To help you understand how foreign systems are to outsiders, here’s a personal story from a trip to India that made me realize I’d never understand another system as an outsider…. and what I needed to focus on instead of trying to manipulate or make sense of a situation that I wanted to effect change over, but was foreign to me.

In this funny story I was so confounded by my inability to understand another culture that I ended up having a spiritual experience.

INDIA HAS NO SYSTEMS

I was on a speaking tour through India titled Spirituality in Business. India is a wonderous place that teaches you how to be authentic: there is no other way to be, since the only system they live with (outside of the strict rules of relationships) is chaos. And with my systems-thinking Asperger brain, that makes me horribly uncomfortable.

So I was going nuts. Absolutely bonkers. Nothing worked as I thought it should. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. No one did the job they were supposed to be doing. There were no rules, far as I could tell. I had no idea what to do, how to fit in or act. I was living in a state of confusion that hurt – every moment of every day.

I decided that the best route would be either murder or suicide. I didn’t much care which, so long as there was death involved.

I made such a fuss that the organizer of the speaking tour got me the name/number of a travel agent who would get me to HHDL (the Dalai Lama) in Dharamsala in North West India. One of the things to note about India is that your plane/train/bus will be late – or early, who knows – but whenever it does show up it will be yesterday’s transport, or tomorrow’s, and you’ll have to wait til, til who knows when. People wait for days. Calmly.

Anyway, I took the number and went to a nearby village to stand on line (with the goats and chickens, babies and arguing adults) to use the phone – a make-shift deal tied around a tree. It was probably the only phone for miles.

When it was my turn, I contacted Mr. Singh. “Ah, Miss Morgen. Yes. I have your plans to Dharamsala. Please hold while I get your file.” As I waited, watching some children play with a dog, I began smelling smoke. I looked around and saw nothing burning, until I looked down: the phone cord was dangling off of the tree, and on fire. That’s right. And that’s not even possible.

Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere. No phone, no transport, no way out, no understanding, no choices. Typical of every moment in India: total confusion, all the time.

I sat down on a nearby rock, rolled my eyes upward, defeated: “OK. I’ll stay.”

ONE STEP . AND THEN ANOTHER.

What had to be true for me to remain in India and not commit Death of some kind? I had to learn how to take one step at a time, put one foot in front of the other, have no expectations, and live totally in the present without needing anyone else to behave in any particular way and without needing to understand anything. One step. I’m OK. One step. I’m OK.  One step. I’m OK. The anger, fear, rage, confusion slipped away; each moment was just fine.

After a day of taking very small, slow steps, I realized that not only was I (and folks around me) still alive, but that I felt free: I realized that much of my life had been based on assumptions of what I wanted to happen – what I expected, and what I thought I could influence, and the frustrations and annoyance when I didn’t get what I expected.

I took this lesson back to my life and job as a seller. I realized it’s not possible to understand a buyer’s systems. Sure, I understand the facts about a need and how it fits with my solution, but my ability to understand ends there.

What are the systems in your client’s environment? They must navigate their daily routines, decisions, jobs, relationships so that work gets done and excellence accomplished. But you don’t understand their system. So, what has to be true for you to help prospects traverse their systems and consider purchasing something?

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

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

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

We can never understand a buyer’s buying environment is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Yes. It is easy. But not with the sales model alone.

THE JOB OF THE SALES MODEL: LIMITING THE PURCHASE CHOICE AND BUYING DECISIONS

The sales model is meant to place a solution. It was designed for a simpler time in history, when there were fewer solutions, precious few ways of marketing them, no internet or FEDEx to get solutions from China delivered to your front door in two days. It was not designed:

• to bring together disparate players on a Buying Decision Team,
• to circumvent many creative solutions that can address a problem besides yours,
• for a bad global economy.

Sales places solutions. But if it were that easy you would have closed more.

You know those sales where the buyer shows up and buys almost immediately? What’s the difference between them and others who take forever? The difference is they are one of the 80% who will buy a solution within 2 years of working with a solution provider (and left behind a trail of dead sales people) and NOW is their 2 year mark: they have finally discovered and gotten agreement on a route to move forward and all of their ducks are in a row. Their need is defined; the new job descriptions are described, the users are ready, the new material will fit comfortably with the old so as to avoid disruption.

The last thing the buyer does is find a solution. Sales enters at the wrong time, offering the wrong data, to the wrong people. If you do the exact same thing you’re doing now, but after you use Buying Facilitation® to help them navigate through their behind-the-scenes decision path, then you’ll close quickly.

MUCH SHORTER SALES CYCLES USING BUYING FACILITATION® AND SALES

Here are some numbers that my clients (using Buying Facilitation® AND sales) tracked against their control groups:

• A large insurance company went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits and 25 closed sales.
• A large tech company selling a small piece of software ($10,000) went from a 6 month sales cycle to a 3 call close.
• One of the Big 3, with a $50,000,000 solution went from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle.
• One of the world’s largest banks went from closing 2% with an 11 month sales cycle , to closing 37.5% in 2 months.
• One of the well known boutique brokerage houses when from $400 Million to $1.2 Billion in revenue in 4 years.

They did this by become true Trusted Advisors; they used Buying Facilitation® to facilitate the buying decision, and then they sold.

Your sales cycle is long because buyers have to figure out how to get the right people and policies aboard before they can buy. It’s not about your solution. Do you want to sell? Or have someone  buy? They are two different activities. Which do you want to focus on? And how will you know if it’s worth adding something new to what you are doing?

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Get a hold of Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and read it. Then contact us so we can train you.

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

Why Your Sales Cycle is So Long (Hint: It’s Not About Your Solution) is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

By any objective standard, I’ve been successful: It’s been a blessing that an out-of-the-box idea has had the opportunity to have a world forum – imagine: one woman with a revolutionary idea making a difference in an age-old field. But my active outreach to gain a broader market is now complete.

