As you enter your meeting, do you know

• what percent of the entire Buying Decision Team is there?
• what weight your contact has on the full Buying Decision Team?
• if everyone who will touch the solution has added their buying criteria to the ’needs’ discussion?
• who is NOT at the meeting… because they haven’t yet been brought onto the Buying Decision Team? because they are at war with someone in the room but is influential? because they don’t want a new solution? because no one invited them?
• what else this group needs to do before they are ready to make a purchase?
• who else they are meeting with – and their criteria for choosing one vendor over another?

Sellers seem to believe that just because you get an appointment you have a leg-up to make a sale. But this isn’t true, or you’d be closing a lot more sales.

WHO COMES TO AN APPOINTMENT?

Here is what happens when you make prospecting calls to get an appointment vs using Buying Facilitation® which helps buyers begin the process of solving a business problem immediately:

1. The only people who agree to a meeting (as a result of a prospecting call) are folks already in the market for a solution. That means, you are already in a price and value competition at the start. With Buying Facilitation®, the whole Buying Decision Team will be at the meeting.

2. The only folks present may or may not be real decision makers.  That means that your brilliant presentation may not be seen by the right people, and in fact will be mis-interpretted as these spokespeople describe it to others. Using Buying Facilitation® will actually teach the buyer how to choose the right people to attend.

3. You have no idea how your presentation fits with the ultimate buying criteria the Buying Decision Team will agree to: Until the entire group is chosen and determines the criteria, the exact specifics of the  need are undefined. Your presentation may miss the forest for the trees – and you will never find out the truth here. Using Buying Facilitation® you won’t present until decisions to move forward and actions have been planned: then the buyer will know exactly what they need and you can give a targeted presentation.

4. You have no idea how they have been managing their problem until now or what would need to change to add a new solution: who is currently managing the work-around; is there a group/team that is doing something similar to what you propose and they’d be out of a job; what would they need to reconfigure to bring in a new solution and how would that affect work flow or job descriptions. You having a good solution does not help them manage change. Using Buying Facilitation® you will know everything you need to move forward before you get to the meeting, and so will your prospect.

WHEN DOES THE PROSPECT DEFINE THEIR SOLUTION NEEDS?

The very last thing a buyer does is choose a solution. When you call to get an appointment, you are ignoring the change management issues the buyers must manage behind the scenes. It would be equivalent to you walking home and noticing a terrific house for sale, buying it, and getting home to your family telling them they are moving tomorrow – after one brief conversation with your wife about moving but without everyone discussing that they want to move, when, what neighborhood, and what they each want a house to do to take care of individual needs (ie. a large playroom; a backyard; a large kitchen, etc).

When you use Buying Facilitation® from the first call, you are directing your efforts to helping buyers determine their steps toward a purchase. You will be able to

• tell immediately who is ready and willing to go through that process,
• get rid of those who will never buy,
• open up those who didn’t know they needed to buy,
• help them determine who needs to be involved in the ultimate decisions and how to begin those conversatoins,
• help them determine who the solution will touch and the extent of change they will be facing.

You want the entire Buying Decision Team present on any appointment you go on. Don’t use your body as a prospecting tool. And just because you got an appointment doesn’t mean you made a sale.

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Listen to Sharon Drew make prospecting/qualifying calls: MP3

Read two sample chapters of Sharon Drew’s latest book on how decisions get made to buy: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

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

Who’s in the meeting – and who’s not? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

My clients consistently close sales in a minimum of half the time it used to take them. Why? Because Buying Facilitation™ gets them onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call, and they immediately being helping navigate the buyers through their often unknowable internal decision issues.

It’s not rocket science: the sales model pushes against the status quo, causing the status quo to defend itself. Sales treats a buyer’s alleged need, or ’problem,’ as if it were an isolated event; it has no capability to support buyers as they discover and manage the off-line change management issues they must address internally and privately prior to making a purchase. Indeed, the buyer’s internal system fights any chaos that would take place if the new solution entered too soon, and thereby rejects outside influence.

Think about coming home with a brand new luxury car before discussing the purchase with your wife or managing the budget or garage space: just because the family might need a car, until or unless all of the internal factors are managed, no change can take place without chaos.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NEED

It’s not about the need, or the solution. Until or unless buyers figure out how to navigate through the off-line systems issues so that there will be no disruption, they will take no action and make no purchase, regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution.

When you enter the call as a neutral navigator, and recognize your first job to be a GPS system that helps the buyer make sense of their internal politics and relationships and vendors and tech groups, and how they all support change or a new solution, you can be immediately recognized as a true support person and put onto the Buying Decision Team immediately. But note: don’t think ‘sales’ as it’s not a sales model.

ON KPMG’S BUYING DECISION TEAM

I’ll recount a very funny story – my favorite of how I got onto the Buying Decision Team. Years ago I received a call from the training partner at KPMG. He had interest in learning Buying Facilitation™. He actually said, “Intuitively, I can tell that using this model would decrease our sales cycle (which it ultimately did – from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle).”

As he started asking me questions, I stopped him and turned the conversation around: no matter how brilliant my solution was, if he and his Buying Decision Team didn’t know how to choose it and if it didn’t fit with their environment, it didn’t matter as he wouldn’t be able to buy it.

“How are you currently adding new skills to the ones you currently train to your Partners?” “What has stopped you from offering the skills that would help your Partners support the buyer’s buying process rather than being solution-driven?”

