For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. There seem to be different names for it these days: the heart of business, corporate social responsibility, conscious capitalism, patient capitalism, bringing the heart to work. What it means, underneath all of the words, is that we [...]

You’ve done your homework. You’ve found the right buyers – prospects with needs you can fulfill and can afford your solution. You’ve nurtured them, contacted them, met with them, scored them, pitched them, networked with them, sent them gifts. But only a small fraction buy.
Where do they go?
Industry lore believes that 80% of your prospects will purchase [...]

There are two distinct categories involving buying decisions: the behind-the-scenes issues buyers must manage internally to get stakeholder buy-in for change and for going outside their status quo for a solution and the solution-choice issues.
We are all very familiar with the latter: that’s what sales handles so well. But sales does not handle the former at all:

Sales people get confused when I suggest they can’t ’understand’ the buyer’s needs if they approach a sale with this outcome. Without everyone on board who will lend their voice to a possible solution, buyers cannot understand it themselves. And using the sales model, we can’t help: we’ll never understand what’s going on behind-the-scenes as they figure out who should be involved, what must be [...]

Would you buy a house without discussing it with your wife or family? Would you even know all of the buying criteria without their input?
Would you bring in a leadership training without getting the buy-in from the people who would be trained? Or know their criteria without their voices?
Would you choose a web designer without [...]

Around 85% of a buyer’s pre-purchase, back-end decision issues get addressed privately, outside of the seller’s purview, and a seller has no place at the table. Here is where we lose our sales – as buyers manage the internal politics, and the strategic/change issues – not because our solutions aren’t relevant or because we haven’t done a good job selling.
The [...]