I not only have said all there is to say (my latest book Dirty Little Secrets presents the complete strategic thinking), but my Asperger’s makes it difficult for me to do what’s necessary to take the idea further. Indeed, the more I procrastinate leaving, the more harm I’m doing to Buying Facilitation® - fine, important material that is being underutilized, possibly because of my lack of appropriate communication skills.

THE LIMITS OF MY CAPABILITY: THE ROLE OF ASPERGER’S

I suspect I”ve done a bad job helping mainstream sales understand how Buying Facilitation® offers sellers tools to help buyers navigate through their behind-the-scenes decisions and why it’s a necessary part of the sales process. I’m guessing that it might have taken a non-Asperger’s person less time (with more success) to get the thinking into the field. Maybe someone less pushy, or less obnoxious, less direct, or less annoying - all traits of my Asperger’s that I’ve spent decades learning to contain (sometimes successfully, when I’m aware), but are impossible to  eliminate.

But maybe it took my focused personality, determination and vision to develop the full set of skills and design learning programs that have achieved the global success we’ve had. Maybe this time line has been appropriate and necessary. I’ll never know the answer to that, of course. It is, as they say, what it is.

Frankly, I have to work hard to not blame myself for Buying Facilitation® not being in the hands of every single sales person by now. My rationale is that it’s not unusual for a new concept to take this path. It took the telephone over 60 years to be adopted. That’s right. People preferred Morse Code over the telephone. For 60 years. I guess my 23 years wasn’t enough :) But maybe the field of sales truly doesn’t want to add the capability of facilitating the buyer’s change management issues. Or maybe a combination of it all.

I’ll never know the answer. What I do know is that it’s time for me to move on. I’ll continue working with coaching clients, do occasional keynotes, and do Buying Facilitation® training for a few select companies if they are ready and the opportunity is fun. I’ll continue supporting my licensees to make sure the work stays alive. And although I won’t be writing much fresh material, I’ll keep my blog up, and regularly change out articles: with over 550, there is plenty of reading matter for those interested in learning.

But I will end my daily activities around placing Buying Facilitation®. If anyone else wants to carry the ball forward and make the material ready for mainstream, that would be great. It’s a model that can be trained for decades, with conventional sales models, and it’s now at its Breakpoint. Fingers crossed it crosses the chasm and eventually gets trained along with sales training in both companies and in universities. I understand it might not happen.

I am clear that I’ve done the best I could and feel quite proud that I’ve made a contribution to the field.

Hopefully, I’ll be remembered as the woman who first discussed ‘helping buyers buy’ or ‘the buying decision path’ or ‘the buying decision journey’ or the Buying Decision Team. Or the concept that a purchase is a change management problem. Or that by using Buying Facilitation®, sales becomes a servant-leader practice. Or that a buying decision is 90% based on what goes on behind-the-scenes and is not solution-related.

MOVING FORWARD

I’ve recently become excited about putting my model into Marketing Automation, and I’ve developed the EXpediter©, an intelligent contact sheet that actually leads buyers through their buying decisions using technology. I’m still getting pushback on this idea, but far less than from the sales field.

I’m also putting together the skeleton for my life-long dream: The Institute of Practical Decision Making in Abu Dhabi, so I can offer my collaborative decision making system to teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, negotiators, coaches, parents, couples, or teachers. (My material was never meant to remain in sales.)  Maybe I’ll sit on a mountaintop in Peru and let my brain create something wild. Or catch up on my reading, and write a book on practical decision making.  Or just languish in Paris eating crepes and getting fat.

Whatever it is, I’ll hopefully still be making a difference in the field of practical, collaborative decision making, as that is my life’s work. But I must rediscover my creative spirit that has been lost over the past few years.

So if you’re looking to learn Buying Facilitation® read my books and articles. Or get the Guided Study program. Or one of my licensees can teach Facilitating  Buying Decisions. Or listen to me use the Facilitative Questions on an MP3.

Thank you for the opportunity you’ve offered me to make a difference and help make sales a spiritual practice. And what a fine opportunity it has been.

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For those of you wishing to learn Buying Facilitation®, the best course of action is to get the Guided Study program. It’s quite a serious program, for serious learners. It takes a bit of time do complete, but by the end you’ll be almost as good as me ;)

For those of you just wishing to dabble, and learn just a few new skills, get the Automated Learning modules, or the MP3s, or the flash drive with both the Ebook Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions and the MP3s.

There is plenty of material to read, especially articles on how Buying Facilitation® differs from sales, and the skills necessary to learn it. It is not just an idea – it is an actual skill set that involves wholly different thinking and behaviors (and outcomes) from sales: Buying Facilitation® and Sales: The Dynamic Duo; A Buying Decision is a Change Management Problem;  Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying; The Buyer’s Buying Process vs. The Sales Model: Two Divergent Roads; The Heart of Sales; Buying Facilitation® is a Method, Not Just a Term

Good luck, folks. And for those of you who are serious students, I’m here for you.

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—————–

Sharon Drew,

What a beautiful, happy, sad, thoughtful email you sent Friday. You’ve carried the Buying Facilitation torch for so long, courageously and intensely.…  You’ve given and written and spoken far beyond generously….So many articles and books and tools… So many “almosts” and dead ends… You’ve been a model for others of us who are trying to bring ideas to market.  And you have moved the sales field forward.   I can’t imagine your sadness and disappointment. I admire your courage and resolve to let it go and move on with your health intact (I hope), focusing on clients that are fun, developing the Institute for Practical Decision Making, and restoring your creativity. We’ll strap ourselves in when we feel the earth rumbling again.

Nick Miller, President, Clarity Advantage

Sharon Drew’s ‘retirement’ & the Future of Buying Facilitation® is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

The problem is they are working from a sales model; but buyers buy using a change management model as they must address their internal, human, unique decision issues prior to a solution choice. Here is where the real influence happens.

But by using the underlying assumptions of the sales model – with the right need and the right solution, there will be a sale, or if someone signs up for a webinar or white paper, they have a certain amount of interest in a purchase – the automation process is limited to push technology.