After a couple of these Facilitative Questions, he didn’t have any answers. I told him to get some answers and call me back. And to this end, I gave him a couple of more Facilitative Questions to help him navigate through his confusion. He called me back a few days later with a couple of Senior Partners on the phone.

“I figured if we’re going to consider bringing you in, we might need a couple of the decision makers to get involved with helping me figure it out. I wasn’t doing such a great job on my own anyway – your questions made me realize this was a larger undertaking than just bringing you in.”

He introduced me to the 2 others, and I began posing more Facilitative Questions. One of them stumped them:

“How would you and your Buying Decision Team know, before you began, that taking the time and paying the price to bring in a new skill set - Buying Facilitation™ or anything new – would give you the skills you seek?”

They didn’t know the answer to this, so I told them to call me back when they had the answer. This back and forth went on for a total of 2 months; on each call there were more people than the previous call. Finally, one Friday when I was in Toronto with a client, they called me at 7:00 a.m. with about 15 people from several countries on the call.

As I was going through more of my Facilitative Questions (which were help them figure out how to manage internal change, who would need to be involved to get the necessary internal buy-in, how the change would have to be managed at each step of the way, etc.), one of the participants said to my initial client:

“Hey Steve. What is she selling?”

Silence. Finally, “I have no idea.’

“How long have you been talking to her.”

“About two months.”

“Two months and you have no idea what she’s selling?”

“Sharon Drew, why haven’t you ever given us a pitch?”

“Until you all understand what change will look like, and you get the internal buy-in you need to bring in a new program such as the one I have, it doesn’t matter what I’ve got, does it?”

“If you don’t give me a pitch now, I’m going to hang up.”

So I gave him a pitch. And we worked together for 2 years. How much time did I put in? Probably a total of about 60 minutes over 2 months. No proposal. No money discussions. No objections. No competition.

If I had taken the first call and done a pitch, I assure you that the Partners would have stopped the collaboration in its tracks, as it was obvious they had no idea how to bring in another ‘consultant’ or know what success would look like. But I taught them how to figure it out. And I was their guide all the way through.

Would you rather sell? or have someone buy. They are truly two different things.

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Get onto the Buying Decision Team on the First Call is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

You end up wasting a lot of time, being annoyed, and facing far too much rejection. Where do seemingly appropriate prospects go? How can they choose a different vendor after all you’ve done for them? How can they take so long when it’s so obvious what the answer should be? Why do people treat you so badly when you really want to serve them?

It’s a tough job, and you end up being protective of yourself – maybe even a bit defensive, and maybe slightly arrogant – hanging on to what you believe: so much of everything else around you seems to make little sense.

And, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of sales because sales only manages a fraction of  the decision issues buyers must address before they make a decision to accept or choose a solution. Indeed, sales does not offer the tools to facilitate the off-line, behind-the-scenes decision issues buyers must manage in order to get internal buy-in for change. And with this lack, you are left fighting the results of prospects who are basically incapable of  making efficient decisions because they have so much unknowable stuff to deal with at the start of a decision to find a solution.

‘WE ARE RIGHT’ MENTALITY, REGARDLESS OF SUCCESS

I began thinking of this fact this past week as I found myself embroiled in a Linked-In group discussion, with sales folks adamantly defending several Consultative Sales models. Pitch better! Buyers are stupid! Understand your customer! Be their Trusted Advisor!

Each time I tried to remind these otherwise intelligent people that sales does not address the long-standing argument the prospect is having with her deparment head, or that the prospect team really, really wants to use their regular vendor, or when the tech team comes in and attempts to take over everything. And I ever-s0-gently remind folks that their closing rates are very abysmal given the amount of time they spend. So why are they defending what they do when it obviously fails?

Sales is a very faulty model. And yet sellers buy-in to the failure as if you’re expecting to lose, just like folks going to Las Vegas hope they will walk out winners but knowing the odds are bad.

It is almost a crap shoot.  After all, you have no idea, when you start, which of your prospects will buy, do you? You’d like to think you do, but you do not.

The only answer I have is Buying Facilitation™ since it gives sellers an additional tool kit. And it works, with proven success of hundreds of percentage points over sales in studies from major, global corporations. But to want to learn it would mean some agreement that just maybe, an additional tool kit would offer better results and be worth the time/money/effort to learn.

How would you know that an additional skill set would offer you the possibility of having more success?

What would you need to know about a new skill set to understand if you would be able to recognize a good prospect from a time-waster? That  you could lead buyers through their behind-the-scenes decisions before they are ready to buy, and become part of their Buying Decision Team?

How would you know if it was worth the effort to learn how to help maneuver buyers through their off-line decisions before going down the sales route.

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to give up being right, and be open to adding new possibilities – all of which would include your being a true, true partner rather than having an answer at the start?

If any of you decide that you would be open to learning something that will give you good success at truly helping buyers in a way you  have not been able to before now, please consider learning Buying Facilitation™. I know it might fly in the face of  ‘sales’ and operate in a different area of the buying decision. And I know it will be uncomfortable at first. But you have a choice: Would you rather sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities. And unless you know how to stop selling and use a different set of skills to be the GPS system for your buyer’s off-line and largely unknowable trip, the arrogance of sales will keep you from being as successful as you deserve to be.

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There is still time to get the freebies for: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation™ - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions. You still get the freebies with the bundle order.

The Arrogance of Sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com