What would need to be true if your priority were to truly serve a customer? Would you need to get paid more? Would there have to be some sort of directive from the top? Would you need to learn new skills? Would your job be different? What would it look like? What would be different?

Years ago I attempted to get a publisher for a book about customer centric selling (a decade before that term became commonplace) and was told there wouldn’t be a market for it. The book was based on concentric circles, with the customer in the middle circle, and technology and sales in the next outter circle, and management, etc. moving out to the largest/last circle where the Board sat. The idea being that everything everyone did was based on the central concept of serving the customer.

Instead, we have corporations that put customers in different silos with different people serving each of their needs – silos that don’t talk to each other, I might add. We promise clients things we cannot do because we’re told we’re not allowed to. We don’t return phone calls because we get busy, and expect customers to understand. We change technology, or programs, because it’s expedient, without keeping the customer in mind. We develop solutions because they fit with our product line, rather than targeting them to the customer’s wishes. We outsource our help desks to other countries because it’s cheaper, and we don’t heed customer complaints about service.

OUR JOB IS TO SERVE

I believe a seller’s priority is to serve clients. It’s the only job a seller has. If a solution is the correct way to serve, then that’s what’s needed. If just a discussion and support for a different solution is what they need – even if it’s a competitor’s – so be it.

We’re in it for the life cycle of a client, not just one transaction, so we must set up our technology, our internal report structure, our support services, with our customer’s needs at the forefront.

And we must get rid of those damn silos. Customers hate when they get put on hold for each person they need to speak with for each problem, or when they speak with one team member who knows nothing of a conversation they had with a different team member.

WHAT SKILLS DO WE NEED

Do our sales skills give us the capability to serve our clients in a way they need to be served?

I suspect our sales skills do little more than attempt to sell our solutions. What would we need to be doing differently if our jobs were to really, really serve our clients? And what skills would we need?

Of course I”m going to talk about how Buying Facilitation® will help you help the client navigate through their change management journey and bring all of the right people together in a way that takes them forever to do on their own. But think about it: facilitating the buying decision path does more than serve our customers: it shortens the sales cycle, differentiates us, and gives us the tools to be great Trusted Advisors.

So let’s make ‘serving’ a priority, shall we? Facilitating our clients, making more money, helping our company, and making everyone’s lives easier.

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Listen to Sharon Drew do Buying Facilitation® and hear the difference between sales and helping buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision issues.

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What is a seller’s priority? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Yesterday, I left the office and noticed a mailer sitting there: it was to have been picked up the day before. I had to go in that direction anyway, so stopped at the post office to ask the manager if there was going to be an ongoing problem.

Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hi. I have a question. You folks have been picking up mail at my door for quite some time now. It’s a really efficient process, and I appreciate it. But yesterday you never got there. Was there a problem? And do I need to adjust for changes?
P.O. Manager: Sorry about that. Yesterday there was a big turnover when folks retired.
SDM: What? I don’t understand what that means to me.
POM: That means some of the new guys don’t know the customers.
SDM: What, exactly, does that have to do with me? I scheduled the pick up.
POM: People are allowed to retire, you know.
SDM: What?????
POM: Retire? People retire! Don’t you get it? The new folks didn’t know what they were supposed to do.
SDM: But I filled out the form online, scheduled the pickup and here is my confirmation.
POM: I know, but maybe they didn’t know. They were new. You’ve got to make some allowances for new people. It’s not their fault.

That was a real conversation.

How often do we have internal problems and not take the responsibility of making it right for our customers? You make promises to your clients. Regardless of your issues on the back end, they are promises. Keep them. And your clients won’t mind when you make a mistake; they will mind when you don’t communicate.

PS: The same problem happened today (one week later) and a package was at my door for days. I went in to the PO, met with the same woman, and her response was totally, totally changed.

POM: Hi. Oh. You’re back! I’m SO sorry you continue having this problem! This isn’t right! You’re one of our good customers. There must be a glitch in the system! Let me fix that for you! Give me your details and I’ll look up on our system what the problem might be, and I’ll call you to let you know what happened and how we’re fixing it for you. And here is my cell number in case there is a next time. That way you can track me down and I’ll take care of it from my end. We’ll get this fixed! I’m SO sorry! And thanks for your patience!

Obviously the woman had had a customer service course in the last week :)  Good for her.

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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’.

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Don’t make your issue the customer’s problem is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I was speaking with a colleague today who complained that although he understands his customer’s needs – does surveys of every aspect of their decisions (how, when, what) so he ‘knows’ how and what they buy – and creates marketing materials positioned to address those needs and segments, the buyers still didn’t behave in a way he believes they should.

Sound familiar? You know who your buyers are. You’ve done assessments and surveys so you ‘know’ how they buy. You’ve developed marketing materials, pitches, websites, white papers, and they should be more successful. What’s going on?

Let’s look at the assumptions here, and see why they are faulty. 1. when you ask questions to gather data so YOU can understand, you are asking biased questions based on what you think is important data that will be useful in creating a selling strategy.Buyers:

• may/may not know how to answer your question,
• may not want to answer your question,
• may give you a partial answer and leave out the nuances,
• may be leaving out large aspects that they decide from unconsciously,
• may be offering the wrong data (inadvertently)
• may not relate with the material you are sending them.

Not to mention that a large, significant number are not responding at all.

2. when you have ‘data’ about another’s decision making, you assume it follows that what you are presenting is offered in the way they are ready, willing, and able to buy. It’s not working, because every purchase is a change management situation. Bring in software? How will you manage the techies, the old systems, the users? Team building? How will the people choose to work with others in the nearby department? How will folks at ‘war’ with each other choose to attend?