And the lead scoring assumptions fail also: by assuming a prospect has a higher value if they do several activities, we are not supporting or influencing the entire decision journey, but waiting to close the low hanging fruit. There should be a higher close rate:  of 10,000 names, approximately 400 are scored as viable, and of these, 2 close. How many of the 10,000 might be buyers? How many of the 400 might be buyers if approached or supported differently?

WHERE MARKETING AUTOMATION IS GOING WRONG

There is something obviously wrong with this picture.

• Just because someone visits a site or signs up for something, doesn’t mean they are a buyer or a prospect;
• Just because someone only visits a site once doesn’t mean they aren’t a buyer;
• Just because someone has a low or high lead score doesn’t mean they are/aren’t a buyer;
• 98% of prospects who are approached for an appointment after they score high enough to be considered a real prospect decline the appointment: this does not mean they aren’t buyers…just that they don’t want an appointment;
• Prospects need different types of data at different points along the buying decision path, and using current technology there is no way to know, or influence, where the buyer is on his/her decision journey – so companies inundate site visitors with junk – um, I mean nurture material – hoping to hit the sweet spot.

SHIFT THE FOCUS TO CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Imagine if marketing automation used change management thinking: until or unless buyers manage the behind-the-scenes change issues that will be effected when/if they make a purchase, and until or unless all folks who will touch the new solution get their voices heard, no purchase can happen.

Current marketing automation does nothing to address the real buying decision journey – the 90% of the purchase decision that is change related, internal, and idiosyncratic - as it’s not solution based. It certainly does nothing to move prospects along each type of decision to help them.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. What do prospects need to do to get the right folks involved to give their buy-in for a purchase? Until they do, they won’t buy regardless of how great your white paper is.
2. How does someone take an idea from a thought in a shower to getting folks to start thinking about making a change? Until people back the idea, they won’t get the buy-in to make a purchase.
3. How does the Buying Decision Team evaluate solutions? Until they know how, they won’t make a purchase.
4. What sort of data does any site visitor need to make a final purchasing decision? Until they have the specific data needed by the entire Buying Decision Team, they won’t make a purchase.

Using the underlying tenants of change management as per my Buying Facilitation® model, I have developed an Intelligent Contact Sheet called the EXpediter© that gets the appropriate data to site visitors at each stage of the buying decision path, starting from an idea. And it leads them from one step to the next. Some facts:

• It’s easy to slip into your current marketing automation set up.
• You will know exactly what stage the visitor is at, what specifically to send them, and whether or not the Buying Decision Team is already on board.
• You will be able to lead site visitors through the range of their off-line decisions.
• You’ll be able to follow the site visitor to other sites, know how/if they are evaluating your solution, and help them move to the next stage of their decision.
• You will know who to call to make an appointment with, at what point to place the call, and your success rates for appointment-getting and closing will be much higher.

I’ve got the content. I can work with your tech team to implement it. Or my technology partner Genoo can lend a hand. Interested? Let’s speak.

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Discover how Buying Facilitation® works with marketing automation and can help you close more sales.

Wanting to learn more? 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. In addition, you will also receive a bonus illustrated booklet.

An Intelligent Contact Sheet is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I’m here to tell you that cold calling can be one of the most effective ways to meet new prospects and close sales. And it’s a whole lotta fun.

I know, I know. Most sellers eschew cold calling, preferring instead to network, get referrals, golf, meet face-to-face or make friends through facebook and twitter.

Did you ever ask yourself why you don’t like cold calling?

Think historically: Dale Carnegie, in How to win friends and influence people published in 1937, told us to meet prospects in person (and his choices then were….. were what?). You can think about trying to ‘get through’ the gatekeeper. You can think about trying to gather information or pitch product with no ability to understand or share personal expressions on a phone.

So let’s say you do your networking, getting referrals, golfing, face-to-face meets and tweeting. What does it give you? Well, it gives you a connection, but it doesn’t necessarily help you close more deals: buyers still need to do their part to manage their behind-the-scenes systems (change management) issues and get buy-in at all levels, or nothing will happen whether they need you or like you.

The bigger problem than meeting someone who might buy is how to help buyers manage those off-line issues, because until they do, your sterling personalities are immaterial: If you start your conversations by shifting from making a sale to helping manage the internal buy-in issues, you can use the phone effectively AND make a sale in at least half the time.

WHY ARE WE CONNECTING?

Let’s begin with the question: Why are we attempting to make contact?

If you begin by trying to understand need, push product, or influence with your personal charm, then I agree; cold calling sucks.

But when you begin as a true consultant to help buyers manage the change of a buying journey, cold calling is wonderful. Buying Facilitation® is a change management/decision facilitation model I”ve been teaching globally for decades that employs a totally different skill set than sales, and helps buyers understand and manage the off-line portion of the buying decision. And then your sales skills are necessary. First manage change, then place the solution. Different way to think, right?

Given the space we’ve got on a blog post, I’ll give you a simple example.

I read about California Closets in the late 1990s and wanted to have them deliver Buying Facilitation® throughout their franchises. I did some research, and found what I later discovered to be a ‘bad’ number – but at the moment I called, it turned out to be a lucky error. A man answered:

SDM: Hi. My name is Sharon Drew Morgen, and I’m an author and developer of a new selling model. This is a sales call. Is this a good time to speak?

EL: No. It’s terrible. But I’ll give you 5 minutes.

SDM: I can call back. It’s only a sales call and I don’t want to disturb you. We didn’t have an appointment.

EL: Let’s start now and we can finish later. I already like your style. How can I help you?

SDM: Thanks. And at any point you want to end, we can stop and pick it up at another time. I was wondering how you are currently adding new sales skills to the ones you’re currently training your sales people and designers.

EL: Are you using the model you’re teaching? Because if you are, I’m buying. I’ve been looking for a new model for 2 years, and from what I’m hearing, I’m happy. How ‘bout if I get the heads of Sales and Training on a call next week, and think about doing training, or training our trainers at the end of January. Call me in a week at this number: XXXXX. Nice job.

