospect will take away what you want them to take away?
• What if only one small bit of your presentation is relevant, and you’re boring them all to tears for an extra 45 minutes?
• What if you have unwittingly omitted the specifics of the sort of buying decisions or unique implementation issues they face?
• What if they haven’t reached internal consensus on what they actually need in order to resolve their Identified Problem, or whether or not to use familiar vendors?
• What if they already made their decision and they are using your material to bring to their preferred vendor?
• What if they are clueless how to move forward and will use your presentation to get them on the road to a solution and have no idea at this moment what that would look like, what it would take, or how long it would take?

If you can’t answer those questions in a way that directly leads to buyers making buying decisions, you must ask yourself why you are doing a presentation.

INFORMATION DOESN’T TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO DECIDE

A client once returned a call days after my call in to him. It took so long because he had gotten an RFP from a big company who had always used a competitor before now, and his team was putting their heads together to figure out the best way to win the business.

“Why aren’t they using their old vendor this time?” I asked. My client had no idea.

Turned out that the prospect was actually planning on using their regular vendor, but needed a second bid! And my client would have wasted weeks of time.

For some reason, sales folks seem to believe that information will teach people how to decide. So you pitch, present, gather data, etc. But you still close an average of less than 10% of your prospects (from first call to close) and it takes about 50% longer than necessary. So all of your truly wonderful, informative, and professional presentations haven’t gotten you much more than frustrated.

If information doesn’t teach people how to decide, what does?

People decide when their criteria have been met. And until the full set of criteria are addressed, no decision to take action will happen. Remember how long it took you to decide to change your hairstyle? Or choose to replace your car? Or move? Or end a relationship? The time it takes to come up with your own answers, based on your own internal, unique, subconscious values and beliefs, is the length of the decision cycle. And until you know how your internal beliefs and choices will line up around a new answer, you will do nothing.

Note that as outsiders, sales folks will never understand the range of internal, unique criteria (outside of the factual problem that requires a solution) that people seek to meet when they make a decision. Would you make any personal purchase until you understood, and met, some sort of criteria? And, if you were a boss needing a solution, would you make a business decision without including the relevant members of the team and ensured their criteria were met? What if you all had different criteria? What if you as boss had one set of criteria that the team needed to buy-in to, and they hadn’t quite gotten there yet? How ready would you be to make a decision of they all weren’t on board?

The conventional sales model doesn’t manage the buyer’s internal, hidden, and unique criteria that hold their Identified Problem in place. After all, if there weren’t some sort of very powerful criteria – say longstanding relationship issues between teams, or incomplete initiatives, etc, the Identified Problem would either not be there, or would have been resolved before now.

Have you asked yourself what has stopped the buyer from resolving that problem until now? You’ll get some pretty interesting answers once you start asking that question – answers about historic failed initiatives, or beloved vendors who weren’t so quality-conscious but still loved by all, etc.

The point is, that behind each ‘problem’ that your product can resolve lie a long list of people, policies, initiatives, thoughts, feelings, history, relationships, that not only created the Identified Problem, but hold it in place. And giving them great product data doesn’t resolve the underlying systems/people/strategic issues that would need to be resolved before a decision can be taken to fix them.

HELP DECISIONS GET MADE AT THE PRESENTATION

You can use your time in front of clients in a far more significant way: you can actually lead them through their decision cycle – and then do a real-time, customized presentation that addresses their specific buying criteria (rather than offering your choice of data that may not be as relevant). So, first get them to decide how they will work together, how they will decide together, then how they will choose a vendor, and lastly the data they need presented to them before they decide.

Here is how it goes: start your presentations by asking the group what they’d like to get out of your time together. Once each of them has spoken, summarize what you’ve heard. It will not all be about fixing the Identified Problem. In fact, you will hear different ‘needs’ from each person in the room. One will want to hear how you’re different. One will want to hear how you price your product. One, a way to make sure you integrate your product with the current set up. Another will want you to prove to them that you can actually make a difference.

You first must get the group into agreement as to their end result:

• What will their environment look like once a product fix is introduced into their environment? Once the Identified Problem has been resolved?
• How will a vendor’s offering help manage the work-around that has been handling the issues that created the current need for resolution?
• How will the folks in the room work together with a vendor once they’ve chosen a vendor? And what criteria do they ALL want a vendor to meet?

In addition, note that some of the important underlying criteria will be missing because some of it can’t be discussed with a stranger, and some of it is subconscious.

Next, ask:

• How would you know that my offering could meet your needs?

Let them all come to an agreement as to how they would choose you. Do what you can to keep a conversation going until there is relative agreement in the room.

Your criteria here is to get them to reach some sort of mutual agreement as to how they want to move forward – with a vendor, with a solution, and, specifically, from their meeting with you (beyond just your product and services). And talk about their outcomes for a fix. If they are not all on the same page, they won’t be able to hear or discuss the information you do end up presenting. I have actually walked out of meetings without presenting anything until the prospects made collaborative decisions, and then I was hired without even doing a presentation just because of the strength of my opening questions.

Now it is time to actually present, and your presentation must conform with the needs they had specified. This means that your presentation materials must have one piece of data on each overhead – a clear representation of one element of your product or service. You will then present only the specific overheads that match the room’s criteria. In other words, your presentation will be customized for each situation and client-driven, not based on what you want to present.

As always, the question is: do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? When it comes to presentations, you have focused on what you want to sell. I’m suggesting that by using half of your time to help your prospects decide how to buy together, your presentation – and your sale – has a greater chance for success.

Presentations: How To Compete When In Front Of A Prospect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

If you face any of the above, it’s because you are using sales methods.

Do I have your attention? Good, because sales operates on a set of myths that perpetuate failure.

