RSSThe Internal Customer: Is It A Sales Job?
Jul 24, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management
What is the difference between selling to an internal customer and selling to an external customer?
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.
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Tags: Buy-In, buying decisions, customers, management tools, teach
Customers Don’t Know How To Buy – Or Do They?
Mar 26, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management, Top Posts
My friend Jill Konrath returned from the recent Sales 2.0 conference and told me of a complaint she heard several times from attendees: “Customers don’t know how to buy.”
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?
Tags: Buy-In, buying decisions, customers, identified problem, prospects, systems
