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

Where did they go?

They went off-line. They went back to their teammates and their old vendors and their old solutions. They decided not to resolve the problem now. A new partner showed up with a fix that kinda resolved the problem. They decide to hire a new staff person with the funds.

In fact, you have no idea where the prospect went.

But I’ll tell you: They went to that place where you can’t go, to that private, off-line place that sales doesn’t give you skills for.

But it’s not your fault.

SALES ONLY MANAGES A SLIVER OF A BUYING DECISION

Sales is a solution placement model. Everything you do in your job, everything you say, every problem you have, every objection you handle, is based on that one factor. In fact, the model of sales – whether you use Sandler or SPIN, Richardson or Khalsa – is based on finding a need and getting the folks with the need to choose your solution to resolve it.

Problem is that buyers don’t buy the way you sell. And sales merely manages a tiny sliver of a buyer’s buying decision – that very last piece that is ready to choose a solution. That’s right: sales enters far too early in a buying decision, and buyers have to go back – after they’ve already met you – and manage the off-line stuff on their own.

And sales ignores all of that – the subjective, internal, private place where buyers go. Sales doesn’t sit at the table when your prospect is at a meeting about next year’s inititives. Sales doesn’t give you the skills to help your prospect talk with the new business partner who shows up with a partial solution and cuts you out of the picture. Sales doesn’t help you convince the tech team that they cannot resolve the problem the way you do. Sales will give you the tools to present your solution effectively, but not manage the fight between your client and the Board.

So you sit and wait, and hope that the buyer comes back after they’ve said the magic words: I’ll Call You Back.

That’s right. You sit and hope. Because you have no control over it. Because sales doesn’t handle that end of the buying decision.

I’ve developed a decision facilitation model that is NOT SALES but offers sellers a new set of skills to help buyers maneuver through their off-line buy-in issues. It’s a change management tool. It’s NOT SALES. But it teaches buyers how to get the approval they need, how to get the boss to free up the budget, how to have the tech team bring you in to work with them. And it closes the sales cycle time in half.

The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. They need to do this anyway. Frankly, they don’t have the skills to do it efficiently because it’s an unknown for them. They need your help.

You can help them. But you have to be willing to add a new skill set to sales. And once you have helped the buyer figure out the internal politics, and the management issues, and the partner relationships, and they know how and why and when they are ready to buy and have all of the necessary people on their buying decision team, THEN you can sell!

Did I peak your interest?  I have a new book coming out on this in September. Stay tuned! I bet between us we can really make a difference and change the sales model to include this other piece.

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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.

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 Sales Fails is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Nothing.

At the end of the day, there is the buyer, the seller, and the solution. The influencer, the influenced, and the idea, or request. Regardless of the moving parts, one person wants another person to buy in to something that represents some sort of change.

Whenever we are responsible for having someone else buy in to an idea, change an opinion, help us on a project, we have a sales issue.

But it’s not the sort of sales issue we’re accustomed to. It’s a change management issue: after all, if the Other can’t figure out a way to add our request to their daily activities, their beliefs about their job, their feelings about what is being asked of them, they will do nothing. If we force them to do something they are not internally comfortable with, we’ll have to manage their sabatoge.

BUY IN IS A DECISION

In order for a colleague to buy in to an idea or help us in some way, they need to be willing to make a decision to do something different. Sure, we have a worthwhile project that we can spout about (all our projects are worthwhile, right?); we can offer details, and great reasons why it’s a worthy use of time or money.

But at the end of the day, the person has to agree – and not just agree, but lend a hand, be willing to support us over time, be available to influence someone else. We actually need them to get on board and become part of the team (even if in a small way). We actually have a leaderhip issue.

We are so accustomed to assuming that because our product/solution/idea is great, and we can see the benefits, that the other person will see the efficacy of it and work with us. But agreeing means they have to have risk: they risk their time, their political capital, their relationships, their ‘name’. Net net, they have a subjective, personal, internal decision to make that must meet their own criteria for who they are in the workplace.

It’s not just about the request or the need or the idea/solution. Help the Other walk through their decision issues.

Once they buy in to giving up some of their time, recognizing what they need to consider to maintain their company status, seeing if they can stand behind the request in a way that integrates with their personal issues, then they can make the personal decisions necessary to stand behind our request.

It’s not about the efficacy of the idea or the solution: it’s about the Other’s need to buy in to a collaboration. Stop selling. Teach the Other how to buy.

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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.

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.