I am going to debunk these myths that have defined the entire industry for decades, if not centuries. Myths that have cost companies, sales people, and clients unfathomable money, time and success. Myths that not only advocate misguided sales methods, but design unproductive marketing and advertising campaigns, and keep management from being able to forecast revenue. And myths that have kept sales people from closing all the sales they should be closing.

THE BUYER IS STUPID

Let me begin with a story. My book Selling with Integrity was originally titled: “I’d Close More Sales if it Weren’t for the Buyer.” I mentioned this at the start of a sales training with a noted hardware provider. Everyone cheered and gave me a standing ovation. I was surprised: for me the title was so silly that I expected laughter. For me the title was equivalent to: I would have had an easier birth if it weren’t for my mother.

These successful professionals were doing the stuff that sellers are expected to do: gathering data, understanding a ‘buyer’s Pain’, learning enough about a buyer’s needs so they could present a relevant solution, developing relationships, offering strategic ways to solve persistent problems, providing good service, following up, having a trustworthy product, being a great Trusted Advisor.

Yet they were not getting the results they deserved, feeling frustrated that given how well they understood buyer’s needs and provided creative solutions (Truly they did!), gave such great service (They care! They care!), had such a good product (The best!), and assiduously followed up (After waiting just the right number of days!), they closed only a small percentage of their prospects.

Indeed, they were perplexed at the prolonged time it took to close, and watched in dismay and annoyance as a prospect often chose the wrong solution or – even more confounding – chose no solution at all.

So much wasted time. And the loss of so many prospects who would have closed if they knew how.

There could be only one conclusion: the buyer was stupid.

Maybe, I suggested, there is something you are missing. They couldn’t think what it could be: they were smart, rigorous, and professional. They assumed the disappointing results were ‘givens’: that buyers made stupid decisions, didn’t really know what they needed, didn’t appreciate quality, had no loyalty, weren’t smart enough to understand a new product.

WHAT IF THE BUYER WEREN’T STUPID?

And, so, the problem with sales. Given the best sales skills in the world, given care and responsibility, a great product and branding, and talking to the ‘right’ decision makers, you close only a fraction of your prospects. Telemarketing and scripted calls close ½-1%. Small business bankers close approximately 2% even after a year of face-visits. Software sales close approximately 5-7%. But it’s safe to say that there is a more-or-less 90% failure rate, from time of prospecting, using available selling skills.

Yet you have continued to seek perfection over the years. You focused on Customer Care, then Relationship Management, then Trusted Advisor. You’ve discovered buyer Pain, marketed with Neuromarketing and targeted the Old Brain. You’ve done Solution Selling and SPIN, gotten to VITO, and looked for the High Probability.

You keep learning how to better yourselves with updated forms of pitching, presenting, prospecting, closing, educating, and handling objections. You learn to put your needs second, and profess to really care that customers get what they need, even if it’s not your product. You hire seasoned professionals, assuming they’ll be more successful – and then play musical chairs as you fire them for deficient numbers and hire someone similar in hopes of greater success. You assume that if you provide the right information, in the right way, at the right time, and brand yourselves fashionably, the buyer will understand why they need to buy. From you.

Sales, advertising, marketing all are based on product placement and perceived-problem resolution – a Problem Management Model if you will. The industry spends trillions on demographic studies, neuroscience studies of learning how the buyer’s brain works, focus groups, market tests. But all that achieves is higher probabilities for specific markets – not a way to manage or influence an individual prospect’s decision-making capacity.

But you still fail to close all of the sales you deserve to close.

Regardless of sales vehicle or skill, the industry or the price tag, the same basic set of beliefs about the ‘job’ of sales persists, building in reduced possibilities (a 400 %+ increase over your standard expectations could be the norm), 100 hours a month wasted using your bodies as prospecting tools, and months or years of positioning, strategizing, and waiting. Adding insult to injury, you hire 4X more sellers than necessary because close rates are so abysmal that you have to hire more people to make up the numbers.

And what about the buyer? What if the buyer is getting less than what they need, paying more for it, and not getting their resolution in a timely way because they are just responding to the sales model? What if the buyer has the best will in the world – truly wants the best vendor or solution or time frame – and still ends up with an inferior solution? Where do they go wrong? And why don’t the very skills of ‘sales’ help them get it right?

As yet, few have questioned the model itself. You’ve just built in failure as being an expectation of the field, and continuing the frustration of finding new ways to do the same thing differently, with the same results – better and better skills at doing the same wrong things better and better.

What is going on here?

WHERE SALES FAILS

I’m here to tell you that you are wonderful, your product is great, and your buyers are smart. It’s the model itself that is broken.

Let me begin by naming a few overarching myths that sales perpetuates:

1. buyers buy because they are in Pain;
2. buyers recognize a need when they notice a problem;
3. buyers buy on price;
4. buyers buy on emotion;
5. buyers need to have a ‘face’ visit with a seller to develop a relationship;
6. buyers buy from a seller they like because they like and trust them;
7. good branding and great products will drive sales;
8. being professional, doing great information-gathering, being a great Trusted Advisor, will teach a buyer how to trust and choose a vendor;
9. sellers need to understand a buyer’s problem/’pain’;
10. providing and gathering the right information will enable buyers to make sense of their need.

If the above were true, buyers would have solved their problem yesterday, or make quicker decisions, or choose the very cheapest solution every time. But they don’t.

As a result of operating out of the wrong beliefs, sellers:

• have sales cycles up to 5 times longer than necessary;
• get unnecessary money objections;
• assume that a 90%+ failure rate is the norm (and build these inadequate projections into their budgets);
• chase prospects for months or years and then possibly lose the sale;
• assume the Pain + good solution + good service + good price + need =purchase;
• don’t know when they have lost the sale until it is too late to recover;
• work arduously on attempting to know all of the answers to ensure they sound professional, represent their company well, and attempt to be seen as true professionals;
• spend zillions of dollars figuring out how to present and pitch information that buyers may not need in order to buy;
• don’t recognize that a buyer will never buy until they have spent too much time on them.

