What has finally become obvious (and I’d like to think that I had something to do with it being so obvious) is the yawning gap between the Implicit buying decisions buyers must make on their own, and the Explicit ones that sellers play such a large part in helping them make.

The Explicit decisions include everything to do with fixing the need (I call it an Identified Problem – certainly not ‘pain’ cuz they would have fixed it already if it were ‘pain’): making sure the issues are resolved and work far more efficient, possibly even Excellently; that the decision makers are happy and make sure the solution fits well and is affordable with minimum risk; that the sellers are available before, during, and after to manage the implementation, the fit, and making the buyers comfortable with their choices. Once the Explicit decisions are made, the solution is purchased.

But if that were all it took,  we’d be closing a helluva lot more sales than we’re closing. The problem is the Implicit decisions.

What happens when the guy in the next department doesn’t want to collaborate – and you share one tech team and budget? What happens when there is no precedent for bringing in an external vendor? How does it get managed when the Senior Manager wants a solution and has the budget for it, but the team doesn’t want anyone to come in. What about when the current vendor has been around for a decade, works in every department with great professionalism, and everyone wants this vendor to just design something new rather than bring in a new vendor? And what about the work-around that’s been managing the Problem Space until they choose a better solution – does Fred in Accounting get fired because the boss is bringing in a new accounting package?

Buyers have managed these decisions on their own while we wait. There is really no way that an outsider – even a smart one – can understand all of the unconscious, historic, hidden, mysterious, and highly personal decisions that need to get handled before buy-in can occur. Sales has had no model to help buyers manage these implicit decisions. One of the ‘dirty little secrets’ that I talk about in my upcoming book (The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it) is that the buyers have no idea how they are going to handle these decision issues either, if for no other reason than they don’t know what they are going to find when the start picking up the rocks. In other words, sales enters the buying decision cycle far too early.

One of the problems is that because the buyers don’t know the exact route they need to take, and sellers can’t know these personal and idiosyncratic systems issues, no one really knows how to manage the Implicit decisions. I’ve coded the system behind how decisions get made in systems (cultures, environments) and can lead folks down their decision cycle generically so they can pick up the pieces they need to address along the way and bring in the right people. Very often, they can figure this out immediately with me, rather than taking one month or one year, and deciding to bring together their buying decision team for a phone meeting (or whatever) within a week of our first conversation. And we do this consistently, time after time, in every industry or size of sale.

Buyers have to go down this route anyway, and goodness knows we sit and wait for them while they figure it out. This fact alone is the cause of the huge delay in the sales cycle.

I’m  not competing with sales; I’m adding a new piece – a front end, if you will – to the typical sales model. It’s not about gathering data. It’s not about understanding the buyer’s needs. It’s not about ‘being there’ when they are ready (Buying Facilitation teaches them how to be ready). It’s  not about becoming a trusted advisor or a relationship manager.

It’s about being a decision facilitator and taking a leadership role to help buyers walk through the Implicit stages of their buying decision process BEFORE they are ready to answer questions about their Explicit needs.

Let’s start using a two pronged approach to sales: first help buyers walk through their unconscious Implicit decisions; then they can walk with us through their conscious Explicit decisions. Because by not doing this we’re losing a lot of sales, spending too long in the sales cycle, causing objections (yes, we cause our own objections) and NOT serving our buyers.

So, do me a favor: start thinking of sales as a two-phased process, and the sales models we’ve been using for decades handle the Explicit decisions. And Buying Facilitation(R) – which is NOT SALES but a decision facilitation model that handles buy-in – can handle the Implicit. After all, would you rather sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities.

I’ve been teaching this stuff for over 20 years, and we have had quite extraordinary results (remember that it’s NOT SALES) with many global corporations in every industry.

For more, go to www.newsalesparadigm.com

Buying Decisions: The Implicit Vs. The Explicit is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

These numbers are far lower than they need to be: so long as your primary focus is on making a sale and you focus on needs assessment and solution choice (factors which are the buyer’s final considerations), and ignore the change management issues buyers must handle before they choose a solution, you are delaying a close by a factor of 8.

By using a different focus and changing your ‘first contact’ criteria, you can enter your prospect’s world and get onto the Buying Decision Team much earlier. And close more/quicker. But it requires a new skill to add to your sales model.

WHAT ISN’T WORKING WITH CURRENT APPROACHES

Here are some numbers my clients have given me over 20+ years:

When using a non-marketing-automation selling model (any form of needs-based consultative selling), and your first contact is to make an appointment as your first outcome, you close 2% from first call (with no idea who might be a prospect, you must start counting your ‘close rates’  from this first call – not from your appointment). It might show up as 15% if you track from first appointment.

When you go through lead scoring and lead nurturing, and then attempt to make an appointment, you are closing much less than 1%. And when counting from first appointment, the close rate shows up as 17% — real, only if the names ignored by lead scoring had no probability.

As a rule of thumb, any time you begin your sale with an attempt to get an appointment, you are being rejected by approximately 90 – 97% of perfectly good prospects.   

At least 50% of the people you are calling are viable prospects. Easily half of  these can close. Are you closing at least 25% of all of your raw leads? These folks are going to buy something similar to your solution within 2 years – but not from you. If you employ a change management model from the first call rather than attempt to get an appointment, you will close more, help put together – and become part of - the Buying Decision Team on your first call,  and making you invaluable immediately.

Note: until or unless the entire Buying Decision Team is on board, buyers will not have the full fact pattern to understand what a solution must include, regardless of what their need or ‘pain’ looks like to us. And generally, buyers do not know all of the Team members until they are close to the end, thereby delaying a purchase.

If you first connect using a qualification process that includes change management criteria, you can turn around a lead from ‘potential interest’ to ‘qualified prospect’ within 10 minutes, and reduce the sales cycle by 50% regardless of the size of the solution.

HAVING A NEED DOES NOT MAKE SOMEONE A BUYER

When you attempt to Qualify using need, purchasing capability, or timing,  or use a Trusted Advisor approach, you are omitting all of those people who

1. don’t know know exactly what they need yet and are not quite ready for solution data,
2. have not managed the off-line change and are not ready to buy – but are indeed buyers and know they have a need,
3. are doing their due diligence, but have assigned others to do on-line research for them and don’t seem to be relevant leads,
4. have not the full solution criteria because they are still getting their Buying Decision Team members on board.