The Internal Customer: Is It A Sales Job? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

My friend Jill Konrath has a passion for helping people get back to work. She has a site, Get Back To Work Faster that includes all-things-necessary to get a job – articles about job search and interviewing techniques, services to help you find appropriate companies to interview with, job market reports, using the internet to find a job and find networks that will help.

The site is filled with handy, necessary, creative job hunting support tools. It’s all free. And her stuff is fresh and thoughtful.

In fact, Jill is inviting you to attend a free webinar on “How to get a job when no one is hiring.” Tell your friends about it who are job hunting.

And, her book Get Back to Work Faster will be out in the fall, but she’s offering it for FREE now as a download.

Now that I’ve introduced you to Jill – the job maven, let me also introduce you to Jill – the sales maven.

Jill (a best selling author of the book Selling to Big Companies) is one of the sales folks whose work I admire enormously. She is the only person I know whose work is a link between mine and typical sales.

Jill talks/writes about the buying decision, and thoughtfully introduces some top notch thinking and models to give small-medium business owners tools to help buyers buy.

While it doesn’t go as far as my Buying Facilitation® model does to engage the off-line, hidden,  personal buy in issues necessary for buyers to address before making a purchase, she goes farther than anyone else I know in understanding the importance of influencing the non-solution  end of a sale.

I respect her and her work greatly. Whether you need a job, or are a small business needing some help to close sales, have a look at her sites. I’m so lucky she’s my friend.

Check out her site: Selling To Big Companies

Do You Need A Job? Let Jill Konrath Help. is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

If that weren’t enough, they are so scared of making bad decisions that they’ve added additional  stakeholders to each decision team to spread the risk. What does that mean? It means that “no” becomes the truly operative word.

Folks are scared to take a stand because they don’t understand the corporate risk AND the personal risk to their egos and reputations.

Folks are now working with strangers, with unknown repercussions for their future careers.

The possibility of agreeing on mutual criteria gets diluted in a larger team so there is no longer a set of assumed criteria to decide with.

Maneuvering Through Decisions

Remember that buyers need to know how to maneuver through their internal, hidden, and sometimes unconscious people/policy dynamics prior to making any sort of  purchase or spending money. They had a hard time doing this before (Remember those long sales cycles? Now they are 50% longer!) because they are often unaware of all of the issues they need to contend with at the start. Now it’s worse.

And we can’t help them with our typical sales skills, because sales manages the need/solution/product placement end of the buying decision.

But if we put on a different hat, and change our job description to be neutral navigators – true leaders -  and provide a path through human change issues, unconscious biases, and group dynamics, we can facilitate their route.  But we cannot do this in the name of providing a solution – only in the name of true service. And the end result will look far different from what a prospect situation has looked like in the past.

Our new jobs must be to support internal, idiosyncratic, subjective buying decisions. Once you recognize that people and policies must buy-in to change (A purchase creates change, right?) before any action is taken, you can use your time, care, and relationship to help buyers maneuver through their internal change issues.

They have to do this anyway. It might as well be with you, in an efficient time frame, and with the integrity of truly serving your buyer’s decision process.

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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.

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.

Helping Buyers Decide To Spend Money is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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

Buyers live in a system. It includes people, policies, relationships, company or family politics, personality issues, initiatives, historic vendor relationships, personal biases, fears. And any Identified Problem, or need, that our product can resolve, sits inside that system. And make no mistake: this Identified Problem sits comfortably in the buyer’s culture (their ’system’).

When they go to resolve this Identified Problem, they are stuck with the work-arounds that the system created for it that not only provide some sort of solution, but also creates sticky tentacles that become firmly rooted in the buyer’s environment. Until or unless these latch on to something else, or get untangled in a way that everyone approves of, no purchase can take place. Managing this creates the delays in buying decisions.

Like in all systems, our buyer’s environments seek homeostasis. It’s a universal law of nature – the retention of balance, regardless of what it takes to do this. When we show up with a solution, no matter how necessary the need, our solution threatens the system. To us it just looks like a need that our solution can fix. To buyers it looks like disruption. Remember, there is some sort of work-around already.

But sales does NOT handle this: in sales, every question, every skill, every professional behavior, is targeted to placing a product. You’ve learned to overcome objections, handle gatekeepers, close better, and wait til they are ready. You gather data – about the problem/need; you listen carefully – about the problem/need; you offer solutions – about the problem/need.

But separate from the Identified Problem/need is the system that holds it in place; if it were so urgent, the buyer would have fixed the need already!