Sales has failed because it assumes that you can sell product by fully understanding the Identified Problem and positioning and pricing and presenting your solution appropriately, using the most appropriate medium, in front of the ‘right’ people.

When I ask sellers why they lost a deal, they ultimately say – after first complaining about what a jerk the buyer is – that if they had done their job ‘better’ the buyer would have bought. So… it’s the seller who is stupid?

IT’S ALWAYS A SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Given your skill set, you do a wonderful job. Truly. I’ve met very, very few of you whom I would call unprofessional. Across industries and market segments, from telemarketers to senior Partners, I find that you truly care about your clients, and really want to do a good job. You somehow weather the daily rejection (also built into the profession) and keep on keepin’on. Each day you fight the good fight. You read more books on your profession than professionals in any other industry – working ever harder at getting that ‘edge’ that will help you close the deal. One half a billion dollars a year are spent on sales training world wide. It’s a very very professional group with ethics, standards, and commitment.

Yet, through no fault of your own, you haven’t been taught the secret: that a buyer’s Identified Problem – that problem or ‘pain’ that you work so assiduously to understand and resolve – can’t be fixed the way you’ve been taught to help fix it. You haven’t been taught that sales should be a systems competency, that a buyer’s Identified Problem is only a small piece of a much larger issue they are facing, unwittingly held in place daily by the company or team, history and rules, politics and relationships.

Indeed, the buyer’s Identified Problem is only the tip of the iceberg – the visible part of some much larger, unresolved, set of issues. And having a product that will ‘fix’ the perceived problem is like putting a band aid on a broken leg: it treats the Identified Problem as if it were a relatively isolated event.

Systems thinking believes that nothing stands alone, that everything is somehow related, that nothing exists in a vacuum, that there are ‘…key interrelationships that influence behavior over time. These are not interrelationships between people, but among key variables…” (pg 44, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge).

The Neuroscience of Human Relationships by Louis Cozolino says, “Our experience of the world is constructed around the notion of the isolated self…. Yet… all of our biologies are interwoven” (pg 3). Nothing stands alone. Nothing is isolated from the system that creates, surrounds, perpetuates, and constrains it. In other words, to change, the very elements within the system that created and maintains the problem must seek, and then embrace, the change.

NOT AN ISOLATED EVENT

Here’s a simplistic analogy: Imagine driving down a street and seeing a “For Sale” sign on the house of your dreams – and going directly in and buying it. Unthinkable! Your spouse will most probably object; your budget and funding would have to be considered; your time frame would need to be organized; you’d somehow have to manage an array of interrelationships (schools, playgroups, soccer practice, moving schedules, weather) that are unique to you and your living situation. Great house, great price, great location, you have the money, you need to move anyway…. And your spouse might want to change jobs and need to relocate. Or you are waiting for interest rates to drop. Or you need to have knee surgery next month. Or or or….

When you consider offering a solution to a prospect, it’s important to remember that all of the stakeholders and ideas and unspoken biases and hidden, historic events and policies and rules that reside within the prospect’s company, team, or family have conspired to create, maintain, and perpetuate the Identified Problem.

So what is perceived as the prospect’s Identified Problem is merely a highly visible segment of a much larger problem within the buyer’s culture – like having historic money issues that would preclude you from easily getting a loan on that perfect new house. Add this to the challenge that the problem has become part of the fabric of the system and will continue to maintain itself daily (and will resist change) until something else replaces it that the entire system buys-in to.

This tangle of interdependent components (sometimes invisible even to the prospect) creates an Identified Problem that needs so much more than just recognizing, understanding or resolving. And, because your product probablydoes resolve the visible part of the Identified Problem, you dangerously assume that your product could be the prospect’s solution, leading you to continue the ‘push’ strategies invoked by sales.

But by then you’re not only facing unnecessarily long sales cycles, you’re also facing a resistance problem. That’s why you end up getting objections, excuses, confusions, time delays, contact problems, and decision issues, and closing such a small percent of your prospects.

SALES CAN’T DISCERN SYSTEMS

As you can see, it’s quite simplistic to think that your care and professionalism, product, or any external solution coming in at the wrong time – even when the Identified Problem seems to seek a resolution – cannot resolve this. Of course, some prospects show up and buy. I call this the Lucky Stripe – that magical place where everything shows up just right and you close a sale quickly. This happens because the prospect has already managed their systems decisions.

Make no mistake: this resolution of systems components needs to happen anyway – with you or without you – and the time it takes buyers to accomplish this is the length of the sales cycle.

The entire model of selling is based on the wrong assumptions. Buyers buy not when they discover a need, or have pain; they’ve been living with that for a period of time. They buy only when they have defined their own internal questions, resolved and discovered their own unique path through their systems issues, and figured out how to bring in change without disruption. Once this occurs, they will know exactly how to buy you and they will actually need your sales skills and product knowledge. But until then, the sales model potentially slows down any comprehensive resolution.

Sales fails because you are pushing, pulling, influencing the area surrounding the Identified Problem, handling just the tip of the iceberg. Sales fails because it assumes that great products and well-positioned data will teach a buyer to buy. And sales ultimately fails because the system will fight change until all internal systems elements are managed. Sales must become a Systems Resolution Event – not a Problem Management Model.

SUCCESS IS POSSIBLE

It is indeed possible to help buyers manage their buying decisions. To do this you will have to learn an additional set of skills: new ways to listen and new things to listen for, new types of questions to ask, new curiosity, new focus and a new way to enter the seller-buyer interaction.

