But sellers only close 7%  of their prospects (and far, far less if using marketing automation).

If you understand how buyers buy, why do you have less than a 40% close rate?

Indeed, it’s not enough to understand: so long as you are using the conventional sales model (and bas your interactions on placing a solution) you have no idea how your buyers travel through their buy path or who is involved. And you certainly have no way of influencing it.

MAKE YOURSELF THE BUYER

Let’s say you’re not closing all of the sales you deserve to close. You follow many prospects and are surprised at which ones finally buy and which ones disappear. You constantly shift the dates on your pipeline because the buyers didn’t close when they said they would. Things ‘happen’: the buyer’s company is going through X, or Y decision maker is now involved, or the old vendor has shown up…. always ‘something’  kinda dumb, when their need obviously fits your solution.

You’re suffering the same issues all sellers face: waiting, waiting, waiting for the purchase. From where you sit, it should happen any day. From where you sit, you know what’s going on: you know the players, you know the old vendor and old technology, you are best friends with the buyer, you’ve agreed on price, and everyone is bought in.

Or is that all true.

From where I sit here’s what I see:

• you don’t know on the first call who is going to buy and who will never buy;
• on the first call you haven’t taught your buyer how to put together the full Buying Decision Team or help him/her discover everyone who will touch the solution and helping them buy-in to change;
• you’re not closing all of the sales you deserve to close;
• you actually have no way of knowing if the right folks are on board at any point in the buying decision cycle;
• your sales cycle is at least 50% longer than it needs to be;
• you are not closing half of the sales you should be closing, or finding the right prospects, or spending too much time chasing prospects who will never close;
• you are entering the buying decision too early and attempting to place a solution before they have the proper buy-in to make a purchase, or even know the full data set of purchasing criteria.

From where I sit, you have a need for my solution. You have a need to add Buying Facilitation® to what you’re already doing, so you can manage the upfront change management piece buyers must go through prior to making a purchase, close at least 40% more sales, and close in 1/2 the time. You’re a prospect. You have all of the problems that my buyers exhibit and need my solution.

So your need and my solution fit. Does that make you a buyer?

You have budget constraints. You don’t know how Buying Facilitation® would fit as an addition to your current sales skills. You don’t have the time/money/management support to make a change. Your sales manager is concentrating on, oh.. say Closing Skills or Negotiating Techniques, and doesn’t have the bandwidth to allow you to sell differently from the others. But I don’t  understand how you buy.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SELLING AND HELPING SOMEONE BUY

I am an outsider. The difference between what I, or anyone, can know as an outsider, and what the insiders must do/know to manage their internal politics, or get all the right people onto the Buying Decision Team, is the difference between your need, your change issues, and my solution.

The difference between what you need and how/when/if you buy is the distance between how you consider/seek Excellence, and how you envisage your status quo, and what you need to manage to be ready to make a change.

Do you have a manager that has created a selling environment based on his own sales skills and wants his team to replicate his success of long ago? Does the CEO not want to spend money – regardless of the training funds sitting in your budget (making the CEO the gatekeeper)? Does HQ want all training to come from them? Is there a training roll out happening now and there is no way you can learn anything new until the roll out is complete?

I might understand your need, and I might even know everyone on your Buying Decision Team (but I probably don’t): but your buying decision issues must match the internal, idiosyncratic, unique, and personal issues that make up your status quo, and I can never, ever understand the politics, or relationships.

Stop trying to undertand. Instead, learn Buying Facilitation®. Add it to the front end of your selling skills. Learn to lead your buyers through their entire series of change management issues so they can avoid all of the delays you’re watching them go through. Then you can find more, close more, close faster, and stop wasting time. And you’ll know who will close, and when.

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Learn Buying Facilitation® as a Self Study program.

Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to really understand how buyers buy.

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

Do you really understand how your buyers 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

I hate to be a contrarian (Oh. Ok. I love it. Why change the habits of a lifetime?) but… it’s not the end-all and be-all that it’s being touted as.