And he hung up. We’ve been working together since then. And this was a cold call. Of course, I did get a bit lucky. But if I had used conventional sales techniques, or twitter or facebook, these folks would not have been my clients – even if I had managed to get in front of them.

DON’T USE YOUR BODY AS A PROSPECTING TOOL

When I understand that my job is to be in a ‘We Space’ (the conversation was all about him) and truly serve by helping  prospects discover how to move toward excellence, it doesn’t matter if I’m in person or on the phone, because there is no manipulation or personal persuasion tactics. Also, the focus of the entire call at this early stage is about the internal issues they need to manage (that a seller can never be a part of) within their system. It’s not about their need, or our solution. Sales does that way too early.

In the Buying Facilitation® model, every interaction, every comment, is based on helping buyers traverse their off-line buy-in issues. I understand that my solution can only be purchased AFTER buyers have managed the needed buy-in. And the telephone is a very handy tool. Of course, once the buyer manages their off-line decision issues internally, and their decision team discovers it’s ready to change and add a new solution, it will need to know more about our solution. THEN we can go visit them, and the entire Buying Decision Team will be there, with us on it. Try it. You might like it :)

So focusing on each cold call as if it were a puzzle, and you are the puzzle master who is not in front of the puzzle, but whispering in the ear of the person doing the puzzle, you can have fun. You won’t have to try to get an appointment, you’ll save travel time and funds, you’ll find a whole lot more prospects, and when you do go to the client site, it will be to sign the contract.

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Learn Buying Facilitation® on your own with our Guided Study program, or with a training program from us.

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

Cold Calling Works – and it’s fun! 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 pe0ple 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

What does your GPS system do? It gets you from here to there without any input other than coordinates. It knows you must go left one mile, and then hang a right at Route 26. It knows you will drive about 40 minutes. It knows there is one alternate route. But it doesn’t need to know what you are wearing, or the gift you brought. It doesn’t need to know that there was an accident ahead that would cause you to slow down. It knows how to get you to where you want to be: it does not concern itself with the details of your personal issues.

Why am I putting sales and weddings and GPS systems in one article? Because I’m making a parallel between the buyer’s decision path and the sellers involvement with a solution choice.

THE TWO JOBS OF SALES

As a seller (if you can follow me here) you need to know the needs to help determine the right gift. You need to understand who is involved, what they like, how much money is budgeted. You need to understand as much as you can to determine that your solution and the buyer’s needs match. It’s the equivalent – using the above analogy – to understanding why you chose to go in your car, or what you decided to wear.

As a buying facilitator, you just need to understand systems and how change happens to bring in something new – the path from here to there.  A GPS system does NOT need the details of the activity. It does not care if you are going to a wedding or a funeral. Just left, right, left, right.

BOTH SELLING AND BUYING FACILITATION® TRIGGER THE BUY-PATH

Imagine if you had 2 jobs as a seller: one, to understand need and place a solution appropriately; one, to help buyers traverse their internal change management/systems issues so they get the buy-in and path to bring in something new.

You know how to do the needs assessment and solution placement. That’s sales. But do you know how to enter a buyer’s system with no questions about need? With no reason to gather data about how they’ll use a solution, or choose a vendor?

Do you know how to interact with a buyer to be their GPS system and manage their internal change? Because until buyers do this, you’ll be sitting and waiting and hoping for them to close.

What do you need to know or believe differently to be willing/able to put aside your curiosity as a sales professional, and put on the hat of a GPS system in order to teach your buyers how to put their ducks in a row – to go down the path of finding the right people, developing the right criteria, figuring out the change issues – so they can buy your solution.

Buying Facilitation® is a wholly different skill set than sales. It is a change management model. You use this to help buyers maneuver and discover, just like a GPS system goes from here to there. By using this model, you can get buyers to the point of being ready to buy – just like the GPS system gets you to the front door of the wedding. And then you can bring your gift and have some fun.

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Learn Buying Facilitation® on your own with our Guided Study program, or with a training program from us.

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

The differences between the solution sale and the buying decision: let’s go to a wedding is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

There must be a better way to do this, no?

1. if we knew who would be a prospect on the first call, and get rid of those who will never buy, how much time would we save?
2. if most gatekeepers would get us to the right person, how much time would we save?
3. if we can connect with all of the folks who will ultimately be (or are already) on the Buying Decision Team, how many more sales would we close?
4. if there are no more objections of any kind, how much time would we save and how much more money would we make?
5. if buyers could make a buying decision in the time frame that we believe is possible (i.e. those buyers who call up and purchase quickly are good examples of what’s possible for every sale),

how much more business would we close? And why can’t we make these things happen?

THE REASONS YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE RESULTS YOU DESERVE

To begin with, you are beginning at the end of the buyer’s journey – the purchasing decision – and must wait while they catch up. As sellers, you have been trained to find appropriate prospects: you have not been trained to help them begin or traverse their journey through the behind-the-scenes decision path that is change-management/systems based, and has more to do with internal politics and time lines than it does with purchasing a solution or choosing a vendor.

As a result, you have learned ways to manage the fallout you’ve received from attempting to offer a solution at the wrong time. Or from attempting to offer a solution that folks might not know they need, or aren’t ready to concede that they might need. Or know they need but haven’t figured out how to get buy-in.

Pushback, objections, time delays, buyers who seemingly don’t know how or if to buy. Prospects that stop returning calls. Prospects who make promises they don’t keep.

The only reason you aren’t closing more sales, and the reason you end up wasting time with non-buyers and delayed sales cycles,  is not because of your solution. Your solution is fine. So is your care and respect and personality.

You’re wasting your time trying to place a solution before the buyer has lined up the change management issues they must contend with. But sales doesn’t offer you any other tools.

THE BUYING FACILITATION® MODEL WORKS WITH SALES TO MANAGE THE BUYING DECISION.

OK. I’m a hammer looking around for a nail. But it’s the truth. Buying Facilitation® is another model – like sales only different – that you must learn in addition to sales to manage the back end issues buyers must address privately before they can buy.