Your results will be profound. You will:

• have much, much shorter sales cycles as buyers will be able to make all necessary decisions much more quickly;
• have a much broader range of prospects, including folks who hadn’t been seeking a solution but indeed need your product;
• be able to discern the difference between a real prospect and someone needs to be dropped (even on the first call);
• quickly become part of the buyer’s decision team and lead them efficiently through critical systems decisions;
• differentiate yourself from the competition because you are facilitating the real issues – helping resolve the Core Problem vs. the Identified Problem;
• and hear no objections as there won’t be anything to object to.

Adding this front end to your current sales approach will give you a shorter sales cycle overall. Remember: the buyer has to do all this anyway; s/he might as well do it with you. Doing it with you will save time, differentiate you, and create a lasting bond. And your buyers will have found their own answers, melding your solution into the solution they design.

Change the game. Selling and buying are two different activities and handle the two distinct phases necessary for a buying decision – the buyer-led systems management phase, and the seller-driven product placement phase. Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

Why Sales Fail is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Your new prospect (The ‘Acme’ Corporation) has a need for your product; you’ve done your research and know this: you either know one of the people in their company who says they are seeking to solve a problem, heard through the grapevine that they are looking for a new vendor, or you’ve actually received an RFP from them. And it’s clear that your product will resolve their issue.

GATEKEEPER

You first seek the right person to introduce yourself and your product. You believe you need to get an appointment to go in and meet this person face-to-face, and introduce your product while showing how it will resolve their business problem.

Your first challenge is to get through the gatekeeper. Your charm is often effective: you’ re respectful and you will let her know you need her (“Can you please help me?”). But in this case, Acme has a receptionist who is not friendly. If you don’t know the name of the person you’re calling, she can’t help you. So you do more research – on line and with colleagues – and get the right name. You call back, and after being put through to the right department, you are met with yet another gatekeeper who doesn’t want to put you through.

“Does Mr. Jones know what this is in reference to?”

“No, Mr. Jones doesn’t know me or my company. But I think he’d be interested in speaking with me since I have a product that he might be able to use to resolve his business problem.”

“Sorry, but I can’t put you through to Mr. Jones without him telling me to give you time. I’ll put you through to his voice mail and you can leave a message. He’ll get back to you if he’s interested.”

VOICE MAIL

Here’s the message you leave:

“Hi Mr. Jones. My name is Kate Anderson. I’m the senior sales consultant at Merriweather. I was speaking with Joe Jones yesterday and he told me of your desire to solve your X problem. We have a product that can manage that for you, from what I understand from Joe, but of course I’d need to know more if there is indeed a chance that my product could help. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to return my call so that I could possibly ask you some questions and determine – with you – if my product would serve your needs. Please call me back at ___________.”

Now you have to wait to hear from him, and you know that most people do not respond to voice mail, especially when they don’t have a clue who you are.

What are your odds of getting a call back? Slim to none: unless Mr. Jones 1. is actually seeking exactly the solution you offer, 2. his current vendor can’t manage his needs, or 3. he’s seeking to compare possible solutions, he won’t speak with you. Why should he? If:

• he’s not aware that he needs your specific solution, he won’t know he needs to speak with you;
• if his current vendor is managing the problem, he won’t know your solution is better/cheaper/quicker;
• if he thinks his problem can be resolved with his current team, he doesn’t need outside support.

In fact, he’ll return the call only if he’s seeking to check out all possible alternatives, and needs to compare price, (the automatic assumption is that the solutions are similar so the price has to be similar or lower).

In other words, if you get a return call you must expect to be treated like a commodity and be ready to defend your price points; if you don’t get a call back, you’ve lost a new prospect that most probably needs you.

Is it the fault of the gatekeeper? Nope. Remembering that a gatekeeper’s job is to let in the folks that will serve her boss, and keep out those that will waste his time, she’s just doing her job.

Is it the fault of your product or your marketing? Nope. That’s all just fine: clear, professional, manages a need.

Is it your fault? Nope. You’re a professional, and truly want to serve.

So what’s the problem?

HOW WILL THE BUYER CHOOSE YOU?

The problem is that the buyer doesn’t know the decisions he needs to make internally to choose you, or to make a decision on whether or not you or your offering could be a part of his solution design and resolve his business problem.

How many times has this happened – that you’ve known you have the right solution for a prospect, known you’re a professional, and then not had the opportunity to get in front of the prospect, or get talked down irreparably on price, or lost to a lesser competitor? Too many times. Obviously if the prospect really knew your product and its value, knew your level of professionalism and care, understood that your product could manage their identified problem, you would have a closed sale.

It’s not you. Not your product. And not even the appropriateness of the solution. It’s about the string of decisions that buyers need to make before they can choose a new product/vendor and ensure that they don’t disrupt their internal systems (people, policies, relationships, etc.). Until or unless buyers address these issues – with you or without you – they will take no action and delay a buying decision.

Until now, the entire field of sales has been based on appropriately placing a product. More recently, the buyer has been incorporated into a needs analysis to ensure that they are getting exactly what they need. But all information gathering, analysis, and consultation, is based on the area directly around the identified need. If that were all there was to it, you’d be closing all of your sales because you do such a good job of this stage. Indeed, the skills that sales espouses are incomplete as they offer limited access into the buyer’s hidden systems that created and maintained the identified problem. And until these are addressed, the buyer-seller gap will remain a product-based push, no matter how well you gather data or analyze the problem.

Let’s take each piece of your approach and see how failure is built in, remembering that your product is most likely a great potential solution but that each person you connect with must first decide to connect with you before you can make the next move.

Gatekeepers:

1. if you are required to give a name to a receptionist, there is no way around this one. Just a company rule; the receptionist is too low level to make her own decisions.
2. the gatekeeper to your identified prospect has a different set of problems. Her job is to let the right people in and keep the wrong people out. And you forget that with this first contact, she IS the primary decision maker. Your job here is to help her decide that you will be the ‘right’ person to serve her boss. Telling her that you have a solution and that you’re a professional doesn’t do the job. You must help her make a decision to choose you by using her own criteria for choice – which you don’t know. How will she know that you will be capable of serving her boss?