Until buyers figure out how to manage all of those people and policy issues, until they get buy-in from all of the people that are affected by the Identified Problem or the work-arounds the buyer has created to manage the problem prior to finding a  different solution, they will do nothing. And because it’s so unique and idiosynratic, because there is no way for an outsider to understand why some folks are having a fight, or why one department doesn’t work with another, or why the decision team members all have disparate views on a solution, a seller can’t understand what is going on. And they can’t be directly involved with the resolution of those issues.

The dirty little secret is that buyers don’t understand it either, until they are well into their decisioning and untangling.

Sales has never taught you how to become an unbiased coach, and help buyers 1. recognize the full extent and reach of the problem situation and the sorts of tangles it’s created; 2. figure out how to resolve their issues with familiar resources and old vendors; and 3. identify the people and teams that need to buy-in to a new solution to ensure there will be no disruption when the problem is resolved.

By using Buying Facilitation (www.newsalesparadigm.com) we can help prospects figure out how to manage and resolve the systems elements that need to agree to change. It’s not sales, but it influences the sale and facilitates the buying decision. Buyers must do this with us or without us. It might as well be with us. But it is a different skill set.

To learn more about it, read the two free chapters of my ebook Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions

What’s Behind A Buying Decision? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

If it’s not us, not our product, and the need is obvious, what’s going on? Why don’t buyers know they’re supposed to buy?

The problem is the sales model. It’s broken. It treats the ‘need’ or the Identified Problem as if it were an isolated event, instead of recognizing that an Identified Problem is just one piece of a larger problem, and sits in a tangle of ’stuff’ that holds it in place in the buyer’s environment. What sales can’t manage is the mysterious route the buyer must go through to untangle the internal issues before they can make a decision to buy.

Think about your weight, or your work-out schedule. Do you eat the way you ’should’? Do you work out as often as you’d like? Why not? Because, well, because. There are a litany of excuses, rationalizations, or reasons you use to explain the oversight. But the explanations hold the lack in place, making it difficult to change without re-thinking the excuses.

And so with our prospects. Their ‘need’ has been there for some time; there are even work-arounds they’ve created that manage the need so it functions well-enough. Indeed: if the buyer believed the ‘need’ was urgent, they would have resolved it already. So although it looks like an ‘urgent need’ to us – given that we know what Excellence can look like with our solution – it’s not so urgent to our buyers. Their managers are leaders – not as good as they’d be with your leadership training, but good enough. Their software works – not as good as it would with your solution, but good enough. It’s not sitting there, waiting for you to show up.

When we enter a prospect’s culture – their ’system’ if you will – we forget that there are multiple work-arounds that hold the ‘need’ in place daily. And until or unless the buyer is ready, willing, and able, to recognize and manage each person, each regulation, each vendor issue, each departmental problem, that holds the Identified Problem in place, they will do nothing; it’s far more important for them to maintain systems congruency than it is to resolve something that’s working ‘well enough’, if the solution will damage the status quo.

Until or unless buyers know how to manage all of the elements that touch the need so there won’t be internal chaos once a new solution is brought in, they will do nothing. And the Sales Model doesn’t help with that end of the buying decision.

Have a look at my book Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions at www.buyingfacilitation.com. There are 2 sample chapters there that will give you a peak at a model that teaches buyers how to accomplish buy-in to change. They won’t buy until they do it; you might as well help.

Sales Treats A Need As If It Were An Isolated Event is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

What a waste – not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation®, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of stuff’ that needs to get figured out before they can make a buying decision. It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, that historic problems are managed. Unfortunately for us, sales doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation and buyers need to do this on their own.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match – but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem!

So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good, or because our solution doesn’t match their need. It’s because their internal issues haven’t been resolved, and buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t: they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions: it’s certainly difficult for sellers to understand the buyer’s buy-in issues, management decisions, technology factors. But it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.

Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

Why is a 90% failure rate ok? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

This, said by sellers blaming buyers for not behaving as sellers would prefer. Or not responding appropriately to seller’s selling patterns.

Let me reverse the issue: Sellers do not respond appropriately to buyer’s buying patterns! Indeed, have they helped their customers:

• manage the range of internal decisions they need to make as they construct a buying decision?
• discern their criteria for resolving a need that resides within a tangle of other problems?
• identify the criteria for adding a  solution to their status quo in a way that won’t create disruption?
• discover the most efficient route through the breadth of decisions and decision makers, to help them manage their newly-challenged organizational issues with stakeholders, budgets, and personnel issues?