The last thing buyers need is solution information, and they need very little of this on the first contact. Until or unless they get feedback on all who touch the solution, and then know how to move forward with change and solution adoption in a way that will create few ripples in their system, prospects cannot buy – separate from their need.

Personally, you may not care about the private, back-end buying journey. But by collapsing the buyer’s journey between first thought and purchase, by helping them get ALL Buying Decision Team members on board early to define the solution and change processes, and get the right policies in place quickly, you can find more prospects, close a lot more sales (400-800% higher close rate over sales alone) and waste a lot less time – not to mention forecast more efficiently.

THE BUYING FACILITATION METHOD® CHANGES THE NUMBERS

With a cold call and a good list, using the Buying Facilitation Method®, my clients close 35% from first call – often without an appointment, and always at least 50% quicker.

Buying Facilitation® facilitates the behind-the-scenes change management issues necessary prior to a purchase, puts you onto the Buying Decision Team immediately (first call) , and teaches the buyer how to recognize and manage their internal systems  issues up front. The model works in any situation in which back-end decisions get made:

• Periodic upsell  for new solutions
• Client recovery to re-engage with lapsed customer relationships
• Prospecting, telepromoting/telemarketing, and follow up from marketing automation
• Managing negotiations
• Pipeline reviews/management
• Qualifying – for proposal management, sales, marketing, pre-lead scoring

How are you currently adding new capability to your X?

At what point would you and your decision team be seeking to add something new to what you’re already doing successfully?

Let’s add Buying Facilitation® to every sales process – as a front end to marketing automation, or a new skill for sales folks - and close in half the time, manage our pipeline in a timely way, find the right buyers immediately and get rid of the time wasters immediately. And start the process from the very first contact.

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Call me. I can discuss self-directed learning, or site sales training, or the development of custom playbooks and sales scripts. We can also design front-end technology to enter the buying decision journey earlier. To help you learn:

• Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.
• Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.
• MP3
• Learning accelerators

First Contact: What to Do, Why, and How to Get Better Results is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I believe we are currently paying our sales folks to waste 90% of their time. They are spending time  pushing solution information to the wrong people at the wrong time, and have no idea who will actually close until, well, until they don’t.

With its focus on placing solutions, the current sales model (including marketing automation) has no way to manage the natural resistance of groups while they figure out their pre-purchase change management strategies. Sellers merely catch the low hanging fruit and the sales model does not faciliate the buyer’s complete – and confusing - decision path.

If we were paying sellers according to what  they SHOULD be closing they’d be earning a fraction of what they are earning. In reality, we can  close twice as much business with half the sales force.

EXTENDING EXPECTATION: SELLERS SHOULD BE CLOSING MORE

Unfortunately, we start off by assuming that if we find folks who COULD buy our solution, and have a recognized NEED, that they are prospects. If this were true, we’d be closing a helluva lot more sales.

Sellers spend 90% of their time attempting to close sales that will never close. The sales model doesn’t offer a skill set to help buyers with the part that keeps them from buying: they must manage their confusing, political change management issues along their decision path. And yet the field resists learning Buying Facilitation®:  As someone recently said to me: Why should I bother learning how to help buyers manage their change issues when I already make a good salary closing the paltry sum I’m closing?

According to Forrester, 80% of our prospects buy a solution similar to ours (or ours) within 2 years of having contact with a sales rep. What does this tell us? The time it takes buyers to get their ducks in a row to get internal agreement to buy is the length of the sales cycle. We must add a skill set to help facilitate the buy-in journey and actually teach buyers how to find their ducks and get them quacking.

EXPAND THE SALES JOB TO ENCOMPASS THE ENTIRE DECISION PATH

Our prospects aren’t buyers. Typical closing rates are  less than 10%  (7% in conventional sales; less than 1% from marketing automation; 2% in banking and insurance). When we close,  we are merely showing up around the time the buyer shows up with their checkbook and have already done their behind-the-scenes work.

The statistical average of closing a sale by following each prospect with an apparent need (15 calls over 9 months) is greater than what we’re actually closing. By containing our sales activities to the solution choice, we fail to close all those who will buy once they get their internal buy-in.

A seller’s performance and pay is currently dependent on whether or not a buyer is ready, willing, and able to buy AT THE TIME THE SELLER IS FOLLOWING THEM.  Using the sales model, we have no idea who is going to buy at the start of the  sales journey.

Apparently, companies assume

• there is no way to tell who will buy,
• it’s not possible to enter the private world buyers live in to  enable them to manage, their decision path more quickly,
• buyers are stupid or they’d buy more/better/faster,
• it’s not a sellers fault if prospects they have been following (and are most probably in the pipeline) don’t buy.

Why not assume that the performance of the sales folks is poor because of  the sales model itself. By merely addressing the last 10% of  the buyer’s decision, and with no skills that would  faciliate the entire buying journey, starting with the buy-in, change management, political issues buyers must manage before they can buy, we are not making it easy for buyers (who need a solution to manage merely a portion of their internal problems). Indeed, adding Buying Facilitation® to the front end of sales skills mitigates the buy-in issues by adding facilitation skills.

BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES THE BUYING DECISION JOURNEY

Imagine if the sales job was to first enter the behind-the-scenes buying decision path and help buyers navigate through all of the non-needs-related decisions they must make and buy-in they must get (focusing on internal relationships, politics, strategies, etc) en route to choosing a solution. Then they would collapse the time it takes for buy-in to happen by half, and triple the number of folks who buy.

Imagine if sellers were paid only on closed sales (rather than spending over 90% of their activity on chasing leads/prospects who will never close) with an assumption that it’s possible to close 5x what they are currently closing?

Imagine if sellers started a conversation by helping manage buy-in. They’d know, from first call, exactly who would close and only spend time on buyers.

Sellers can increase their performance by at least a factor of 5. Knowing this, would you still keep paying them the same base salary? or continue hiring more sales folks to get the sales you need?