Voicemail:

1. voice mails offering data will not help the person decide to call you back unless they are already at a stage in their decision making process that they know what data they want to listen to. And by that time, you’re in a competitive situation.
2. it’s possible to use voice mail to help the prospect recognize their internal criteria and decide to call you back because they recognize a collaborative decision making experience that will aid them in discovering all of their decision criteria right from your message. Ask the prospect how they are currently managing X and how they will be deciding on a new vendor to support their needed solution.

Face visits:

1. prospects need to make systems decisions within the environment that created the identified problem before they choose a product solution. If they are lead through these decisions (and which they can’t always see clearly before they begin to seek a solution) on the phone, they will have the right people at the first face meeting. Otherwise, they will only have the first level decision makers and you’ll have to wait some extended period of time until the others get involved. And there are always others.
2. Dale Carnegie advocated face visits because in 1935, it was the easiest way to connect with a prospect. This is no longer true and actually wastes time. Since buyers don’t make decisions based on information and since the product sale is the second half of a two phase sales process (the buying decision half is Phase 1; the product placement half is Phase 2), wait for your face visit until they have recognized and managed the hidden political, relationship, and policy issues necessary before their solution can be fully designed. Then visit to present your product in a way that addresses the solution they just designed, that must fix the entire scope of the identified problem.

Here are a few ‘givens’ that Buying Facilitation works from:

1. information doesn’t teach someone how to make a decision. All of the years you’ve been pitching, offering product data in one form or another, and gathering information has been at the wrong time in the sales cycle. You are actually slowing down your sale. People need to first make decisions around how their solution design will have to manage a set of their unique internal criteria before they will choose a product or service to solve the problem.
2. having the right product to fit a need does not ensure they will know how to buy it.
3. buyers live within a unique set of internal systems that involve people, rules, politics, initiatives, vendor issues, relationships, historic attitudes, that have created and maintain the status quo. That means, the identified problem is a part of a larger, hidden system that must be managed before change can happen. And this system can’t be understood by any outsider. Any outsider. And understanding the buyer, the problem, or who the decision makers are does not help the buyer address the systems that need to be managed. Only insiders can manage this.
4. until or unless a prospect manages their internal systems issues so that major disruption will not occur when they bring in a fix, they will take no action.
5. the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle.
6. sellers should use their time with prospects to help them recognize all of the internal systems issues they need to manage, and then help them create a structure within which they can design a solution that hopefully builds in the seller’s product. Then a seller can gather and offer information.

The Buying Facilitation Method® was developed as Phase 1 of the conventionally accepted sales process, recognizing that you’ve never had the tools within the ‘sales’ model to actually deal with the hidden, historic, and idiosyncratic issues that buyers must manage internally that have kept the identified problem from being resolved until now (why wasn’t it resolved yesterday). The Method includes Facilitative Questions that assist sellers in leading buyers through the tactical and systems decisions (old vendor issues, historic union issues, new relationship management issues from another department, strategic initiatives that are getting badly managed) they need to make before bringing in a new solution. They need to handle this. They’ll do it with you or without you. I would prefer they do it with you and meld you into their solution design.

After all: do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

Voice Mail, Gatekeepers, And Other Obstructions To Sales Success is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I’m here to tell you that there is indeed a wholly original new sales process. But are you willing to change what you’re doing to get different results? My history of changing the sales paradigm over the past 16 years has told me that it’s highly unlikely that you are, and you’d rather keep the status quo and work around its inefficiencies (i.e. hire more sales people to make up the slack, cut back on training, reconfigure regions to save personnel) rather than change. And I find it perplexing.

WOULD YOU CHANGE IF THERE WERE A BETTER WAY?

If you heard that using a new sales paradigm could actually give you a 200% increase over a conventional sales model, would you believe it?

If you believed that a new sales paradigm would give you a 200% increase in sales over your conventional sales model, what would stop you from using it?

And why is it acceptable to have wonderful products that too few people are purchasing, too slowly, from sales people who, by definition, have a 93% failure rate, and not be willing to seek new tools to fix it?

In this month’s essay, I’m going to explain why the sales model is outmoded, and offer a new one. I’ll include a Q&A at the end to help you understand that you will be able to close more quickly, sell more product, differentiate from the competition, have real control over the sale cycle and truly serve clients.

HOW THE SALES MODEL HAS CHANGED HISTORICALLY

While it appears as if sales has changed dramatically over the past 25 years, I agree with Trailer and Dickie: I believe we’ve only made changes in content, not in the basic model. Sure, we’ve become far more customer/relationship driven; yes, we’ve added great questions to help the seller discover what a buyer might need; and certainly all of our focus is based on buyers getting their needs met, even, sometimes, at the expense of the product purchase.

Whether by using pitch, presentation, finding the ‘decision makers’, or the well-known selling methods (High Probability, Values Based, Solution, SPIN, Customer-Centric, Sandler Sales, or even Sales Ready Messaging etc.), the object behind every sales model is to sell product.

But sales has never been the problem. Buyers need you, and your product will solve their identified problem. Sellers are great, products are good, pitches and presentations appropriate and professional.

The problem has never been the sales activity or the seller, not the brand or the need. The problem has been the buying decision.

After you connect with the buyer, and pitch, present, visit, etc., the buyer goes into a hidden place and does something mysterious, without you. In fact, with whatever approach used, sellers end up in the same position: helplessly waiting for a return call, and with no way of telling who will call back, when, or if. Sometimes buyers go with a different vendor, sometimes they do nothing, and sometimes it’s something that seems stupid to us. But the model of sales does nothing to manage that mystery no matter how much – or who – the seller knows.