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE BUYING DECISION

I suspect buyer’s criteria for buying are different from what sellers would like them to be. It’s always been that way (which accounts for sales’ abysmal closing ratios) given sales is based on product placement and need, rather than systems management.

How do I know? Because after 15 years as a very successful sales person, I became a customer and realized what the problem was.

As an entrepreneur of a start-up tech company, my problem was never the ‘need’. The ‘need’ was just the observable factor (think tip of the iceberg) of a conglomeration of internal issues within my system of people, policies, relationships, and initiatives; it was never resolved so simply as finding a solution to one of the elements. There always seemed to be a trickle down factor.

Indeed: there are a few givens that sellers forget when it comes to customers ‘knowing’ how to buy:

1. buyers don’t want to buy anything. They want to resolve a problem. Period.  They will resolve their problem with the most efficacious means, so long as it happens with a minimum level of internal disruption. If it means using a work-around that might fit better into the existent system of people and policies than bringing in a new solution or vendor, that’s the decision. If the status quo – incomplete and problematic as it might be – is better than having to shift initiatives, dislodge jobs, or uproot long standing and collegial vendors, then the status quo is the best resolution. An outside observer, such as a seller, cannot understand the ramifications of a customer’s decision when there is so much more than just the Identified Problem at stake.
2. sales treats an Identified Problem as if it were an isolated event. It forgets that the Identified Problem was created over time, by a series of idiosyncratic decisions and adjoining elements that continue to hold the Identified Problem in place. Invariably, there are a series of problems – long standing personnel issues, problematic initiatives or relationships, new rules being developed but not completed – that circle the Identified Problem like a vine; one piece cannot be resolved without consequences to the rest. Think Pick-up-Sticks. When you played that childhood game, remember how many sticks you had to pick up before you got to the primary one? And remember how difficult it was to avoid moving the sticks because they were all so intertwined? This is what a client’s environment looks like, and the problem you can resolve with your product is that primary stick hidden within the tangle of others that need to be disentangled before they can buy. Remember that, when you think you have THE obvious solution to a buyer’s Identified Problem. The solution you have will only manage one single aspect of a buyer’s Problem Space, and the elements that caused it are so far afield of your solution that even gathering data about the buyer’s ‘problem’ will not elicit the necessary data to help you sell. This fact alone is responsible for the unnecessary doubling of the length of the sales cycle.
3. the job of sales has focused on uncovering need, creating a trusting relationship, and presenting an appropriate solution. It’s ultimately about product placement and need. But imagine if your job included helping buyers manage all of the non-problem-related internal issues they must manage BEFORE they were able to make a decision on the solution. Imagine if the first stage of sales was to teach customers how to manage their internal people/policy/personnel/political decisions, much like figuring out how to safely uncover the lead pick-up stick. They have to do it anyway – with you or without you. They might as well do it with you.

The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle.

SALES DOESN’T SUPPORT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Instead of blaming customers for not knowing how to make a buying decision, maybe you can blame the sales profession for not giving you the skills to truly support and manage all of the decision criteria that buyers must address before they choose you.

No matter the industry or the size of the sale, whether it’s on the phone or in person, buyers have to somehow resolve a problem by not upsetting the rest of their status quo, and by managing the adjacent problems simultaneously. And your solution is merely one aspect of the types of decisions necessary.

Buyers must figure out how to solve their entire tangle of issues that have created their imperfect status quo. Your solution may be one of the elements that will address their resolution. But they also may discover that buying your product – or any product – may not be their best solution.

Your choice is to sit back and wait for them to buy – or not – or call and call and call, and lower your price, and make-nice, or add another set of skills to your sales skills. You can use Buying Facilitation to help buyers recognize and manage all of the internal, idiosyncratic, systemic issues they need to address as they resolve their Identified Problems. It’s not sales – it’s a precursor to sales, but a skill you might want to consider in this new economic environment. Again, buyers have to do this anyway. They might as well do it with you. What else do you have to do now anyway?Every sale is now a complex sale due to internal, endemic issues that we (as outsiders) can not understand. Enter the buy-seller relationship as a decision facilitator first. Then you can either accelerate the ultimate decision one way or another, or you can get on the decision team.

Customers know how to buy. They just aren’t making the decisions you want them to make in the way you want them to make them. And, by focusing on product sale and need, you’re not helping them.

Customers Don’t Know How To Buy – Or Do They? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com