Is it worth a test to trial Buying Facilitation® to a pilot group and see the difference? Call me and we’ll discuss options. Then you can pay your sellers what they are really worth — a lot.

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Start the journey to help sellers get the skills they need to manage both ends of the buying decision journey – the off-line political and relational buy-in as well as the solution choice. Read Dirty Little Secrets; get an MP3 to hear Sharon Drew using the model; contact us to learn about training your sales folks.

Buying Facilitation® licensing program: July 1-7, Austin TX.

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

What are we paying our sales folks to do? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

SELLERS ENTER TOO EARLY

We fail to realize that we are only being brought in when they have all of their internal ducks in a row and are ready to bring in a change.  When buyers are

• considering all options and face confusion and internal politics,
• recognizing a problem and the timing on fixing it,
• doing research into possible vendors or solutions,
• figuring out which problems to resolve in which order,
• understanding how a new solution will create shifts in their culture and technology,
• figuring out who needs to be on the Buying Decision Team, the prospect isn’t ready to buy.

As sellers, we don’t realize that buyers have an incomplete understanding who to invite on the Buying  Decision Team when they begin their process (I write about this in my latest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it). The entire buying path is largely unknown up until close to the end of their decision – and until it is, they cannot make a purchase.

In fact, there are so many human issues that rear their ugly heads that a buyer really has no idea at the start who to involve, what the buy-in problems will be, nor what personal, corporate, or market issues will have to be resolved prior to making a purchase. And until they figure this out, they cannot buy, regardless of the efficacy of our solution.

SALES IGNORES THE BACK-END, NON-SOLUTION-RELATED  DECISION PATH

Sales gives us no skills to help with those back end decisions as they are not needs/solution-related. And we sit and wait while buyers figure it out. But Buying Facilitation® does: it’s a change management/decision facilitation model that gives you an additional skill set to lead buyers through their private issues that we’ve always sat and waited for them to complete.

No, it’s not sales, and it’s not solution-placement or needs-assessment — sales does a wonderful job of doing that. But add Buying Facilitation® to your sales skills, and enter the buyer’s decision path early and become a very active partner. You will:

• close 8x more sales;
• halve the close time;
• understand who is not a prospect on the first call;
• only go to meetings when the entire Buying Decision Team is involved (and you’ll help get all of the members included);
• rarely need a proposal, or be in a competitive situation.

Would you rather sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities. Sales will only help you place your solution. Buying Facilitation® can lead the buyer through their decisions. Call to discuss how to become a part of the buyer’s buying journey.

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• Guided Study program for individuals or teams
• Learning Accelerators
• Buy the MP3′s of Sharon Drew making live phone prospecting and qualifying calls.

3-Day Public Training in Austin  June 14-16 Syllabus | Registration

Make the vendor an active partner from early in the buyer’s decision path is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I recently asked 15 colleagues to define what a good contact sheet should reveal. I got 15 different answers. So what’s correct? Here is my take away:

1. it’s obviously subjective. Different companies seek different data points. How do they choose? How do they know they aren’t annoying/rebuffing/ignoring good leads? Are they calibrating the data so they understand the type/amount of wastage?
2. the pulled data does not offer true buy-cycle data, merely good guesses.

When I trial a few contact sheets to test different types – and try to trick the questions to reveal nothing -  I realize that the sheets are asking for specious data. How does one company decide to ask for number of employees, and another ask for the company revenue? And since the close numbers are so low, what difference does it make?

I can easily fill out a form for a webinar from home, and not use my company data. I can easily use a different account – say, a gmail account – to sign up for anything I want and no one will know who I am or be able to reach me. I can sign up for my ‘boss,’ who, say, might use the conference room and my computer, to listen to the webinar with 10 others, and no one will know. I can sign up for myself, and just be comparing the new material with my vendor’s, so I can pass the data on to them and have no intention of buying anything (even though I look and act like a real prospect) and block all the rest of the incoming emails.

WHO IS FALLING OUT OF THE SYSTEM?

As a result of the debatable usefulness of the data collected, sellers have no idea who they are following, nurturing, or trying to make an appointment with. Or who/what they should be spending money on. They are ignoring great leads and nurturing some who will never close. And they don’t know the difference, so they call and nurture whoever comes up on their ‘lead scoring’ – another activity based on guesswork (or they’d be closing more sales, no?).

Here are the numbers that you may not be tracking: from first name, when attempting to get an appointment, you are closing .6758% of the collected names. From 100 names that you call approximately 15 times over 3 months (obviously there is nothing better to do), 97.5% don’t want an appointment. From the 2.5% who take an appointment, 17% will close at some point. That’s when I hear folks say, “I close 17%.’ Geesh. Anyone can close 17% from first appointment. Why aren’t you closing 17% from the total?

How many of the 97.5% that didn’t want an appointment were real prospects? You have no idea – and yet they fell out of the system.

It’s possible to determine if the Buying Decision Team is already on board, or not formed yet. It’s possible to determine if the visitor is seeking other solutions, or comparing price with your competition. I would deem this valuable data.

But current contact sheets are not set up for this sort of data collection, because they are attempting to place a solution to the ‘right’ sort of buyer and lowering the odds by placing leads in demographic categories and then guessing.

WHAT WOULD BE THE RIGHT DATA

What if the idea was to collect data on the behind-the-scenes activities that buyers were managing, and entering there? In other words, entering earlier in the buying path rather than at the tail end. If your realtor could help you from the moment you and your family started considering you might want to move, would you have more data, and a better relationship, than when they just come to you saying they want a 3 bedroom house?

Here is the killer question: how many good leads – real buyers –  are you losing because you aren’t capturing the right data? And what would the right data capture look like?

I’ve developed a new contact sheet that has a decision facilitation basis that really – really – leads buyers to the exact data they need at the exact right time (based on the decision path, not the type of buyer they might be) and simply helps buyers manage their entire decision path – offline as well as on line, change management as well as solution choice. It’s different from what you’re using now. But simple to use. And easy to replace your current contact sheet.