• Gatekeepers will help you find the right people to talk to rather than put you off.
• You can help buyers put together their entire Buying Decision Team on the first call.
• You will no longer get objections (fallout from the sales model) – price or otherwise.
• You will be differentiated from your competition immediately.
• Your buyers will buy in approximately 1/8 the time (sometimes with very large sales the number drops to 1/4).
• You will know who is a buyer and who is not, on the first call.

It’s not sales. But really – do you want to keep having those super long sales cycles and getting objections? Do you really want pipelines that aren’t converting? Take a look at my site www.newsalesparadigm.com and see what options you have to learn. There is no reason you shouldn’t be doing Buying Facilitation® AND sales, and stop wasting time. The sale model is great to understand need and place solution – but by using it too early in the buyer’s change management process, you’re not helping buyers buy. You deserve better.

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Read about Buying Facilitation® in these books: Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. Or buy the bundle with them both.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

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

How much time do sales people waste? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• dialogue with me,
• discover ways to partner,
• just chat about places to stay.

And the use and quality of Skype has made it all as simple and cheap as calling a friend in a different city.

IF WE TRUST EACH OTHER, WHY AREN’T WE CLOSING MORE?

With automatic ‘trust’ built in – we’re sort of family once we are connected – our conversations seem to flow smoothly: we’ve used Facebook, the net, and Twitter to discover who the other is, have determined whether and how we want to connect, what we can offer each other, and how to prepare. An off-handed comment about the person’s upcoming wedding, or a congratulatory mention of their new business venture compounds the trust.

Gone are the days of cold calling, running around the country to network, speaking at events for free just to collect business cards. I bet some folks out there don’t even remember when those were the only ways to get leads, other than the phone book.

So why aren’t we closing more?

Not only are we not closing more, we’re closing less.

What is going on?

What’s going on is that our relationships, communication, trust, and friendliness are not helping others reach the sorts of decisions necessary to close a deal.

CHANGE, SYSTEMS, AND BUY-IN

Before we look at what’s happening, let’s change the discussion for a moment to look at what needs to happen for any purchase to occur.

In order for someone to buy something other than a small personal item, there are several steps that must take place to get the necessary buy-in to move forward. The appropriate buy-in must be acquired from the right people and groups; the rules must be changed to allow for a new set of ‘givens’; vendors and business partners must agree; job descriptions must match up with the new jobs.

We tend to forget that all purchases are change management problems. And, because a problem is not an isolated event and has been maintained by the people and policies, rules and politics of the existent environment, there are systemic things that touch the solution that would be affected if a new solution were to enter.

So a new piece of software would seriously affect users, techies, internal consultants, and trainers; training for one group would affect all of the people who touch that group.

And systems prefer to maintain the status quo, even if it means maintaining failure. After all, it has been ‘good enough’ until now, and everything has bought-in to maintaining it as it is. In fact, our buyers would rather maintain their status quo regardless of what it is costing them, and regardless of the efficacy of our solution: no matter how much they will save with a new solution, it costs more overall to bring in something new.

Remember: If the buyer felt pain, or was ready to change, they would have done so already.

So until or unless the status quo will accept the addition of something new, and has the capability to manage in such a way that an addition will not create too much unregulated disruption, it will do nothing.

WHAT IT TAKES TO CLOSE A DEAL

Currently, our relationships through social networking haven’t included the agenda to help the Other recognize and manage the different sorts of buy-in necessary to change. But that doesn’t mean we can’t include that.

I was at a client site recently listening in on a sales call with a prospect who my client had been chatting with for months. It was a lovely call. Laughter, in-jokes, obvious rapport. They were introduced on LinkedIn; they tweeted each other daily. Yet nothing was going anywhere. I wrote a note in front of him, which he repeated:

We’ve been chatting for a while now. And the more I get to know you, the more I see the possibility of our working together somehow. What would you need to know about my solution to know if it would fit, and if your colleagues would be willing to consider adding something new to what they are already doing so well?

The conversation shifted. The man was happy to answer: We’re starting to go through the process of an M&A, and won’t be able to take on anything new for about a year. Can we revisit this in 6 months? At that time there will be new people on board (I might even be gone!), and I don’t know what the hierarchy will be, but we can discuss it.

There could be no buy in, no decision team, and most likely no purchase. Does that make you want to continue being ‘friends’ or end the ‘friendship’? Do you want to ask for a referral? How much time do you want to spend being ‘friendly’ vs closing a sale? And how will you know when/if it’s time to pull the plug, or ask the hard questions?

We’re in a new era. There are no rules – we’re making them up as we go along. So ask yourself:

• What do you want to get out of social media?
• How will you know that one person over another is a prospect?
• At what point is connecting enough, or do you want to connect only with potential prospects or partners?

The capability is in front of us. The choice is our as to what we want to do with it. We just have to remember that being friendly, evoking trusting ‘relationships’, having hundreds or thousands of friends, doesn’t make you a better seller.

What would you need to learn differently to add a new skill set to what you’re doing online, to help you help your ‘friends’ make their best decisions?

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Learn about Buying Facilitation®: Peruse this blog for articles on change management, the buying decision path, how buyers buy, and how to add Buying Facilitation® to your sales process.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

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

How does social networking help make the sale? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Confused? You’re accustomed to just using the sales model to place your solution. But the buying decision process is more complex than just choosing a solution.

Here is a graph that shows you the issues buyers must manage as they go from idea to purchase:

Unfortunately, we’ve tried for years to use just the selling model to help buyers choose our solution. But until or unless

• the buyer’s entire Buying Decision Team is on board,
• everyone who touches the solution is bought in to bringing in something new,
• everyone who will touch the solution is comfortable with their new roles and tasks,
• all systems issues (rules, roles, relationships, old vendors, etc) are in alignment with the change a solution will bring,

they will not, cannot, buy. And the sales model doesn’t manage that part of the buying decision path – hence your long sales cycles and paucity of closed sales relative to the number of prospects.

