Sharon Drew Morgen

Leadership and Decision Making

Dec 15, 2009 Sales Related View Comments

leadership What, exactly, is a leader?

The definition used in Tango is my favorite: If you notice the leader, he’s not doing a very good job. The job of the leader is to get the best out of his follower and get out of the way: He opens the door, the follower goes through exhibiting her best, and then the leader follows. I believe that it’s a leader’s job to help followers - colleagues, staff, partners, teammates - make the decisions they need to make to achieve excellence.

Of course we all know many leaders who believe it’s their job to make the decisions and get their followers to do their bidding. They call that Influencing, and there are many methods and models that teach this. But doing it this way often comes back to haunt: when people are not part of the decision making process and haven’t bought in to the proposed change, they may go through their own brand of sabatoge, acting out, forgetfulness, or misinterpretation en route to following orders. Their knowledge of the environment, of the day-to-day working conditions, and their creative ideas, are ignored. We see this frequently with tech implementations. Indeed, requests made by senior people for ‘underlings’ to do their bidding are often met with failure. Read More..

Decision Facilitation: my definition

Dec 14, 2009 Sales Related View Comments

change-is-disruptive I believe I coined the term ‘decision facilitation,’ at least in its present incarnation. When I developed Buying Facilitation® in the early 90’s, I defined it as a ‘decision facilitation model used to neutrally (without bias) lead change through the appropriate avenues and levels of buy-in while avoiding disruption.’

I realize that the term has recently become part of our vocabulary in many contexts, and I’m so pleased. I’d like to offer my thinking behind the definition as I originally conceived of it.

In my definition, decision facilitation is a neutral navigation model that teaches people how to recognize and manage, without bias, all of the internal criteria they must first address, so they can maintain integrity through change. It’s much like a GPS system that leads a driver to their destination without bias re the destination. Read More..

What is theft and what is flattery?

Dec 11, 2009 Sales Related View Comments

theft-vs-flattery Thank goodness for Google Alerts. I was alerted today to a man promoting his ‘new sales model’ that uses some of my terms (terms that took me decades to come up with), some of my phrases (word for word from articles I’ve written), some of my ideas, and one of my Facilitative Questions (a type of question that takes great skill and training to formulate, as it uses a specific technique including brain function, memory storage and unconscious criteria). To add insult to injury, he’s taken the ideas and put them into a form of sales based on ‘helping buyers decide’ but all from the sales angle – so not at all based on what my terms were coined to mean. What if folks are not familiar with my material, read his, and find mine later? Do I appear to be plagarizing? Are my ideas then the ‘wrong’ ones?

Do I have legal recourse? Well, except for the Facilitative Question which was lifted directly from one of my books with just 2 small changes, he could make a claim that I have no legal right to the material since he added his own words around mine. Except for my registered, copyrighted term Buying Facilitation®, I do not. But a bit of attribution might be in order.

I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, as everyone has a right to make a living. But hey, folks, let’s stay in integrity here. Read More..

Coaching does not have to be like sales

Dec 10, 2009 Sales Related View Comments

Success coaching In my opinion the field of coaching behaves similarly to the field of sales: gather data about a problem, ask responsible, caring questions, and then provide a solution. Similar to sales, coaches like to say that they really do care, that they don’t give answers, that they only provide data on relevant solutions. And yet, to me the models are quite similar, if not identical.

Coaches lose at least 50% of their clients after the first round of coaching. Just like sellers, coaches blame the clients.Where do the clients go? They weren’t ready to change/buy; they maintained their status quo; they used a competitor.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the coaching model (and here I’m going to buck the conventional wisdom) merely works within the bias of both coach and client, in the same way that placing a solution and asking information-gathering questions works within the bias of the seller’s bias and ability to fix a problem with their solution. Read More..

Music in Austin

Dec 8, 2009 Random Thoughts View Comments

music-notes1 One of the wonderful things about living in Austin is the music. I’m a crazy blues fanatic, so this is THE place for blues. We actually have about 100 live music venues a night – a night! – so if you like blues (and other music and movies and dance and literary events and football and art and and and ) Austin is the place to be.

One of the wonderful things about Christmas time is our local Grammy-award winning choir group called Conspirare. Every Christmas they do a small concert at the Carillon, a small, intimate church, and they sing in the vesprey, with the echoes of their amazing voices ringing through the small setting. On the following Monday, they offer the same concert to a larger group of 2300. The tickets to the Carillon are sold out years in advance, but each year I manage to get to the large auditorium to hear – and feel – them. Read More..