And without managing this internal, hidden ‘something’, nothing will happen. Nothing at all. Managing objections, handling gatekeepers, knowing internal coaches, gathering information, presenting professionally, finding out the politics – none of the sales skills that you possess will manage that hidden place prospects go to and make their decisions.

You end up selling into a closed system that sellers can’t ever know because you don’t live there.

This is difficult for a sales person to understand, especially when it seems your product will easily resolve the identified problem. Yet no matter how big their problem, no matter how difficult it is to continue operating with the disruption and discomfort it causes, the buyer will never make a purchasing decision until the internal elements that maintain and create the status quo agree to buy-in to a solution. And sales doesn’t manage that end of the equation.

SALES IS A OUTDATED MODEL

The model we’re currently using as a ‘sales’ model was designed at a different point in history, for an entirely different purpose: sales was originally invented to introduce product information to people who couldn’t otherwise get it (because travel was difficult in those days sellers had to be face-to-face). It has been a product placement tool with a preference for face-to-face visits ever since. And given the complexity of today’s buying environment, sales is now taking 30% longer to close, regardless of the problem or the sales process.

Buyers no longer need us to give them data or fix their problems, given the availability of information dissemination, media, travel, and communication possibilities.

They actually need us to help them make sense of the process of internal change and choice issues as they go about designing an appropriate solution.

Before he died, David Sandler called me to buy me out: “I didn’t know how to get any farther out of the box than I got, but you really got out of the box. You figured out how to aid the buying process instead of selling.”

It’s time to replace the conventional sales model with a new one – Buying Facilitation – that has a different skill set and outcome:

1. buyers no longer need salespeople to give them product data that they can get on the net. In fact, buyers do NOT need your product – they merely need to resolve a business problem.
2. buyers live in very complex internal systems that must be managed before they’ll buy. This delays their purchase by months if not years. Until buyers manage the entire system that maintains the identified problem, they will take no action. This is the length of the sales cycle.

WHAT’S STOPPING THE NEW MODEL FROM ACCEPTANCE?

For the past 16 years, I have been successfully training the Morgen Buying Facilitation Method® to major corporations world-wide, and achieving tested increases from 200% – 600% over all other sales models. It’s confusing to me why more American companies aren’t seeking to add an available new model to what they are already doing when the references and results of such high increases are available.

I belong to a group of smart, accomplished folks who get together and teach each other what we know. After years of sharing ideas and being recognized as a new thinker, I was quite surprised to hear a colleague say that he didn’t believe that I actually had a new sales paradigm that could generate a 200% increase over the conventional sales models. If that were indeed possible, he asked, why weren’t all of the CEOs across American banging down my door?

Here’s a man – a well-known economist by trade – who respects me, yet operates out conventional beliefs that actually make some sense: why, indeed, would companies not want to appreciably increase their bottom line if there were a way to do that?

Why, indeed.

I remember a conversation I had with the Sales Training Manager of a very well known brokerage house: excited by finding Buying Facilitation, he introduced my material to the VP of Sales. He called me the next day: “I was told that we just spent X millions of dollars on sales training a couple of years ago and that we wouldn’t do it again for another couple of years. He didn’t get it, and I don’t know how to get him to understand that Buying Facilitation would give us significantly different results. He didn’t even take the time to really look into it.” He must have believed that nothing new was possible.

So what has to be true for sales managers to disregard the possibility of getting incredibly different results? Either they:

1. are really happy with their revenue;
2. don’t believe that doing anything new is necessary or possible;
3. won’t consider ‘going outside the box’ (if it doesn’t look, act, perform like conventional sales models, it’s obviously not valid);
4. can’t handle the disruption of a new model;

Or maybe it’s just that a visionary idea takes whatever time it takes to filter into the mainstream no matter what the results are (The internet was developed in 1991, and it took Bill Gates 6 years to focus any effort on the idea – and only then when a staff person persuaded him to.).

What’s so interesting is that in this time of extenuated closings and difficulties differentiating offerings, managers are changing the people, training, and organizational structures, rather than consider that the model itself is broken.

It’s time to change the way we sell: the model is out of date, and very inefficient. You’ve got a great product, great sales people, a great brand. Now all you have to do is to learn a new skill set to help buyers decide how to manage their internal systems so they can choose you much more efficiently.

Q&A

Do I need to understand what the prospect needs?

Ultimately you will need to know. But not until buyers understand their decision process. Sales is actually a two-phased process and you’ve never had the tools to manage the buying decision phase. Believe it or not that must come first, as they need to understand their internal decision systems before they understand their needs.

Use your initial communication(s) with the prospect to facilitate them through their decisioning process and teach them how to recognize the people, policies, and relationships that must be part of their decision. After the buyer has lined up all decision criteria, then it’s time for your pitch and information gathering questions.

I’m always curious as to what has stopped the prospect from solving their problem yesterday. Facilitating them through a systems exploration gives them insights into what needs to happen before they move forward.

If I am not discussing or pitching my product, what type of control will I have over the interaction?

Do you have control now? You do such a great job gathering data and positioning your product, managing objections, and knowing what they need, why aren’t you closing all of your sales now?

The mystery in sales has always been what buyers do when they disappear. Buying Facilitation codes the way buyers make internal decisions based on the entire system they live within that has created and maintains the identified problem, and that needs to be addressed before taking action.

As an example, if there is a new business partner who will get disenfranchised with a change, or an historic rule that will be broken, or a beloved vendor that could possibly manage a piece of the solution, nothing will be done until it’s all tackled. Sales doesn’t address these issues, and prolongs the sales cycle by the factor of their internal complexity.

How does this increase sales to such a great extent?

Buyers won’t buy until all of their internal ducks are in a row. The time it takes them to do that is the length of the sales cycle. Buying Facilitation has the decision cycle sequenced, so you can lead the buyer through the decisions they need to make (separate from how your product could apply). They need to do this anyway – with you or without you. You can help them navigate their own journey.