That’s where Buying Facilitation® fits in: it’s a wholly different model than sales; it’s a change management model that uses systems thinking (Ater all, buyers live in systems, and sales treats a ‘need’ as if it were an isolated event.) and operates as a neutral (i.e. not solution-directed) GPS tool to be the lighthouse, or neutral navigator, to steer our buyers through the confusing, non-solution/non-need related systems issues they must address behind-the-scenes.

ENTREPRENURIAL SELLING GETS YOU FROM BUYER’S IDEA THROUGH TO CLOSE

But on it’s own, Buying Facilitation® is incomplete. Buying Facilitation® works with the sales model, as sales does the needs assessment and solution placement. Obviously, we’ve got nothing to sell if we can’t understand our buyer’s needs and have the right solution – even if they’ve got the Buying Decision Team sitting and waiting to make a change.

It’s with this thought in mind – both/and rather than either/or – that I introduce you to a wonderful new product:  RAIN Group has developed  Entreprenurial Selling and includes the finest thinkers in sales today (including yours truly). It’s the definitive program for those  wanting the best.

I am lucky enough to be a part of this phenomenal group of sales leaders who put together a program that will bring you from the buyer’s idea, formation of the Buying Decision Team, and will get you in the door, with the right thing to say to the right people, to close the deal.

The folks at RAIN have done a lovely job of capturing the environment of today’s selling/buying experience. And not only do they have the top in the field represented, but they’ve put together a learning experience that fits nicely with a collaborative community experience for all who purchase. They use videos, exercises, and experiential learning to lead you through both ends of the buying decision path – from idea through to purchase.

Here is a link to purchase this training/learning package. It’s not inexpensive, due to the quality and depth of the material. But for 8 days, there is an introductory price.

Is it worth it? Well, here is a Facilitative Question:

What would you need to know about a learning package to understand if your sales might increase as a result of your investment?

Enjoy.

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Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to learn all of the issues buyers face when they are considering a purchase.

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

Selling AND Buying Facilitation®: facilitating the buying journey from idea to close with RAIN Group is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s think about this for a moment. The buying path itself is far more complex than we can understand: we have no capability of actually being there when prospects have meetings or political in-fighting. With sales, ‘solution choice’ is the focus, and buyers are left on their own to navigate through the internal politics and human biases they address before they can get agreement to buy.

CLOSING LESS THAN 1% OF WARM LEADS

As part of my prep work when developing sales training for a few new clients recently, I tracked the success of their marketing automation initiatives. These numbers coincided with other numbers I’ve procured, regardless of industry:

• Out of 100 names determined to be prospects (out of a total of 10,000 contacts), 3 will agree to an appointment.
• One quarter will cancel, leaving 2.25.
• Of these, 75 percent will express interest and possibly get as far as pricing.
• Of these that express interest, 38 percent will close, or .59 percent.

Based on these numbers, you have to wonder if there is something missing in our process. And, there’s no telling how many of the thousands of originating leads might have been good prospects.

Why is it OK to waste such a high percent of a seller’s time, making 10-15 calls to each lead, over months and months, to get an appointment that has such a small chance to close? Or is this the new norm? With the existing strategy, we’re left to question how can we identify…

• The number of real prospects within the thousands who came to our sites and weren’t called for an appointment?
• Those that got as far as pricing might have closed if sold to differently?
• Whether they would have purchased from the original 100 if they were not first approached to take an appointment?
• Who would buy if they weren’t first called for (and turned off by) a request for an appointment?

WE CAN HELP MANAGE THE BEHIND-THE-SCENES CHANGE ISSUES

Supporters of marketing automation, to date, have maintained the thinking that has driven sales: bring people to a site, follow their online activity, assume they are leads because they exhibit a certain amount of interest, nurture them to make sure they receive the right data, score them according to some unique criteria, and then try to close.

Let’s go back to the main problem: as a solution placement activity, sales merely addresses the final 10 percent of the buying decision path, and has little input as to how buyers manage change and buy-in. But buyers will take no action until their Buying Decision Team and those who will touch the solution buys-in to making a change.

Using current practices, there are five fundamental questions that remain unanswered…

• From all names gathered, who will be a real buyer?
• What is the interest level and role of the person who filled out the contact sheet?
• What stage of the buying journey are they on and what data is relevant to that stage?
• How is the received material being used and who is it being shared with (i.e. competing vendors? In-house teams)?
• Is the entire Buying Decision Team on board? Are all who touch the solution in agreement?

Whatever selling model you’re using, unless the entire series of unique behind-the-scenes issues are not managed, the buyer cannot buy. And current marketing automation technology does not even address this area.

HOW CAN MARKETING AUTOMATION HELP BUYERS NAVIGATE THEIR BUYING PATH?

Far too often, sales addresses a need as if it were an isolated event, but buyers don’t buy in isolation from their people, policies, rules, politics, or market forces. Marketing automation is uniquely positioned to actually help buyers manage the entire route down their buying decision path. While the path to purchase often starts with one person and an idea, it includes managing politics as well as people and their diverse relationships.

With marketing automation it is quite possible to:

• Lead visitors through their entire buy-path, starting with an idea;
• Know exactly what stage of the buying decision journey buyers are on;
• Identify the appropriate material to send for that stage in the buy path (even make it possible for the site visitor to choose the exact data they want).

Marketing automation is a very powerful concept that is being underutilized, causing us to miss the opportunity to lead a lot more buyers through their non-solution-related, off-line decision issues. They must manage the buy-in and change issues anyway – with us or without us.

Instead of us wasting resources following folks too early in their buy-cycle, or sending the wrong data for the point they are in their decision making, we can better target our efforts to facilitate the entire decision journey, know who’s ready, help others get ready, and nurture them all at an earlier stage.

Let’s add some thinking around navigating and facilitating the entire buying decision path, from idea through to purchasing decision. By thinking of the buying decision path differently than the solution sale, we can close more, and serve more people.

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Sharon Drew Morgen is currently using Buying Facilitation® to develop content to use with technology at each stage of the decision path. Contact Sharon Drew to discuss needs and capability.