Yes, it’s different from what you’ve been using for the past 3 years. Ask yourself: Do you want to influence leads

• at the point where you can offer them your solution data, and hope they’ll use it
• or at the point where they are making decisions based on their human, political, and company criteria, and be there at the right time and place with the right data for each stage of the buying path?

Call me to discuss my newest solution. Unless you really like the results you’re getting and are convinced nothing is falling out of the bottom.

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To read more about the offline buying decision path, read The Buyer’s Decision Path: why it’s important to sellers;

Why aren’t our prospects buying: the problem sales can’t solve;

Helping buyers choose the right Buying Decision Team: a case study.

There are many ways to learn Buying Facilitation®:

• 3-Day Public Training in Austin  June 8-10 Syllabus | Registration
• Buying Facilitation® corporate training
• Guided Study program for individuals or teams
• Learning Accelerators

Contact sheets: are they gathering the right data? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• to get rid of unworkable leads before handing them over to the sales team;
• to help leads bring together the entire BDT even from a one-way communication;
• to know exactly where prospects are on their buying path. But not using the current thinking.

CURRENT LEAD SCORING IS INSUFFICIENT

Here are a few questions for those of you using marketing automation and lead scoring:

• Do you know how viewed data is being used by your site visitors?
• Do you know which stage of the buying decision path they are on?
• Do you know which member of the Buying Decision Team has viewed/signed up on your site – and what percentage of the solution-choice vote they represent?
• Do you know who else will learn about your data – from a 3rd or 4th source – and what exactly is being transferred? Is it the right message?
• Do you know if all of the folks who will touch the solution are on board to purchase your solution?
• Do you know if the person you’re scoring, or nurturing, or calling for an appointment is the right person, or has the capability to buy or transfer your data to the right people?

And, drum roll, here is the big one: How much money/time/resource are you wasting by focusing on inappropriate leads – and potentially missing the right ones?

You don’t know?? How many of these questions do you not have answers to? Why not?

I’m here to tell that it’s possible. But not using the current marketing automation -> data collection -> lead scoring -> nurturing -> selling model as it is currently being used.

THE WRONG POINT IN THE BUY CYCLE

We use marketing automation, and collect/score data at the wrong point (the last, solution choice, segment) on the buying decision path. As a result, we are collecting insufficient data to sell and qualify with, not scoring leads properly, have too many inappropriate leads in our pipeline, and are not differentiating ourselves from our buyers.

The sales and marketing models merely focus on the last 10% of the buying decision – and by that point, most of the internal decisions that actually bias the solution choice have already been made.

ENTER EARLIER

Think about this differently by considering the questions buyers must have answers to before they can choose a solution:

• Are all of the Buying Decision Team members on board?
• Is everyone who touches the solution in agreement?
• What criteria will be used to choose one solution over another?
• How will you choose a new solution/provider over a familiar resources?

Until or unless all of the above questions are managed, no buying decision will be made.

As you think about adding some new capability to your current processes (and, btw, I’ve developed a very simple  process to add to your current marketing automation processes to manage, follow, and influence, the back-end), here are some questions to ask yourselves:

What do you need to be doing differently to enter the buyer’s path in their private decision-making places? How can you help buyers manage their internal change issues to free them up for purchasing your solution? What can you do to help buyers get their full Buying Decision Team on board and ready to buy?  How can you qualify appropriately and only spend time on those who are going to close?

Until you manage all of the above, you will be wasting a lot of time and resource, and losing prospects who would buy if they knew how.

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Let’s talk about my simple marketing automation solution that tells you where the buyer is on their buy cycle, and offers and collects the right data so they can be both served and sold to. sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com

Read more about how buyers buy. Here are two sample chapters from Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. Or just buy the book on amazon. com

Sharon Drew is a featured speaker at the Search Insider Summit – May 4 – 7 , 2011

Deliver the Right Content at the Right Stage of the Buy-Path is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Do you know which of the opportunities are the top 10 – and are you certain they are the top 10? How are you and your team – VP of sales, sales execs and managers – connecting with the prospects to know what they need to ‘be ready to buy’ ? How do you know, from where you are sitting, at what stage of the buying decision path they are on?

And how do you define ‘opportunity?’

THE FRONT END VS. THE BACK END OF THE BUYING PATH

Sales merely manages the last 10% of the buyer’s journey. It has no capacity to address the private, off-line, and often unconscious (certainly not based on needs or solution choice) aspects of a decision path that are, by definition, idiosyncratic. Sales was designed merely to assess need and place a solution.

Here are a few things buyers must do before they can buy. As I introduce each one, see if you can determine where your buyer is on this path, because until they complete each of these they will not buy, regardless of their needs or how well your solution fits, or how much ‘pain’ they are in.

1. get all of the right people onto the Buying Decision Team (BDT). Each BDT member brings their own criteria for a solution, and the solution requirements will not be stabilized until everyone puts in their 2 cents. Presenting from, or gathering data from, anything less than the whole BDT will result in insufficient data to choose a solution – or pitch – on.
2. get buy-in from everyone who will touch the solution. If a solution is chosen without the requisite buy-in, the system will face massive chaos/disruption.
3. all of the people, policies, historic vendors, old technology, systems issues, must know how they will shift when something new is added. Will they need to outsource staff? Where? When? Who? Who will supervise? Project lead? What happens to their current work load?

Just because we see a problem and have a great solution, doesn’t mean the buyer is ready, willing, and able to buy – otherwise you’d close a lot more sales.

Why are prospects in your pipeline?

What criteria of yours have placed them there?

How accurate are you with your projections? And why aren’t they more accurate?

What’s the difference between someone who will buy and someone who might initially look like a buyer but isn’t? And how do you know the difference?

So long as you place prospects in your pipeline because you believe 1. the buyer is ready, 2. they have the money, 3. they know they need your solution, and/or 4. they like you and are in ‘pain’, you will have a wildly fluctuating success rate.

Here is what you should know before putting a prospect onto the pipeline:

1. that every single one of the Buying Decision Team members is on board, and bought in to making a change and a purchase;
2. that there is a change management/implementation plan – that the seller is a part of – for when the solution will be purchased;
3. that any of the buy-in or change problems are addressed with anyone who will touch the solution;
4. that all existing technology and jobs that will be effected by the solution will be somehow included into the solution purchase so there are no loose ends or mystery.

