‘Create opt-in permission to deliver content through email using the drip/nurture system.’

‘Deliver content to develop trust and authority.’

What, exactly, do these claims mean? And how is this different from a pitch, or presentation, or a great blog or website?

Frankly, I think this is nothing more than the ‘new new thing.’ Follow me through the thinking on this one while I show you how great content doesn’t make a sale if it’s offered at the wrong time in the buying decision cycle or if the buyer hasn’t figure out how to make necessary changes to adopt your solution.

MY CONTENT WAS DRIPPED, TRUSTWORTHY, USEFUL… BUT

Let me show you the large gulf between the change decisions a buyer needs to make and the content needed to select a solution. Let’s use us (you and I) as an example.

How many of you read this blog on a regular basis? I’m ranked somewhere around #6 of the top sales blogs . On any given day, I might have 100,000 readers, most of whom are repeats. Good, right? You find my content useful and interesting (I’d like to think provocative….but I don’t really know what you think, do I?) or you wouldn’t be reading it.

How many of you send it to your friends? Or tweet about it? How many of you discuss some of my ideas with teammates, or attempt to incorporate some of my thinking into your discussions or supervision, or your own blog?

How many of you have been to any of my sites (New Sales Paradigm is my favorite), or heard any of my dozens of podcasts? Or seen one or twenty of my dozens of webinars? Great, right? Thoughtful. Interesting. Provocative. Insightful. Useful. And you trust my consistency, professionalism, service to the field of sales.

But – and here is where it gets interesting - did my great content get you to make a purchase? Did you buy my latest book? Did you call me to do a keynote for you? Did you hire me to do a training for you?

No? Why not? I gave you great content. Great content. You love it, use it, think about it, and come back for more. You read me over time (i.e. the ‘drip nurturing’ model). You know my content is useful and will help your business. But you most likely haven’t spent a penny on any of my material – even if it’s a $20 ebook or a $99 self-guided learning module.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT FIRST, CONTENT SECOND

According to the rules of ‘content marketing’ – which I seem to follow to the letter – you should be buying something from me. But you’re not. It’s not because my material isn’t good, it’s just that you have some issues to reconsider before you can buy.

How would you know that adding a new skill set to the front end of your selling model would give you additional results?

At what point would you recognize that entering earlier than solution placement and needs analysis to help buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decisions would enhance your sales efforts?

How would you know that adding Buying Facilitation™ into your skill set wouldn’t disrupt your current success and would actually enhance it and give you a much higher close rate?

And how would your boss know that your new skills would actually help you close more, even though they are different from what the company taught you?

I’ve trained over 20,000 people in global corporations. I’ve got the content, the details, the references, the proof of success far greater than the sales model can offer. Do I need better/more content for you to buy from me? Do I need to be marketing my content better?

No. You need to figure out:

1. if the material fits with your sales methods and your belief about who you are as a sales person;
2. if your colleagues or bosses would consider working with the buying decision earlier than where you are entering now;
3. if you believe it’s possible or necessary to actually facilitate a buyer’s decision with a different skill set than with a sales/solution-based activity;
4. that it’s even worth the time/effort/cost to learn enough to know if any of the above is true.

And once you know all of this, then the content fits right in. Or not. One of our problems is that you have been reading the content before you figured out how to change. And as you can see, content offered at the wrong time does not make a purchase: content/data does not teach people how to make a new decision – it merely matches the criteria you finally reconciled and makes a case for a decision already made.

So now think about where content marketing fits into your sales efforts. And then buy my latest book.

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Find out more about Buying Facilitation™ digital selling.

Learn the Buying Facilitation™ Model.

Purchase Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyer’s Can’t Buy And Sellers Can’t Sell And What You Can Do About It

Content Marketing: is it helping you buy me? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I was speaking with a colleague today who complained that although he understands his customer’s needs – does surveys of every aspect of their decisions (how, when, what) so he ‘knows’ how and what they buy – and creates marketing materials positioned to address those needs and segments, the buyers still didn’t behave in a way he believes they should.

Sound familiar? You know who your buyers are. You’ve done assessments and surveys so you ‘know’ how they buy. You’ve developed marketing materials, pitches, websites, white papers, and they should be more successful. What’s going on?

