Here are the ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ of why buyers don’t buy, taken from my book of the same name:

1. Sales focuses on solution placement and needs assessment, and has no skill set to help buyers maneuver through their off-line, personal, idiosyncratic, behind-the-scenes planning and decision making that must take place in their environment before they can buy.
2. Buyers will make no purchasing decisions until they get buy-in from the components (people, policies, initiatives, groups) that are in any way connected to, or will touch, a solution to their ‘need.’
3. Until or unless there is buy-in, and the system is ready, willing, and able to buy-in to necessary change, buyers will not accept a solution no matter how great the need.
4. Buyers live in systems that operate, as all systems do, from the law of homeostasis, and thereby must resist if something new were to threaten disruption. To insure minimal internal disruption, buyers face internal change management issues as they bring in something new (a solution).
5. Until buyers understand and know how to mitigate the risks that a new solution will bring to their culture, they will do nothing. The system is sacrosanct; homeostasis is more important than fixing a need. New solutions can’t be purchased until a way is found to maintain internal balance. Includes internal politics and relationship issues.
6. Until all of the Buying Decision Team members have added their voices and fully defined the criteria that a solution must contain, buyers can’t make proper use of  solution information (i.e. pitch, presentation).
7. Sales, and the focus on solutions, enters the buyer’s decision path too early in a buyer’s decision cycle – usually before all of the Buying Decision Team is on board and has added their specific needs to the solution criteria.
8. Helping buyers maneuver through their buy-in and systems issues require a different focus, and a different skill set, than the one sales offers. Buyers don’t buy using a seller’s selling patterns. And the sales model doesn’t have tools to influence non-solution-related decisions.
9. Buyers buy on unique, idiosyncratic criteria that are agreed to by their Buying Decision Team – not on the strength of their need, your product, or their relationship.
10. The type of relationship a seller has with customers/prospects is a buying feature only once the buyer has determine how, when, why, and if they are going to buy.
11. Buyers seek a solution only after they manage their internal systems issues. Part of their decision/choice is the assurance that the new solution will maintain the ecology of the system.
12. At the start, buyers don’t know all the issues they need to manage as they begin the process of resolving a problem and choosing a solution.

Your current sales skills do a great job understanding need and placing solutions. But they don’t work with the behind-the-scenes non-solution-related change management issues buyers go through privately.

How will you shift your skills to help buyers manage their buying decision issues?

If you want to help buyers facilitate their off-line, behind-the-skills decision issues, you may want to learn Buying Facilitation® – a set of change management/decision facilitation skills that are wholly different from (but work in tandem with) sales skills, designed to help buyers navigate through their decision path as they prepare to choose a solution. It speeds up their change management process: we sit and wait while they do it anyway.

Add Buying Facilitation® to your sales skills as a facilitation tool, and decrease your sales cycle, find the right prospects to spend time on, and close more sales. Here are some sample chapters to give you more data: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions.

In today’s business climate, decisions to buy are far more complex than they’ve been in the past, and your selling skills aren’t enough. What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to add a new skill set to enhance your success?

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Join Sharon Drew Morgen on September 13th for a FREE online webinar about understanding Buying Facilitation®.

To learn how to create the sort of dialogue that supports your client interactions, take a look at Dirty Little Secrets. It’s more about the collaborative communication than being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

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

12 Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers don’t buy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

If your buyer had pain, they would have fixed the problem already.

THE STATUS QUO IS… THE STATUS QUO

Like all of us, buyers live in systems of people and policies, activies and relationships. Everything within the system is there for a reason: stability gets maintained with rules and processes and job descriptions and relationships. When there is a problem that creeps up, the system creates some workarounds so it can continue working; the problem fades into the background and becomes part of the tapestry of the system, until it grows larger.

When we show up and notice a problem, we instantly believe these folks are prospects because it seems like a fit. But we’re not taking into account the system that has accepted the problem and recreates it daily.

Sales acts as if the buyer’s problem were an isolated event. But it’s not. That’s like saying the rash on your arm is an isolated event.