Just because a seller thinks a buyer is ready doesn’t mean the prospect belongs in the pipeline.

Manage your pipeline by managing the buying decision path. Otherwise, your forecasting is ineffective. Buying Facilitation® will teach you how to manage the buying journey and understand exactly when, who, why, and how the solution will be purchased. Then you can forecast with accuracy.

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Fire up your sales folks at your next sales conference, have Sharon Drew give your keynote.

Look at our Learning Accelerators to add some new skills to your sales so you can manage your pipeline effectively.

Learn how buyer’s decide: read two sample chapters of Sharon Drew’s latest book Dirty Little Secrets.

Sharon Drew is a featured speaker at the Search Insider Summit – May 4 – 7 , 2011

Pipeline management: is your forecasting accurate? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But actually, that is exactly what happens: you are missing income on the sales you aren’t closing. But if you based your efforts on the buyer’s decision paths rather than your solution, you can be closing a helluva lot more sales.

THE COST OF NOT ADDRESSING THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

If you could keep the commission you’re now on, and close twice as many sales, would you?

If you could close your business in half the time, leaving you time to close more, would you?

If you could close all of the prospects who would buy and avoid spending time on all of  the prospects/leads who will never buy, would you?

If you could only spend time on those people who you accurately qualify as buyers on the first call, would you?

If you could only respond to those RFPs who will choose you, would you?

If you could get 4x more prospects to want an appointment with you – and speak with folks who are eager to connect with you -  would you?

If you only went on appointments when the entire Buying Decision Team was present, and only need to make one appointment before you close the deal, would you?

If you needed to learn a new skill to do all of the above, would you?

So why aren’t you?

Just asking.

FACILITATE THE BUYING DECISION FIRST, THEN PLACE SOLUTION

With Buying Facilitation® as a front end – and yes, a new skill to learn as it is a change management model that works with sales - you can do all of the above.

But you’d have to learn something new. What is it worth to you?

And yes, this is an unmitigated plug for Buying Facilitation®. I’ve heard too many people this week tell me that they don’t get paid for helping the buyer manage their buying decision journey. And that’s just not true: they do get paid for what they are closing – and not getting paid for what they are losing.

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Easy ways to learn Buying Facilitation®:

Buy Dirty Little Secrets Bundle and read the tactical and strategic sides  of the model.

Buy the MP3′s of Sharon Drew making live phone prospecting and qualifying calls.

Buy a Learning Accelerator for just those areas you’d like to brush up on (i.e. prospecting, managing objections, etc.).

Or get really bold, and learn the whole model with the Guided Study program.

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The Buyer’s Decision Path: why it’s important to sellers is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Does your buyer know the answers to these questions? Because until they do, they won’t buy. And, even if you think you know the answers – which would be impossible as they are personal and idiosyncratic to each buying environment – that doesn’t help the prospect manage their status quo, which is a hands-on, trial-and-error exercise.

I bet you thought that because they have a problem/pain/need and you have a solution, that your prospects are ready to buy. Or because you did a great presentation and they seemed to like you. But you would have closed a lot more sales if it were that simple.

WHAT DOES A BUYER NEED BEFORE THEY CAN BUY?

What, exactly, does a buyer need to do to get ready to make a purchase?

Here are a few things that are essential for buyers to handle to be ready to buy. But do not, not for a moment, think that the sales model you are using will help the buyer get ready. Because the internal, off-line, idiosyncratic stuff they must manage is not needs-related, and cannot be resolved by a purchase. It’s a systems problem that can only be managed by the system.

Here are the issues buyers must manage before they are ready to buy:

1. get all of the Buying Decision Team on board. That means, everyone who will touch the solution. This is not as simple as it seems. And buyers don’t know at the start who needs to be involved. But unless everyone lends their voices, no purchase will happen.

2. in regards to how the system (the people, functions, relationships, job descriptions, etc.)will function once something new enters, understand the difference between what needs to change, what cannot change, and what will change – and how to mitigate these.

3.  discover who needs to buy-in, when, to what extent, and what role do they play as the Buying Decision Team is formed, and then when a new solution would come aboard.

4. manage the change – and recognize and manage each potential problem before the solution is purchased. Otherwise there will be unknowable disruption. And the system the buyers live in is sacrosanct – or they would have known how to fix their problem earlier.

5. get appropriate buy-in, including people, policies, politics, old vendors, and make sure the new solution melds with their current solutions.

6. check out all possibilities for a fix – with a bias toward finding familiar vendors  used in the past.

7. organize the new roles, responsibilities, initiatives, and internal politics, and begin managing the potential fallout.

8. understand when all internal stuff is complete and know when to move forward – taking into account all of the criteria of all of the players (current and future).

On www.en.mimi.hu there is a definition that I find lacking: “Buyer readiness stages: categorize consumers  in terms of how close they are to making a purchase or a decision. Stages range from initial awareness, through to interest, desire and, finally, action.”

I believe that that definition ignores the entire back end of the buyer’s change management journey and is quite limited.

Let’s start a discussion on Buyer Readiness. I’ll start a new site. Let’s develop some models and training materials. I believe this is important for Qualifying and shortening the sales cycle.

The big question is: what do you need to be doing differently to help buyers enter into Buyer Readiness early in the buying journey? Given it’s not currently part of the sales model, how will you approach this? May I, ahem, suggest you read one of my books, or listen to some of my podcasts. And when you get convinced that you need skills in addition to your sales skills, you can contact me.

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Books:

• Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.
• Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.
• MP3
• Learning accelerators

Recent Posts

• Buying Facilitation™ is a Method not just a term
• Why do we get pushback – and can it be avoided?
• Provocation-based selling:proving pain does not close a sale

Learn Buying Facilitation™ | Implement Buying Facilitation™ | License Buying Facilitation™

Buyer Readiness: teach the buyer to qualify themselves is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Recently someone told me that Buying Facilitation™ is an old concept, that its been written about in books since sales books have been written, and that he’s been helping buyer’s buy for decades. Of course he has, except that he, like the entire sales field, has a paltry success rate – certainly under 10%. Why? If the seller understands the need, has the right solution, and has a great relationship, what’s stopping the buyer from buying as often as they should? Why isn’t the buyer deciding on the obvious solution?