Let’s look at the assumptions here, and see why they are faulty. 1. when you ask questions to gather data so YOU can understand, you are asking biased questions based on what you think is important data that will be useful in creating a selling strategy.Buyers:

• may/may not know how to answer your question,
• may not want to answer your question,
• may give you a partial answer and leave out the nuances,
• may be leaving out large aspects that they decide from unconsciously,
• may be offering the wrong data (inadvertently)
• may not relate with the material you are sending them.

Not to mention that a large, significant number are not responding at all.

2. when you have ‘data’ about another’s decision making, you assume it follows that what you are presenting is offered in the way they are ready, willing, and able to buy. It’s not working, because every purchase is a change management situation. Bring in software? How will you manage the techies, the old systems, the users? Team building? How will the people choose to work with others in the nearby department? How will folks at ‘war’ with each other choose to attend?

Until buyers are ready to do something different – i.e. change – they won’t respond to your offering even if it’s the right offering for them. That’s why you lose 90% of your prospects.

Change happens only when people’s (unconscious) criteria are met and the system they live in is willing to be disrupted. Have you tried to change your diet or cease an addictive behavior? You know there is a problem. You know what the solutions are. You are not ready to do anything different (or you would have already). Someone gathering data about your habits won’t help you do something different.

3. when you develop a pitch or solution based on the data you’ve gathered, you assume it’s appropriate for their needs AND they believe their current situation needs to change now. But it’s specious – nothing to do with the customer. How do you know what criteria someone will use to make a buying decision at that moment? That their buying decision team will agree with the data you used to create an offering with?

Rarely is solution-specific data all people need to make a purchase, and their private decision criteria may not align with the offering you developed based on demographic assumptions.

As I hope I’ve shown, when you attempt to influence a buying decision by creating a pitch or solution that should fit into their buying patterns, you are making specious assumptions. Do you know – right now – how you’re going to choose to move next time you move? Will your choices be based on kids’ school districts, or proximity to a hospital? Who will be involved in this decision this time, different from a similar decision 5 months ago? How will you choose who fits in where and when? Do you know when you’re filling out an assessment what your buying patterns might be at some point in the future?

People make decisions in idiosyncratic ways and they must, they must, handle the change management issues that the new solution will compromise. Sales only handles needs assessment and solution placement, and the surveys and questionnaires we prepare merely manage the sales end. You are left with the same assumptions and possibilities you have when you make a sales call, or place an advertisement.

To help buyers handle their private decision issues (often having nothing to do with their need or your solution) is a separate skill set from knowing they have a need or seeking a solution. It’s possible to create surveys/questionnaires that will not only give you good data but will create a customer for you at the same time, Facilitative Questions such as:

• What would you need to see from a solution to know that you would be willing to use it?
• How would we be creating this for you in a way that would make it comfortable to bring in to your family?

Managing the need isn’t enough. Help them choose how to use it without too much internal disruption. If you don’t help them, they’ll wait until they figure it out by themselves. Stop trying to understand them as you never will in the way that will help them change. But you can help them understand themselves.

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Understanding customers doesn’t help the buyer buy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I wonder how true this is now. Or if these are the most appropriate benchmark needs of a seller. Let’s go through each of them:

1. When will a prospect buy?

People buy only when their entire decision team figures out how to bring in something new while ensuring that the status quo (the people, policies, initiatives, partners, rules, relationships, etc.) won’t be severely affected by the new solution coming in. It’s got absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with their need – they’ve done without trying to ‘fix’ the problem this long, why do they need to hurry up and potentially risk some sort of fallout? We are the ones who want them to hurry up. We notice a ‘problem’ and we have the perfect ‘solution’ of course, and think that there is obviously a need for an immediate resolution.

If you broke your leg, would you wait to get it fixed? I suspect not. You’d see the problem, feel the pain,and get it fixed immediately.

Rule: if your buyer had real ‘pain’ or a real ‘need’ they would have fixed their problem already. Finding the perfect solution is not their first concern: managing their environment in a way that will comfortably adopt to a more efficient business solution is.