In order for buyers to buy, they need to manage systemic change: they must involve all of the internal managers, department heads, and sundry people who will touch the ultimate solution; without buy-in to change, without designing new rules or roles to manage the change, without replacing the old solution in a way that insures nothing will be severely harmed and equilibrium is maintained, nothing will be purchased.

HOW TO SELL IF THE BUYER DOESN’T WANT A SOLUTION?

What will you do differently if you believe that a sale must be more than a solution placement and actually include support during the buyer’s decision journey?

First, put on your Leader hat rather than your Sales hat, and enter the conversation as a detective and help them discover their own clues. What’s keeping them from being willing or able to change? How would they know when it would be worth the effort to go through what’s necessary to achieve excellence? What would they need to know or believe differently in order to be willing to go through the internal disruption process to enhance something that’s already working… well, already working the way it’s working?

Stop trying to assess needs or push a solution. Certainly stop trying to get an appointment until the entire Buying Decision Team is ready for change. Instead, enter as a GPS system to help your prospect walk through the change management issues so they will understand the landscape of change. The Buying Facilitation® process will give you the skills to lead your prospect through this confusion, with you as the true Relationship Manager.

Selling and buying are two different activities. Help buyers recognize how to bring in change so your solution can easily enter and not cause disruption. Buyers don’t need you: they need to solve a business problem. And the business problem involves more of a solution than just your product.

Change the way you are entering. Stop basing your sale on determining if there is a need your solution can resolve. That thinking has only brought you low closing rates and a lot of time wastage. It’s time to help buyer’s buy.

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

Learn how to help buyer’s buy.

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

Your prospects aren’t in pain is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Imagine if sellers had the tools to be true spiritual guides and not only sell product, but sell more than ever and become part of the buyer’s team with all of the commensurate integrity and values.

What would be the difference – in skill sets? In outcomes? In beliefs?

To consider sales as a Spiritual Practice, let’s start with my definition of ‘spiritual’. To me it means:

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

Different from sales, which sometimes has a ‘win-lose’, which sometimes believes that the parts might be greater than the whole, in which the seller serves the buyer, has the ‘right’ answer in their solution, and indeed might have the buyer’s ‘answer’, let’s change the equation from sales to facilitating the buying environment.

Let’s also define sellers as Guides (guides that lead buyers to their best decisions based on their own criteria) and discuss what our jobs would look like with this new set of beliefs.

ALWAYS HAVE A WIN-WIN

To have a win-win, both sides would have to get what they needed in equal measure. I realize that sellers tell themselves that by placing product, there is an automatic win-win.

But the dialogue must be much, much bigger than product placement. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. How did the Identified Problem show up that way? How is it kept in place daily? Why hasn’t it been resolved until now? What are the issues that would have to be managed in order to bring in a new/different solution and not create havoc?

Until or unless all of the internal systems issues are addressed that not only created but maintain the status quo, the buyer can’t decide, and product/service- focused dialogues are misplaced, mistimed, and misguided.

Imagine having a product-needs discussion about moving an iceberg when the entire discussion revolved around just the iceberg’s tip. That’s what the conventional sales model does, and ignores the entire range of systems issues that created and maintain the IP.

Changing the model means the seller will have to take some responsibility to help the buyer manage their off-line, behind-the-scenes decisions.

Is it the current vendor relationship that must be shifted somehow? Does one department have to relinquish a job? What about changes in policy? Or people’s egos? What about historic rules that have kept the Identified Problem in place? Or how have departments and job descriptions evolved so that the status quo is relatively functional?

Having a win-win means that all of these issues get resolved so the buyer is freed up to make a good policy decision. It’s not about your product or their problem.

When sellers see a PROBLEM it becomes the focus of all needs analysis, data gathering, data presenting. Sales is actually defined as a way to place a solution, and everything that supports the selling model is based on placing a solution in the right way to the right demographic. And yet sellers still close under 10% of their prospects (and waste 90% of their time).

Imagine if the sales job were to help the buyer make a buying decision based on the system issues that need to be resolved prior to making any changes. Imagine if buyers knew just what and when and how to buy once they achieved buy-in for change. Imagine not having to sell anymore, and closing twice as many sales. Imagine.

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