Indeed, I just heard a statistic that in mature prospecting situations in which sellers are waiting for a close, at least 20% of these situations don’t close due to ‘no decision.’  But a decisions has been made! It’s ‘We Have Decided Not To Buy Your Solution From You At This Time.’ So it is a decision. It’s just not the one you wanted. Or it’s possible that you never had a buyer to begin with, and have either told your managers you’d be closing, or convinced yourself that you have a buyer when you really don’t.

And I’m not even discussing the 30% that are in line to close but choose another vendor…. a waste because they didn’t know how to choose you. And what about those that you lost well before they got in line to be READY to close? The entire sales process is a giant waste of time and energy!

TWO DECISIONS

Buyers have two types of decisions. One is the focus of our sales efforts: the decision to buy a solution. Of course this has been written about for decades. But the other set of decisions they must make is around buy-in: until or unless all of the people, policies, relationships (partners, vendors, rules, etc) buy in to bringing something new in, nothing will happen and no buying decision will be made. These decisions are private and idiosyncratic, and we sit and wait for them to happen. Sales does not manage this.

I call the facilitation of these non-solution-oriented decisions – the behind-the-scenes decision issues that have nothing to do with the Identified Problem - Buying Facilitation™. You can call it anything you want. But until or unless a buyer recognizes and manages these often-unconscious decision issues necessary to get group/company buy-in, buyers won’t choose a solution.

This is where our prospects go when they don’t choose us: they get caught in their internal relationships and politics, their old vendors, their status quo. And the sales model does not handle this. It never has.

WHAT’S GOING ON BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Before you showed up with the perfect solution, the buyer’s environment (I call it a system) worked… well, it worked the way it worked. The problem we can resolve with our solution is not an isolated event: it sits within the buyer’s system as a piece of the pie, an ingredient if you will, not the whole pie. The system has accepted it and has created work-arounds for it. In other words, the problem we can resolve is not a big problem to the system. We see it as such because we concentrate on it so we can sell.  But if the system was being harmed by it, it would have fixed it already

It is only when the problem becomes an annoyance to the rest of the system that the buyer is willing to do something different. At that point, not only does must it choose a solution, but because the problem has been embedded and touches so many parts of the system, it must manage the work-arounds that were created along the way to make sure the system kept working with the problem in it. A decision to bring in a new solution (a buying decision) is a change management activity.

A decision to buy a solution must be backed by the full force of the team/group/company/family, otherwise the fall-out would harm the originating group and not be worth it. If the head of training will quit because she doesn’t want the new vendor to ‘do her job’ or if the tech team will not be able to integrate the new software or if the management team is wary of having outsiders come in, no buying decision will be made. The system is sacrosanct.

SALES FOLKS THINK IT’S ABOUT THE SOLUTION

Sales is necessary to help manage the needs assessment and solution placement AFTER the buyer has navigated through all of their decision issues. Unfortunately, buyers don’t know at the start what sorts of issues they’re going to have to handle. That’s where we come in. With an entirely new/different skill set – NOT SALES as I repeatedly say in my new book Dirty Little Secrets – it’s possible to be a GPS system for your buyer and help them navigate through their decision issues. Not toward a solution, necessarily. But toward a resolution of the factors they need to address to get buy-in. First help buyers make their buyIN decisions, and then you can help them make their buyING decisions.

Buying Facilitation™ is not sales: it does not do needs assessment; it does not do solution placement; it does not manage objections (but it mitigates them). But it will make you first a decision facilitator and true consultant, will differentiate you from your competition, and it will help buyers make decisions 80% faster. Buyers have to do all of  this anyway, with you or without you. And the time it takes them is the length of the sales cycle. You’re already waiting for them – you might has well offer them true leadership while you’re waiting (It’s not sales. It’s not sales.).

Get a copy of Dirty Little Secrets. Take a training with me at the end of May here in Austin. Do the Guided Study program. Mitigate the 20% failure rate by spending time only on the right prospects, and helping them close a lot faster; get 35% more prospects at the beginning, and early on get rid of the ones who will never close. If you want to discuss, have a look around NewSalesParadigm.com or call me: 512 457 0246.

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Currently I am holding a contest, The 10 Steps of a Sales Cycle, for a free signed copy of Dirty Little Secrets. Join now for your chance to win.

Two Types of Decisions: Buy-IN, and BuyING is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Do you remember, back in the day, when docs said that women suffering from PMS were hysterical and they needed to have a hysterectomy (that’s where the word ‘hysterical’ comes from btw)? They didn’t understand the physiology underlying the physical issues, and relegated the problem to emotions.

My son has a neurological disease called Dystonia. There is no physical/medical test for it (although it’s very obvious what it is if you are familiar with it), and for many years people suffered with it and had to go to mental institutions because it was called an ‘emotional’ disease. In fact, when I lived in London and my son needed his perscriptions filled from our NY neurologist, our ‘surgery’ doc (the UK medical model) told us he needed a psychiatrist, not meds for his uncontrollable spasms.

Historically, when we don’t understand the roots of something we assume there is an emotional component, with the underlying belief being that there is something ‘not quite right’ with the person experiencing what is outside our comfort zone.

BUYER’S PURCHASES MUST COMPLY WITH THEIR SYSTEM

Because buyers take actions that sellers regularly believe to be ‘irrational’, we say that they are either ‘stupid’ or making an ‘emotional’ decision. Neuroscientists calls these decisions irrational or emotional as well. But we – sellers and neuroscientists – are rather biased: we see a problem, believe we know the solution, and consider our solution to be the best because it’s the most rational. We forget that every person, every group or family, every system if you will, has a very unique and idiosyncratic set of beliefs and criteria that determine their choices. And what may look irrational from the outside is very very rational on the inside, even if sometimes unconscious.

Indeed, before anyone makes any decision, they consider it against their own beliefs. Would you walk over to a stranger in a park and harm him? No? Why not? That would be an emotional, irrational decision. But you wouldn’t do it because you have internal, unconscious beliefs and values that wouldn’t allow you to harm another person – especially a stranger.