Here’s the good news: Sales 2.0 is good for driving people to you. By simply offering a webinar, a free e-book, a White Paper, or some incentive, you can get folks to your site. If your material is good enough, they will Twitter about you, put a TinyUrl about you, link to your site, write you up on their blog. You can gather their data, have some sort of passive or active follow up, use the names on an opt-in list, and get hundreds or thousands of new names on your database.

If you want new names and a large database, Sales 2.0 is for you. I know many, many marketers pouring their hearts out to develop wonderful content to send out as bait to attract attention. And it works: after your event, you can follow people up with an email, or hire a telephone sales group to follow up with a phone call. Allegedly, SalesGenius has a dedicated phone sales crew that will call up a new contact within minutes of them signing up on their contact form.

And, what does that give you? An opt-in list (a different question – did the people opt-in for you to contact them after the event?) to send marketing material to. If you don’t actively follow up, you potentially have a new group of people who have been introduced to you and your material, and will hopefully go to your site and learn more or buy something. Hopefully is the operative word here.

And here’s the bad news: how do these folks decide to convert? How do they choose to make a purchase once you’ve captured their name? After you’ve sent them emails (and emails and emails)? Because this is still a one-way pitch: they are basically unknown addresses, who will  interact meaningfully only if they choose to, and only make a purchase if they need exactly what you are offering at the exact moment you are offering it.

Solution data is the last thing buyers need when making a decision to purchase.

People only use data to make decisions with at the point they need the data – usually as the last act in a purchasing decision. Not before. Primary decisions are made on values. With lots of buy-in necessary.

Let me say that a different way. Sales 2.0 suffers from the same problem that all sales suffers from: the assumption that because there is a need, or a problem, the only thing that must occur is some sort of hook-up between the need and the ‘right solution’ and, miraculously, a purchase will occur.

We all know that, sadly, there is a less than 10% conversion rate in sales. And yet the myth persists: great product, trusted partner, perfect solution, good prospecting, great closing techniques, getting past gatekeepers, getting to the decision makers, understanding who the decision makers are, having a great price or a special deal – yup. Sales keeps coming up with ways to persuade, manipulate, position. But still, after centuries of lots of new, new things, there is still a <10% closing rate.

Why, you ask? Ah. I’m going to tell you why. Because (obviously) that’s not how people buy.  Because the sales model only manages the solution-decision end of the buyer’s buying decision. Because a buyer – whether an individual or a group – has a bunch of internal, subjective, hidden, mysterious, unconscious (Are you getting the point? There is no way an outsider can influence this using the sales model.) factors and criteria they need to  address internally in some way, before a purchasing decision can be made.

And many of these factors are deep within the buyer’s culture, and have nothing directly to do with the Identified Problem. It’s the lunch meeting with the boss’s boss that was canceled; the fight your prospect is having with the next department. It’s the relationship and rules and people stuff we can’t control with the sales model. But has to get done.

Your buyer needs a new piece of software? or a team building course? But they have been doing what they doing for quite a while and haven’t changed anything. Obviously, the status quo will continue until it gets enough buy-in to agree to a change.

Indeed, making a purchase is a change management issue – a systems issue, if you will, that can be influenced by Buying Facilitation™. It’s not so simple as problem/need + solution = purchase or we’d be closing a lot more than we close.

Like sales, Sales 2.0 is a push modality, even though it professes to be a pull model. Because it doesn’t help buyers maneuver through their unique and idiosyncratic hidden dynamics that need to buy-in to making a change at this time – independent of the need.

So Sales 2.0 is basically a great tool for sales using a numbers game: have enough names, throw enough spaghetti on the wall, and some of it will stick.

So: don’t expect:

1. people who aren’t ready to buy to buy you because they opted in to a free webinar;
2. people who signed a contact sheet to read your emails;
3. people to know how to buy you because you’ve got their name from a cookie;
4. your sales to increase if you don’t find a way to help the buyer facilitate the unique change decisions (NOT buying decisions) they need to make that will ensure their system will be intact after purchasing your product;
5. to automatically convert an email address to a buyer.

Ask yourself this: why do you assume that the webinar, or the White Paper, or the Podcast you are offering is a precursor to a buying decision?

Just some food for thought. And because I like being a contrarian.
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Sales 2.0: 5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com