Turning a ‘No’ into a ‘Yes’

Dec 7, 2009 Sales Related View Comments

I recently experienced a very clear example of Buying Facilitation(R), when i used it to turn a failed buying situation into a purchase.

I tell a shortened version of this story in my new book “Dirty Little Secrets;” it bears repeating during this economic confusion when buyers are having difficulty getting to ‘yes’.

I was at a client site running a Buying Facilitation(R) training. A part of the training includes real-time calls to clients prospects. In this situation, my client had requested that the team listen to me on a call first, so they could hear what BF actually sounded like real-time. They set up a phone meeting between me and a prospect who had called recently to say “Sorry. We won’t be purchasing your product,” after one year of 3 sales visits and 3 product trials.

These women that I called were the heads of L&D at a well-known university and were expecting my call. They had been told that I was a trainee who wanted to ask some questions to help me learn about the product and the buyer’s environment. They were happy to help.

I called (with everyone listening in), and after some intros and pleasantries, the conversation went like this:

SDM: It must have been so sad for you to have to decline purchasing the Solution when you loved it so much.

L&D: It was! We love your product! We really would have liked to have bought it.

SDM: What stopped you?

L&D: We have this new HR Director who is nearly impossible to work with. We ended up deciding that we’d make our lives easier and not fight with him. As a result, we’ve not fought him when he’s made decisions we’re not happy with, even though we should have an equal say and vote. It’s just not worth the hassle.

SDM: I hear you saying that the relationship issues you are having with a colleague are keeping you from making available possible tools to help your folks achieve a greater level of excellence.

L&D: Oh my. You’re right! Doesn’t sound very mature, does it?

SDM: What would need to happen differently to ensure the two of you could figure out a way forward to make sure your personal issues wouldn’t get in the way of necessary work decisions?

L&D: We’d have to figure out how to a start a dialogue and come to some professional resolution.

About three hours after this conversation, my client got a note from these women and asked to get some of ‘those questions’ (Facilitative Questions) so they could use them on the HR Director. I sent them, and within 3 weeks, the prospects purchased our product.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BUYERS SAY ‘NO?’

If these prospects didn’t like the product, they would have said ‘no’ days/weeks after first being introduced to it – not waited for 3 vendor visits and wasted time and manpower on 3 trials over 11 months. Obviously they liked the product, like the vendor, and needed the product. But they didn’t buy because of an internal relationship issue that was out of the realm of the sales model.

Does this happen to you? Do you have great relationships with your prospects who seem to recognize that your product will solve their need? Do you sit and wait for months and months for them to call back, believing you have a sale, and then they never call back, or call back to say ‘No?’

It’s not you. It’s not your solution, or your personality, or your skills, or your client relationship. It’s the sales model. Sales merely deals with the solution-placement end of the buyer’s final decision and has no skills to help the buyer make sense of the internal, idiosyncratic stuff that seems so difficult for them to handle…..those relationship and policy and personality issues that have created the status quo and keep it in place daily, the ones you know nothing about and are not part of their problem or your solution.

As you saw in the story above, until buyers manage their internal decision and relationship issues, they will take no action: the ramifications of change are worse than maintaining the status quo (I write extensively about this in my new book). We’ve always sat and waited impatiently for them to achieve an internal decision, frequently attempting to ‘get in’ during this quiet time, and try to make something happen, when unfortunately it’s out of our control.

But you can maintain some influence and control right from the first conversation (see blog of Friday December 4). Doing this does the following:

1. it puts you on the Buying Decision Team immediately;

2. it differentiates you from the competition;

3. it discovers those who cannot buy immediately;

4. it makes it possible to have a bit of control around what’s happening when you’re not around;

5. it gets rid of all objections (price and otherwise).

How would you know when you’d be willing to add a new skill set to what you’re already doing successfully? And what would you need to understand about Buying Facilitation(R) to know if the model would work in your client environment?

I recently experienced a very clear example of Buying Facilitation®, when i used it to turn a failed buying situation into a purchase.

I tell a shortened version of this story in my new book, Dirty Little Secrets; it bears repeating during this economic confusion when buyers are having difficulty getting to ‘yes’.

I was at a client site running a Buying Facilitation® training. A part of the training includes real-time calls to clients prospects. In this situation, my client had requested that the team listen to me on a call first, so they could hear what BF actually sounded like real-time. They set up a phone meeting between me and a prospect who had called recently to say “Sorry. We won’t be purchasing your product,” after one year of 3 sales visits and 3 product trials.