Buying Facilitation is for any size sale (from a $15 cosmetic, to a $50,000,000 tax solution). It has brought a 3 year sales cycle to 4 months with just a small presentation and no proposal (a Big Four accounting firm with an international project), a 6 month sales cycle to 3 weeks (a Fortune 50 software company with a $50,000 solution), 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits and 25 closed sales (a major insurance company), a 1-2 year close with many field visits and competition from all other major banks, to a 2 or 3-call close with no competition (major American bank).

Also, current prospecting models attempt to get to the top, or make an appointment with ‘the decision makers’. This leaves out those prospects who don’t know they need something, don’t like the seller or sales approach, don’t have the time to see someone, etc. You are leaving behind X% prospects who actually may need your product. And you end up finding those who already know they have a need and are in the early stages of seeking a vendor. That means that you are automatically in a compromised and competitive situation.

Buying Facilitation will differentiate you, find the right prospects and increase your prospect list, and delete those who are inappropriate, saving you months or years of following up the wrong prospect.

Using Buying Facilitation, revenue increases dramatically due to 1. finding and shaping those prospects who want to connect with only you, and will eliminate inappropriate prospects immediately; 2. visiting prospects when they are ready to close and have their entire decision team on board; 3. teaching buyers how to manage their internal decisions and getting all decision makers involved right away; 4. differentiating yourself from the competition by becoming a true trusted advisor.

Are you saying that I don’t need to make appointments and see prospects?

Don’t use your body as a prospecting tool. Only go to see those prospects who have defined their closing process. For example, Buying Facilitation has been used on the phone with a Big Four accounting firm (and a multimillion dollar international sale) to help bring together all of the international partners on both the seller side and the buyer side before a face visit was made, saving months and months of lead time.

Because it’s a facilitated questioning model, the questions don’t need a face visit, and the seller ultimately presents in person only when the entire team (including the seller) decides what the seller should present. So your presentations will include the exact data the decision team needs.

CONCLUSION:

People buy in two phases. Before understanding what product to buy, they must manage all internal systems elements that created and maintained the problem so making a change won’t cause disruption. Until now, you’ve only known how to manage the product data piece of the sales equation (Phase 2). Buying Facilitation sits on top of sales and manages the buying decision (Phase 1). Are you ready for something new?

You can learn it now, or wait until it the model has taken hold in the mainstream, thereby putting you in the same sort of competition you’re in now. Will it cause disruption and change? Yes. Will it give you new skills and be uncomfortable at first? Yes, and yes. Will it give you a huge increase in revenue. Yes.

You must ask yourself: Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

Changing The Paradigm: Is A 200% Increase In Sales Possible? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• it’s taking 30% longer to close a sale than it used to;
• additional decision makers seemingly appear from nowhere;
• internal decision makers whom the prospects seek to include in their purchasing decision are either unfamiliar to the sales team or seemingly not relevant to the identified problem;
• goals aren’t being achieved and targeted prospects are not responding appropriately to our efforts;
• we’re losing business to unknown competitors.

As a result, many of us are rethinking all or some of our normal sales practices:

1. Because of the lengthened close cycle, we’ve been firing perfectly good sales people, and replacing them with clones, hoping that we’ll have better results with different sales people.
2. We’ve stopped doing face-to-face sales training, replacing it with e-learning, thinking that maybe the training process might be the problem.
3. We’re spending a fortune on refining our demographics, to ensure we target the most relevant prospects.
4. We are trying blog’s, brand differentiation, different forms of marketing done through behavioral scientists, psychologists who tell us how our buyer-base makes decisions – believing that if we know this we can find a way to trigger our prospects into buying.

WHAT IS SALES? AND WHAT DOES IT DO?

Sales is geared toward helping place product – either through different pitch mechanisms (such as presentations, ads, marketing, direct mail), different sales styles (SPIN, Sandler, High Probability, Solution Selling, Integrity Selling, and Dale Carnegie to name a few), and different forms of relationship management (Trusted Advisor, Relationship Selling, etc.).

When I remind sellers that their efforts are directed at placing product, some get blustery, saying things like: ‘Well! We will ONLY sell to clients that are appropriate.’ ‘We REALLY care that our product gets placed with people who really need it.’ ‘We are TRUE consultants and spend X time up front making sure our product would be appropriate.’ Call it what you will; everything I just mentioned here has one – and only one – focus: to place product.

I once had a discussion with Philip Kotler, author of Marketing Management, and marketing guru from the Kellogg School, about the inefficiency of the sales model, such as inappropriately long closing cycles, differentiation problems, objection-handling, gatekeepers, etc. “But those are all problems inherent in the model itself. Sellers have had to manage those problems through time.” Precisely.

In other words, the skills inherent in the sales model creates the very problems it works to overcome:

1. objections get created by the sales process itself as sellers attempt to push, offer, and introduce solutions to a buyer who hasn’t fully discerned the full range of their unique buying criteria. Push back results, often around price;
2. closing takes longer than necessary as buyers embark on the confusing task of managing their policy and people issues that are indirectly related to the identified problem. Product information does NOT teach buyers how to make their criteria-based, unique decisions across management lines;
3. gatekeepers reject sellers whom they believe will abuse their boss’s time, and let in the only the ones they know will support the decision process.

Through time, we’ve accepted these inherent problems and built them in to our sales model as ‘givens’. Indeed, we automatically assume that these obstacles are a normal part of handling the sales cycle.