No one makes decisions outside of their beliefs. The internal, private ‘system’ that makes up our functioning rules (as individuals or groups) is sacrosanct, and if any decision might render the system useless, or ‘less-than,’ then another decision will be made. And outsiders cannot understand what’s going or become a part of that decision becasue, well, because they are outsiders.

Ever wonder why your friend stayed with her/his spouse? You’ll never understand. But it’s not irrational to him or her; it meets a need of some sort. Indeed, why haven’t you lost those ’5′ pounds? And why don’t you eat healthier, or work out more, or spend more time with your kids, or or or or. It might look irrational to me, but you have a very unique, idiosyncratic set of internal beliefs that kinda fit together and make up who you are, and if you try to change one piece of this, the rest of the system has distress.

If you were going to start working out daily, you’d have to either get up earlier or move something else in your schedule around. You’d have to probably start considering to eat healthier, and maybe stop having so many beers. It’s not about the gym, or about the weights; it’s about your system and how it’s willing to change so it all becomes a seamless whole that operates in tandem to serve you.

Buyers live in a unique system of rules and roles and relationships, history and initiatives, feelings and vendors and budgets. Change anything and everything else gets touched in some way. Before buyers buy, they must figure out how to manage all this so it ends up butter-side-up; understanding their needs, doing SPIN or Sandler or Relationship sales, or or or, only manages the problem end of the buying decision – the very very last action that buyers need to take – AFTER they’ve managed their systems change bits. And again, no matter what we ask or what we are told, we can never, ever understand someone else’s system, just as they can’t understand ours.

My new book discusses all of this in detail, and explains what’s going on behind-the-scenes, and why. And it teaches how to help buyers discover and address all of their unconscious issues so they can make a congruent decision. Think about it. Think about your decisions and how you make them, and the beliefs you must consider first. Then apply the same beliefs to your buyers.

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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.

Decisions are Never Emotional is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I’m here to denounce the myth that they are good in all instances: I actually believe they are used most effectively at the back end of the selling/buying cycle and have no role to play in the buying decision activity that occurs before buyers make their solution choice.

Let’s first consider why they are used at all. Questions, in and of themselves, create parameters for the questioned person. So if i asked you what you had for breakfast, you couldn’t tell me about a trip to visit your Mom. Questions effectively set the boundaries for your answer.

Open Questions give the questioned person a large field to answer in, making it possible for the person to think fully and expansively. In the field of sales, Open Questions are used to have prospects/buyers ‘open up’ and ‘spill the beans’ so that sellers can gather the data they need to know to sell better. The word I hear a lot from sellers is that they want the prospect to ‘REVEAL.’

These questions help sellers ‘understand’ the buyer. The belief here is that if the seller TRULY understands what is going on – with the problem that needs to be resolved, with the way the decisions are being made, with how they are choosing vendors, with past problems that surround the ‘need’ – s/he will be able to sell/pitch/present better.

So….. does it work? Have Open Questions increased your sales? Has ‘knowing’ who the decision makers are gotten more sales, faster? Has ‘understanding’ the problem increased your close rate? I don’t think so.

WHY OUR CURRENT BELIEFS ABOUT OPEN QUESTIONS ARE SPECIOUS

I believe that there are two very distinct elements in a buying decision: 1. the private,  internal, off-line systems issues they must address that rarely have anything specifically to do with the ‘need’, and are managed in a way that must conform to their idiosyncratic norms – their relationships, Buying Decision Team needs, initiatives, future outcomes; 2. the choice of the best route to resolve a problem (includes solution, provider, price, and implementation). Sales very nicely manages #2. We sit and wait while they do #1 on their own and hope they’ll come back and buy.

We use Open Questions in #2. The problem is that when we first meet our clients, it’s too early for them to know the complete, nuanced, answers to our questions – not in the detail they will know at the end of their buying decision process. They most probably have not en-massed their entire Buying Decision Team, or seen how some elements of the ‘problem’ must fit with other in-house issues, or fully defined their solution needs.

Our perfectly fine questions are being asked way too early.

One of the ‘dirty little secrets’ in my new book is that when buyers begin their search for a solution, they have little idea of the route they will end up taking on the way to choosing a solution: They don’t always know all of the people who end up needing to be involved, or how/if their regular vendors can handle the situation, or how the tech team will react, or if another department can help them with parts of the solution.

What is discussed in those off-line discussions and negotiations that happen between department heads over lunch? Or the meetings with the tech team to see if they can resolve the situation? Or the conversations with the present vendor? Until or unless buyers do these things, they can’t buy. And Open Questions do nothing to help them. Open Questions are for the seller, and the information we gather does not help close the sale at this point in the buying decision cycle.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

The problem is that the main elements involved in buying decisions happen behind-the-scenes and are not based on our solution, and generally not even based on ’need’ (which I call an Identified Problem). So we end up asking Open Questions far too early for them to have good data to share.

I’ve developed something called a Facilitative Question that pulls together subconscious criteria (i.e. not information based) and acts like a flashlight to lead the buyer step-by-step down the path they must go through as they muddle through their internal decisioning issues. It’s actually a decision facilitation tool, not a sales tool.

Because the issues that buyers must address first are so private (not to mention a mystery as they begin discovery of the people and policies they must include in decisions) we cannot be there when they do these things. But we can teach the buyer how to discover their route and bring together the right people. This may not ‘reveal’ but it certainly puts us on the Buying Decision Team. Would you rather ‘know’ how they buy (which you can’t anyway because you’re an outsider, you’re not there, don’t know all of the players, and have no history the problem), or be on the team that helps make the decisions?

Facilitative Questions often start with ‘What’ and follow the decision phases that brains go through as they change: What has stopped you from losing those 10 pounds, and what would you need to be considering differently in order to know when it’s time to do so? At what point would you be choosing people to enlist on your health routine to get you where you want to be? We may be selling a gym membership, but until the person answers all of those internal questions for themselves, all the data we gather about their fitness, or what we share about the gym, won’t get them to buy.