Until buyers are ready to do something different – i.e. change – they won’t respond to your offering even if it’s the right offering for them. That’s why you lose 90% of your prospects.

Change happens only when people’s (unconscious) criteria are met and the system they live in is willing to be disrupted. Have you tried to change your diet or cease an addictive behavior? You know there is a problem. You know what the solutions are. You are not ready to do anything different (or you would have already). Someone gathering data about your habits won’t help you do something different.

3. when you develop a pitch or solution based on the data you’ve gathered, you assume it’s appropriate for their needs AND they believe their current situation needs to change now. But it’s specious – nothing to do with the customer. How do you know what criteria someone will use to make a buying decision at that moment? That their buying decision team will agree with the data you used to create an offering with?

Rarely is solution-specific data all people need to make a purchase, and their private decision criteria may not align with the offering you developed based on demographic assumptions.

As I hope I’ve shown, when you attempt to influence a buying decision by creating a pitch or solution that should fit into their buying patterns, you are making specious assumptions. Do you know – right now – how you’re going to choose to move next time you move? Will your choices be based on kids’ school districts, or proximity to a hospital? Who will be involved in this decision this time, different from a similar decision 5 months ago? How will you choose who fits in where and when? Do you know when you’re filling out an assessment what your buying patterns might be at some point in the future?

People make decisions in idiosyncratic ways and they must, they must, handle the change management issues that the new solution will compromise. Sales only handles needs assessment and solution placement, and the surveys and questionnaires we prepare merely manage the sales end. You are left with the same assumptions and possibilities you have when you make a sales call, or place an advertisement.

To help buyers handle their private decision issues (often having nothing to do with their need or your solution) is a separate skill set from knowing they have a need or seeking a solution. It’s possible to create surveys/questionnaires that will not only give you good data but will create a customer for you at the same time, Facilitative Questions such as:

• What would you need to see from a solution to know that you would be willing to use it?
• How would we be creating this for you in a way that would make it comfortable to bring in to your family?

Managing the need isn’t enough. Help them choose how to use it without too much internal disruption. If you don’t help them, they’ll wait until they figure it out by themselves. Stop trying to understand them as you never will in the way that will help them change. But you can help them understand themselves.

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Understanding customers doesn’t help the buyer buy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

On the face of it, it’s a no-brainer. Of course  it’s vital to ‘understand the customer.’ But it’s not so simple as just ‘understanding’ as there are so many facets to this. I must admit that when I hear folks using the term “understanding the customer’, it sounds to me as if they are seeking to ‘understand’ so they can sell or influence – using the act of understanding as part of a sales cycle.

Let’s take a closer look at the facets of ‘understanding the customer.’

First,  there are so many things you can’t/will never understand, and yet there are several things you must understand if you are going to truly serve them.

There is actually a timing on this. There are certain things a seller must understand to ensure that the right solution is being offered and will fit. But that happens only when it’s time to place your solution, or ensure that your solution and the buyer’s needs fit.

SELLERS CAN NEVER UNDERSTAND

There are so many more things that buyers know and sellers can never understand… and don’t need to. For example:

1. Who is on the buying decision team. Even if we know exactly who is on the BDT, what will you do about it? Try to contact them… and… and then what? Even if you knew all of the members, that wouldn’t influence their decision. Not to mention that buyers don’t know the full complement of decision team members until they are just about at the end of their decision cycle.
2. What the real problem is. Buyers may start off with one set of problems, but by the time they co-opt the right people, and gather the full complement of data, they may end up with a different set of needs. There is no way to know all of the data at the beginning of the decision cycle, hence when sellers try to ‘understand’ too early they end up with a faulty fact pattern.
3. What the buying criteria are. The full range of buying criteria are not available until all of the members of the Buying Decision Team are on board – much later in the decision process than when we enter.
4. The steps that the Buying Decision Team go through in order to choose a solution. They don’t even know this — how could we? And even if we know, what can we do with that information?

We absolutely need to understand how a need fits with our solution. We absolutely need to understand all of the details the buyer needs us to know. But we’re spending too much time, too early, gathering specious or unnecessary data – not to mention that farther along the buying decision process the data will change.

USE YOUR EARLY CONTACTS TO HELP BUYERS DECIDE

Until now, you haven’t had the tools to help buyers do what they need to do first, before they get to the point when it would be necessary for you to understand them. First, they must figure out how to gather the appropriate Buying Decision Team members. They need to know how to determine if their existing vendors can help them (Sorry, but they must do this!). They need to determine how to choose a new solution, or how to ensure that a new solution would fix comfortably with whatever else they are doing and have in place.

But here is what we need to understand when it’s time – after the buyer has managed their internal, private, off-line decisions (usually political, or relationship based):

1. How your solution will fit with their existing range of solutions.
2. How your solution will be accepted by the users and what you need to do to help make that happen.
3. What buyers need to end up with after your solution is adopted and if it will handle the criteria of the full Buying Decision Team.
4. All of the specifics for fit, configurations, people who will use it and how they want to use it.

Sales is only manage a small portion of the issues buyers need to address in order to make a buying decision. We’ve never thought about their behind-the-scenes decision process before and we’ve inappropriately used the only skills we’ve had to sell with – understanding the customer.

But we can’t understand them – at least not until they understand themselves. Use Buying Facilitation™ to help them understand themselves first. And THEN you can sell.

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Listen to Sharon Drew

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We Can’t Understand Customers is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Nothing.

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

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

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

BUY IN IS A DECISION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that inluences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

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

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

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

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

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE BUYING DECISION

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

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

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

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

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

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

SALES DOESN’T SUPPORT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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