Buy Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and learn all of the stages buyers go through on their decision path.

Listen to Sharon Drew prospect/qualify using Buying Facilitation®.

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

Marketing Automation can facilitate the entire buying decision path is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Sales models to not have the capability to facilitate the buyer’s behind-the-scenes issues and activities to ensure they get the necessary buy-in to bring in an outside solution. But they should, because in the gap between the selling and the buying is where we lose our buyers, and they lose us.

WHEN DOES A BUYER  NEED TO BUY

Just because we perceive a need (And we are right! They do!) doesn’t mean our prospects  want it fixed, or fixed by us, or fixed now. We enter our conversations with a bias: we believe that our solution will rule the day: find the need, pitch the solution. Bingo. Except then we sit and wait. And wait.

But the last thing a buyer needs is a solution. In fact, buyers don’t want to buy anything – they merely need to resolve a business problem. If they are not able to resolve it with a familiar resource, they are forced to select a solution to purchase. But they don’t really want to.

When we enter with a solution – even one that is necessary – buyers have a problem: how do they solve their problem in the easiest, most cost-effective manner? It’s simpler to use an existing resource so less change is necessary. But if they determine they must find a new provider, they must bring in the new solution in a way that leaves their culture whole. All things being equal they really don’t want to disrupt their routines.

BUYERS LIVE IN SYSTEMS

There is a disparity between the selling model and buying behaviors: solutions are ‘things’ and a buying decision is a change management issue. As per my latest book Dirty Little Secrets, buyers (like all of us) live in systems of people, rules, relationships, history and policies. Any ‘problem’ becomes part of the system, which develops work-arounds so it can keep on keepin’-on. So when we gain weight, we buy new clothes rather than change our eating habits, work out more, stop drinking our wine. And daily, the system wakes up doing the best it can.

When we approach prospects using the sales model (i.e. a search for a match between the need and the solution), we are acting as if the problem were an isolated event rather than a part of a larger system of people and policies that maintain it. We don’t realize that they have already created a ‘good enough’ work-around for it.

It is only when – and if – the group of folks that touch the problem daily decide that a work-around isn’t good enough AND they cannot fix it with a familiar resource, that they seek an external fix. Then, regardless of how well we’ve been selling, they have work to do: 1. they have to figure out how to ‘go outside’ for a solution; 2. they have to figure out how to get internal issues prepared for change.

HAVING A NEED DOESN’T MEAN A NEED FOR A SOLUTION

Our selling doesn’t provide us with another tool kit for change management – what buyers do when they go off-line to manage their internal politics and relationship issues.

So what are we supposed to do?

Here are our choices:

• we sit and wait until they figure out how to get everyone together to decide;
• we sit and wait until they get the full Buying Decision Team on board;
• we pitch, send data, nurture, and hope we’ll be top-of-mind when they’ve put all of their ducks in a row;
• we begin with a different focus: we help them navigate through their buying decision path and shorten the sales cycle AND get onto the Buying Decision Team and thwart competitors.

The last option sounds the best, right? And yes, my Buying Facilitation® model is an add-on skill that works with sales to do this.

Given you work within a sales system, let me ask you to consider adding Buying Facilitation® skills to the sales skills you use:

How will you know when it’s time to consider adding a new skill to what you’re already doing successfully?

What skills/activities/beliefs do you want to keep so anything new will not disrupt your normal functioning that you’ve become familiar with? And how would you like something new added in a way that maintains your activities and motivation?

What would you need to know about Buying Facilitation® before you consider an addition, to know if it would work for you? How difficult it would be to learn/add? What the downsides and upsides would be? How your boss/team would react when you begin selling differently?

What would you need to know from me, as the developer/seller, to know if you’d get the support you need to be successful?

It’s not about your solution. To really sell well, you must have 2 skills: helping buyers navigate through their back-end change management issues; place solutions.

Or just sit and wait for the low hanging fruit to drop. Remember that 80% of your prospects will buy a solution similar to yours within 2 years. They have the need – they just haven’t figured out how to manage the change. Help them. And close more sales, quicker.

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Read sample chapters of Dirty Little Secrets. Or buy the book.

Hear Sharon Drew make cold calls, prospecting calls, and qualifying calls, live.

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

A buying decision is a change management problem is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

They split the sales team into an Inside Sales group that makes appointments, and Corporate and Field Sales teams to close them. The structure, as well as the compensation, promotes failure: Inside Sales is paid per appointment (with a tendency to push for an appointment with whomever they speak with, regardless of their appropriateness); the other sales functions are paid based on how many they close.

It’s a perfect storm: inappropriate leads are given to sellers who spend gobs of time pushing a solution to whomever ends up agreeing to an appointment (who may not be appropriate buyers, and certainly don’t represent all those who might buy), and get a very low percentage of closed sales. So the company hires more and more Inside Sales reps to get appointments, hoping that a higher percent of the appointment will result.

DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A SALE OR AN APPOINTMENT?

My clients came to me complaining of a very low close rate. It never occured to them that just maybe there is a problem with their selling model; they manage the problem by adding sales reps. They believe success is at their fingertips by playing the numbers game!

There is a very large elephant in the room here: Before a buyer can buy they must manage the behind-the-scenes change management issues that address the disruption, the people, the relationships, the rules, that must be handled behind-the-scenes to get the buy-in necessary to bring in a new solution in. Sales enters at the point of  ‘need’… but that’s the tail end of the buyer’s buying decision path.

Our continued fascination with making an appointment as a precursor to making a sale is based on the belief that a buyer will buy based on the strength of the presentation. And although we get extremely low closing rates, we continue to do it and often throw more sellers at the problem, doing the same activity. That’s the definition of insanity!

Imagine if it’s possible to discover leads/prospects who can be made ready to buy without making an appointment!

Imagine if it’s possible to close the buying decision path gap in a fraction of the time and closing 5x more sales without introducing your solution – or pitching, presenting, or creating a proposal.