My new book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, coming out October 15, is all about the inner life of the buying cycle and how decisions get made to buy, to change, to solve a problem. Add this thinking – along with Facilitative Questions – to the front end of your Open Questions, and you’ll have a complete model to use to truly help buyers buy, help people change (i.e. use in your coaching), and help in a negotiation.

How would you know that adding a new skill set to the one you’re currently using would enhance your results?

And, what is stopping you from closing all of the sales you deserve to close?

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If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

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 inluences 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. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

Why Open Questions Don’t Work is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our favor. We certainly would not lose as many sales as we do. The problem is that the buying decision is so, so much more complex than we can imagine as we stand on the outside looking in.

Sales mysteriously treats an Identified Problem (my word for ‘need’) as if it were an isolated event. But it’s not. There are ramifications to any change, and the ramifications are ones only buyers can see from the inside and we will never be privy to.

WHEN DO BUYERS START FIGURING OUT STUFF?

Buyers don’t start figuring out their behind-the-scenes issues until after we’ve met them, except in cases when buyers call us and buy… in which case they’ve made all of the behind-the-scenes buying decisions before they contacted us and we are just lucky.

We come in at the wrong time, pitching a solution to a small portion of the ultimate Buying Decision Team, and have no tools to help buyers do what they must do first: manage all of the off-line buying decisions that need to happen for them to get buy-in for change.

I have said this over and over: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. Before they can buy anything they first look into their current teams, partners groups, rules, historic decisions for a simple resolution to a business problem. They come to us by default, and even then end up going back inside (to their old vendors, or the other department heads, or the tech team) to do an internal check on resources before placing an order.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE SCENES?

I’ve fully described the actual steps that happen behind-the-scenes in my new book coming out soon (Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it). To think about this, let’s start with this question: How did a buyer’s ‘need’ get there? It didn’t arise overnight, and people and policies inside agreed to allow it to happen. So the ‘need’ got created behind-the-scenes.

Not only that, the system and rules and people and policies have allowed it to remain as it is – or they would have changed it already.

Before a buyer will buy or choose any solution at all, they must first figure out and manage the very idiosyncratic and mysterious ramifications of change. What will a solution change internally? How will the people and policies interact differently if/when they decide to resolve an Identified Problem and bring in something… something different that isn’t already there? Obviously, the sales model doesn’t equip us with the tools to help buyers manage these issues, and we cannot do it for them.

And no solution will be purchased if there is any possibility that the client can resolve their problem on their own.

As we think about sales, and wonder how to close more sales, quicker, we must realize that by merely focusing on the solution-placement area, and we do our ’understanding’ – understanding need, understanding the decision making, understanding the requirements, helping buyers understand our the judiciousness of our offering - we are not helping the buyer do the behind-the-scenes work they must accomplish before making a buying decision. That work is private, idiosyncratic, personal, unique, and not open to outsiders. And, unfortunately, buyers don’t know how to do this work easily because it’s new to them. But we can help – with a different set of skills.

We can help them by being true servant leaders, true trusted advisors and relationship managers, and guide them through their systemic, off-line, buying decision issues. But it’s not sales. In this time of economic uncertainty, add Buying Facilitation™ and differentiate from your competition – and truly help your buyer buy. And, stop selling.

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If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

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. I’ll be doing a webinar on the material close to the launch date, so stay tuned.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that inluences 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. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

Buying Decisions: What Happens Behind-The-Scenes is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I have a question: if your job is to get people to buy your solution, why do you spend so much time doing stuff that doesn’t bring in business?

I  recently spoke with a sales guy who told me that for two years he’s been making appointments to do presentations for a relatively small ticket solution, and then waiting for a year before 30% of the the buyers purchased. His biggest challenge was getting the appointment. Do the numbers and it turns out that the first 90% of the prospects wouldn’t give him an appointment.

Why would anyone work so hard just to close 3% of their prospects? And why is he getting paid to waste so much time and resource? And And, why does he keep doing it that way if  it’s a failed prospecting model?

Why? Because these sorts of low numbers are expected. Because that’s what sellers do. Because they’ve never learned the process of helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decisions they need to make.

Think of this:                          _____________________________________*_____

The product sale is at the end of the line, after the star. It’s merely a sliver of the buying decision process buyers address on the way to making a purchase. They do the lion’s share of their decision making off-line. That other part of the line, on the left. And you’re not there with them.

So what, exactly, is your job? Buyers are doing the first 80% on their own; you are getting rejected 90% of the time on that sliver because you’re entering the buying decision at the wrong time; and you’re complaining that the buyer is stupid.

Your job is to help buyers make buying decisions – not sell. Sales won’t get you more than what you’re getting now. Is that enough? Seems to me you deserve more.

What needs to happen for you to actually be willing to stop selling, and use another set of skills to help buyers manage their buying decision process?

Let’s change your job to a decision facilitator. Until or unless buyers figure out when or what to buy, and from whom, and their off-line issues are ready to allow them to go through some sort of change, they won’t do anything, regardless of their need and your solution.

Change your job.

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What Is The Job Of A Seller? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Since I’m the Queen Contrarian, I’d like to say that the ‘need’ we think that buyers have is not a real need.

First of all, we often meet them at the wrong end of their buying decision – when they are just starting their search for a possible solution. Not only have they not committed to making a purchase, they are too early in their decision process to fully understand all that their ‘need’ entails.

Next, if they REALLY had a need, they would have fixed it already. Any ‘system’ uses work-arounds when something in the system isn’t functioning optimally, so our buyer’s ‘need’ is already being taken care of in some fashion. That means their need isn’t urgent.

And, finally, the buyer doesn’t know at the beginning of their discovery, who needs to buy-in to a new vendor or a new solution. So we are walking down the path of understanding need (which they can’t really know in the beginning) and sharing data, and the prospect has no idea what the final parameters of the need will look like once all of the right people get onto the Buying Decision Team.

Because this is such a big topic, I’ll devote more time to this later on. For now, have a look at my video, and start a discussion around this. I’ll be sending in blog posts from Scotland, so I may not be as involved as I will be when I”m back, but I think it’s a good conversation to share.

Enjoy.

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What Is A Need? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com