I have one more comment about time. The time it takes for prospects to discover, and manage, all of their off-line decision criteria is the length of the buying cycle. When left of their own, they take quite a bit of time figuring this out, and they will never buy if they might irreparably harm something/someone. Using Buying Facilitation™ you can help them speed up their process by a factor of about 8. They will do this with you or without you. Your choice to wait, or be a neutral navigator.

2. Who are the decision makers?

Who cares? And what will you do with that data?

Let’s say that I know that in matters of money, you are ‘the decision maker’ in your family. First of all, that’s a specious phrase because everyone has a part in the decision, even if it’s not direct. Would you make a decision that harmed anyone in your family even it they don’t sign the check? If your daughter was allergic, would you bring home a cat? If your son was a year away from graduating, would you consider moving to the perfect house in a different state?

Next: even if you know EXACTLY who the decision makers are, what can you do about it? Call them – and go around your connection? Send them a gift? An email? And what if you can actually speak with them – what will you do? Try to convince them that your solution is the best? Get them to LIKE you so that they choose you over others? Discuss price?

First of all, no one on the Buying Decision Team can not know all of their decision criteria until they are just about at the point of choosing a solution, because the entire process is idiosyncratic and a mystery (to them certainly. For you – forget about it). When you were thinking of buying a house,was there any way you could have known all of the different types of decisions/choices you’d need to make along the path toward a solution? Of course not. So knowing who their decision makers are is pointless.

I once had a secretary who was very very protective of my time (that’s her job, after all). She was relentless: if she thought it was important for me to spend my time with someone, she’d stand there until I took the call or made sure I returned it in a short time span. If she thought the person would be a waste of my time, she’d hide the message slip. Sometimes I wouldn’t find it for weeks. Even though I yelled about it, she didn’t stop doing it. She used to cross her arms and glare at me: “I don’t care WHAT you are supposed to do with him. I don’t trust him. He’s rude, demanding, and disrespectful. You shouldn’t be in business with him.” So who, exactly, was the decision maker here? Not me, obviously.

3. How much money will I get?

If your buyers know exactly how to buy, and you help them manage their off-line process so they can meet and figure out their own buying criteria (that most likely has absolutely nothing to do with a need), they will have no issue with whatever you charge. I never, ever, get asked price. It’s only when buyers can’t tell the difference between two things and they both look equal that price becomes an issue.

All of your problems with buyers come from the sales cycle, which doesn’t give you the skills to do much more than discover needs/pain, and offer solutions. It’s time to facilitate a buyer’s criteria-based, off-line decision making. But the sales model won’t get you there.

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Who are the decision makers? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

As we approach prospects, we end up pushing against their ‘system’ that is ‘relatively ok’  (or it would have changed already) and doesn’t wish to be disturbed until it is assured that anything new will not cause permanent disruption – something they must come to terms with themselves and has nothing to do with their need or our solution.

As a result, sales folks have to suffer the indignities of rejection caused by us showing up with the right solution at the wrong time, determined by the way the sales model itself is structured. To manage this rejection, and because we see an obvious match between their ‘need’ and our solution and believe it’s the right time to involve ourselves, we have developed work-arounds to ‘get in’ and get heard, get seen, get liked. We push against the system as we

• send introductory letters to ‘grease the wheel’ for our prospecting calls,
• network to get to know prospects better so they will like us (and buy our solution),
• meet face-t0-face to prove our professionalism (so they will like us and buy our solution),
• learn opening, closing, gatekeeper, objection-handling techniques,
• finely hone our shining personalities and brilliant persuasion techniques,

all because we unaware of  the stage buyers are at within the change management issues in their internal buying decisions – and then complain about the rotten results we’re getting.

In reality, if buyers wanted to be different, they would have done something different already! But before they take action now, they must go through internal stuff that we can’t understand or see or even be a part of because we are outsiders. And sales doesn’t give us a GPS system to help buyers manuever through their own trip.

The most curious part for me is why sales folks fight to continue these often-useless activities. As I have been introducing decision facilitation and Buying Facilitation™ into the field for decades I have been hoping the field would say “YiPEE – I can ADD some new skills to what I’ve been doing and BUYERS WILL BUY MORE AND FASTER.” But instead for 20 years folks have fought for the right to do what they’ve always done and get a 90% failure rate.