START WITH A DIFFERENT SET OF ASSUMPTIONS

Once you begin with the assumption that buyers just need to understand your solution and how it would benefit them, you’re a solution looking for a problem. Then your sales folks are order takers, or tele-sales reps, or consultants running around looking busy. But all sales – regardless of the industry - close between 2-7%. Where do the rest go? And why are you pitching, wasting time, or making appointments with, folks who will never buy?

You end up hiring more and more sales folks to close fewer and fewer sales… especially these days when Buying Decision Teams are more diverse in geography and function.

Right now you are paying your sales folks to find the low-hanging fruit: buyers who most probably would have found you and bought from you anyway.

Let’s compensate our sales folks for helping buyers navigate through the entire buying decision path and help buyers where they need the most help to solve a problem – managing the buy-in of all who will touch the solution - something sales does not do at the moment, as it remains focused on needs assessment and solution placement.

Once you add Buying Facilitation® to your seller’s skill set, you will be able to close much more business. Because now you’re spending far, far too much time following prospects who will never close and paying your sales people for the wasted effort.

I’ve heard sellers tell me that they didn’t need to learn BF because they earn 6 figures doing what they are doing badly. Imagine if you compensated your sales folks on an expectation that they close 40% of their leads. It’s very possible – my clients do that easily. Then, there would be no reason to hire more folks just to get the numbers you’re trying to get. And you would have a much higher ROI.

Stop compensating your sales folks on meager expectations. Stop having your sales folks set up appointments first. Start with the very first ‘Hello’ and teach them how to buy. Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy?

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Buy Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and learn the difference between selling and managing the buying path.

Listen to Sharon Drew make prospecting calls on this MP3.

Compensating our sales folks is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

When I began using the terms in the 80s my meaning described a change management process to lead buyers through their non-solution/non-need-related, behind-the-scenes internal and political issues that enable all who touch the solution to buy-in. Lately I’ve noticed the terms applied to the sales end of the buying decision – that 10% of the buyer’s journey that manages the  pre-solution choice  behaviors, including  solution/vendor choice, time/money issues. In other words, sales.

But let’s stop a moment: We don’t buy this way.

HOW DO WE BUY?

Here’s is a case study to offer an example of how we actually buy.

Pretend you are the VP of Client Services of a $15 Million company, considering upgrading your website; you don’t like the job your internal tech folks have done. What needs to happen for you to get a site you need? Get your own guys to work better/smarter? Bring in a new vendor to fix the one you have? Let’s look at the actions you must take prior to moving forward.

1. start a conversation with a colleague/friend to discuss ideas about the status quo.
2. if the idea has merit, see if there is interest from the VPs of Sales and Marketing as they’d need to share budget with you.
3. go on line and do some research to: look at several possible solutions, see how your competition is managing it, and call colleagues for vendor possibilities.
4. talk with the internal Tech guys to discuss your displeasure and see what they’re willing to do differently, closer in line with what you’ve learned.
5. have a meeting with VPs or Sales and Marketing to get the lay of the land, share some new ideas, gather their thoughts, discuss options to move forward with their support. This is the foundation of the Buying Decision Team (BDT).
6. contact a few local vendors to ask them to give you a presentation so you can better understand what they do and what’s possible.
7. attend vendor presentations that focus on strength of design, strength of technical and programming skills.
8. meet with the BDT to discuss your take-aways from the vendor presentations. Everyone wants to do more research. Sales and Marketing  folks not talking with each other, and each want to take this in different directions.
9. meet with CFO who manages the technology department. She wants to keep all work inhouse.
10. meet to discuss with Sales, Marketing. Invite Technology folks, but they don’t come. Sales and Marketing must learn how to get along as they have a similar focus and don’t like the work the Tech team does.
11. decisions must be made as per changing mind of the CFO. Group decides to look at vendors again and gather different sorts of data to offer proof to CFO.
12. same vendors come in to do a presentation to you, Sales, Marketing. Tech folks refuse to come.
13. group decides to use vendors rather then tech team, but must find a way to get buy-in from CFO.
14. group writes a paper to convince CFO to use outside supplier. Head of Sales is chosen to get Tech folks on board.
15. meeting set up with Tech VP, CFO, heads of Sales, Internal Consulting, Project Management, HR (to manage any outsourcing) Marketing, and you – the complete Buying Decision Team. All decide to use the Tech team to do the programming; vendor to do the design. You all decide to take a look at the vendors again to see who would be most capable of collaborating as well as designing, as they’d need to hand over, and work with, the tech folks.
16. vendor meeting #3. The vendors with the slide about collaboration was chosen (that buying criteria was not even discussed with the vendors during earlier conversations or needs-assessment conversations).

This is a very very simplistic decision path during a year’s worth of meetings: there are only ‘people’ variables, and not any policies, internal politics, initiatives, etc.

SALES FOCUSES ON NEEDS AND SOLUTION PLACEMENT

In this situation, the sales model would have the potential vendors gather, and assume that the ‘need’ was for web design, rather than collaboration skills AND web design. And, the assumption would be that the entire Buying Decision Team – not fully formed until near the end – is already on board.

In this instance, you’d become involved in steps 6,7. You’d give a great presentation, recognize a need, get along well with your contact, and assume you were ‘in.’ When you didn’t hear back for a while, you’d start calling. And when you got your second presentation appointment, you’d assume you were in. And the rest is history.

If you were using Buying Facilitation® all of this would have been avoided for both you and your prospect. As the vendor, you would have helped the buyer recognize the problem lie with the CFO on the first call, helped design the make up of the full Buying Decision Team, and not gone in to do a presentation until there was agreement to have a vendor do some/all of the work. You’d go in only when the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Tech, and the CFO were present in the room. And it all would have taken a month or two.

If you want to learn how to do this, start by reading Dirty Little Secrets. Then get the Guided Study program and begin learning Buying Facilitation®. Or call me and we’ll discuss training.

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

Listen to insights and illustrative examples regarding: what change is and why its fundamentally the same regardless of industry or organization type, what systems are and their role in the change management process.

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

How do you buy? Steps in a buying decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com