Isn’t there something wrong when we end up having the exact same problems over time? We’ve dealt with closing problems, gatekeepers, and objections throughout the history of sales and nothing has changed; … and no course, no article, no software, no consultant, can manage these problems

WORK-AROUNDS TO MANAGE THE SHORTCOMINGS

Through the years, we have actually devised work-‘rounds:

• make-nice skills to convince prospects we care;
• proclaim our individuality through ads, branding, or promotions;
• get in front of prospects looking/acting/sounding ‘professional’;
• send gifts;
• get GOOD referrals from “people who know people”;
• get to the “C” level people so a directive comes from top down;
• make sure we sound credible, trustworthy, and differentiated;
• spend gobs on money on websites and web portals to create a ‘great’ customer experience that proclaims WE CARE, WE CARE.

We seem to be placing blame on everything other than the originating problem: the sales model itself. For some reason, we have the belief that the sales model is, well, the sales model – comprised of a specific, rather standardized, set of skills that we must perform in order to sell product. Why have we not realized that the inherent problems could be prevented with a different model?

In my humble opinion, the sales model is obsolete.

What needs to happen for us to realize that without a buyer managing their full set of systemic decision factors, our product placement activity is moot?

That the goal of placing product is not a good use of a seller’s time?

And, the ultimate question: when will we realize that no matter what type of selling we’re doing, what approach we’re using, what demographics we are targeting, and how great our sales people/product/brand is, we continue to close basically the same number of sales (from first prospecting call to close) that we’ve always closed (7% from first prospecting call to close). Just slower.

THE HISTORY OF SALES

Let’s go back a bit and look at the facts. Historically, sellers were needed to give buyers data that they couldn’t otherwise get. When our modern sales approach was designed – I believe Dale Carnegie to be the founder of our current model…… even consultative sales is a derivative of Carnegie’s basic model – there was no internet, few magazines, and efficient travel was embryonic.

Without sellers offering ‘features, functions, and benefits’, buyers had no way of fully understanding a product offering. So the main job of the seller became (in addition to finding an appropriate buyer) ensuring that the buyer had all of the information they needed to make an informed decision.

But that has changed. We no longer need to offer data about our product that the internet can ably do for us; we have new forms of competition; we have global partners and prospects; and the internal variables that create our customer’s decisions are hidden from us.

We’ve basically not changed our sales model through time. It’s time to make the sales function do more than sell product; we must start using sales as a vehicle to support the full range of our prospect’s buying decisions – not to place product, but to help them recognize, manage, and align all of the unique systems variables that need to be addressed before they can decide to go through the internal change process necessary for a purchase to happen.

THE SOLUTION: THE MORGEN BUYING FACILITATION METHOD®

I have developed a collaborative decision facilitation model (Buying Facilitation) that supports the discovery and management of the buying decision and addresses all of the elements that buyers need to manage before they decide. Buying Facilitation has very different results from sales, with none of the problems: no objections, sales cycles up to 90% shorter than any sales method, few gatekeeper problems, and targeted decision support etc.

The model doesn’t place product: it teaches buyers how to buy, using their own unique, hidden, historic, systems criteria to support their decision. After all, if they don’t know how to decide to buy you, it doesn’t matter how or what you’re selling.

Here are a few actual case histories using The Buying Facilitation Method® following difficulties with conventional sales:

1. I was working with a tax recovery company who got paid solely from recovered funds. They had a one-two year sales cycle.

SALES PROCESS: contacted prospect. Introduced themselves as the pre-eminent tax recovery company, with the best consultants (true!). Mentioned the percentage possibility of recovering funds and discussed fee structure (only paid when money found, i.e. no direct cost to company). Asked for appointment to discuss possibilities of recovering money in their state and to gather data etc. Got appointments 5% of the time. Visited several times and closed 10% within 24 months – usually 10-12 months.

BUYING FACILITATION PROCESS: contacted prospect and briefly introduced themselves. Asked prospect how they were currently recovering any funds due them and how they would manage relationships with tax folks if they decided to re-open the books. Inappropriate prospects said they would never annoy tax preparers and ended the call kindly. Appropriate prospects said they wanted to find money where possible. No – or maximum one – visit(s). One month close. No follow-up with inappropriate prospects.

2. A major internationally branded consulting firm had a 2 year delay in an agree-upon 8 figure technology solution for a major bank.

SALES PROCESS: Get an introduction to the CTO to get agreement for a meeting to discuss needs. This took several months, but was possible because of the well-known brand. Developed a business case for a software solution. Proposal developed and accepted. Work order delayed because of internal issues. Consulting firm managed to do small jobs, but after two years and budding friendships with the CFO, CTO, and COO, the delay continued. Cost to bank for NOT implementing new software: One Billion Dollars.

BUYING FACILITATION: the technology company had me contact the CFO of the company to help move them forward. It became clear, within 20 minutes of using Buying Facilitation that there was a long-standing unresolved Union problem that no one considered when discussing the technology solution. We resolved it in a few meetings. It could have been resolved years before. The bank was then free to start the software solution.

3. One of my own new sales people was having difficulty ‘getting past’ the gatekeeper.

SALES PROCESS: Mary was making cold calls to find speaking engagements for me. I listened while she was put into voice mail, given the run-around, and in general had great difficulty getting through to the correct person.

BUYING FACILITATION: I made cold calls to exhibit how to work with the gatekeeper. Mary dialed 7 numbers that were mysterious to me (truly cold). The first one I blew – the gatekeeper hung up on me mid question. The other 6 I was given straight to the correct decision maker or his/her assistant, who then gave me an appointment for the next day. I had collaborated with the decision maker (the gatekeeper) to help her decide to make me a part of the solution.

In reality, Buying Facilitation is a wholly different model with a different premise, different skills, and a different outcome. It’s not about selling, it’s about supporting the buyer in recognizing and managing all of the hidden elements that need to be addressed before they can make a buying decision. They need to do this anyway – with you, or without you. And the time it takes them to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle.

The question is, are we ready to change our sales model, and disrupt our status quo, for the possibility of getting the results we seek?

Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

Sales Is The Problem: What Is The Solution? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com