Why is it such a struggle to want to change when there is such a tiny success ratio? I guess we are so used to the struggle that it has become our nature. We’re doing what our buyers are doing: choosing the status quo rather than change.

I wonder.  Sometimes I take responsibility thinking that I haven’t been clear enough with my model – although in my new book I think I finally am – see a review.

Sometimes I think the centuries of sales have just reached a concretized form that will never change.

And yet, over the years, dozens and dozens of companies have hired me, and the field is now finally talking about the ideas I’ve espoused (we now commonly speak of  ‘buying decisions’ and ‘decision facilitation’ and ‘buying patterns’ and ‘buying criteria’ – all phrases I coined decades ago) so I know it’s possible and remain ever hopeful.

Our jobs are only difficult because sales focuses on solution placement and leaves buyers to figure out the route through change on their own. We can help – but not with the sales model. I hope my new book Dirty Little Secrets and my Buying Facilitation™ model will help you manage the front end of the buying decision process.

It really, really doesn’t have to be this difficult. Contact my client Peter Casebow and ask him how we brought his sales to a one year, 3 meeting sales cycle, to a 3 call, 3 week close. But they weren’t using sales to do this.

Let’s make it easier. Let’s stop trying to sell, and really support the buyer’s buying.

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Listen to Sharon Drew Morgen speak on MaestroConference on Oct. 14 at 12P.M. PST

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.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences 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, and is meant to be read alongside of the new book, Dirty Little Secrets.

How Does Sales Make Our Job Harder? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

IS IT TIME TO TRULY HELP BUYERS BUY?

There are actually two major things a buyer must do prior to making a purchasing decision. Of course they must ultimately choose a supplier and a solution (that’s the role of sales). But they also must manage all of the off-line, behind-the scenes change issues that must take place internally so they can get buy-in to bring aboard something new (i.e. a solution). And this idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff buying decision activity is not addressed by the sales model – and yet it takes up 2/3 of the time it takes a buyer to do all they have to do before they buy.

We cannot be a direct part of this process. We are not there: we are outsiders, the conversations happen between colleagues, and we are not a part of the buyer’s team. Sure, we know (and learn) how to be professionals, and care, and understand. Yet the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers – not the ones we want them to have but answers based on the idiosyncratic needs of the internal system – is the length of the sales cycle.

One of the problems we’re having selling now is not about a buyer’s need, or our solution: it’s the internal, behind-the-scenes issues buyers are having difficulty managing internally.  And these issues are now very politically motivated and economy-driven.

Because sales only manages the solution/product placement end of the buying decision, it offers us no tool kit to help buyers manage the conversations that go on off-line, between departments, with old vendors, etc. And because it focuses on the very last thing buyers do – choosing  a solution – and not the nitty-gritty issues that cause buyers to buy (or not), we are basically out of control.

DO WE WANT TO SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY?

Sales is at a critical point: it’s stalling, taking far too long to close, and prospects aren’t even entering the conversation in ways they used to. Not to mention that our typical closing rates are far, far too low.

The problem is not with the economy, or with the buyer, or with the seller, or even with the need or the solution. The problem is with the sales model itself: it merely manages information gathering about ‘need’ and solution placement options to sell a solution.

As we continue to ‘push’ on the solution-placement end, it’s getting harder and harder to sell. But imagine if we adopted a new set of skills that actually worked WITH the buyer’s Buying Decision Team to help them manage their own internal decision making. Not based on their need or our solution, but based on the management of their off-line elements. Not using sales techniques, but using decision facilitation techniques. Not about ‘understanding’ but about leadership through change management.

To do that takes an additional skill set. Sales doesn’t do this. We’d have to learn how to facilitate the buyer’s off-line decision issues that often have little to do with a need or our solution.

Are we ready to change? Is it time to do something different? Is it worth the discomfort to add something new to our typical selling habits? And what’s the cost if we don’t.

Dirty Little Secrets Site

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Listen to Sharon Drew Morgen speak on MaestroConference on Oct. 14 at 12P.M. PST

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.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences 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, and is meant to be read alongside of the new book, Dirty Little Secrets.

Why Sales Are Faltering In This Economy, And What To Do About It is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com