Around 85% of a buyer’s pre-purchase, back-end decision issues get addressed privately, outside of the seller’s purview, and a seller has no place at the table. Here is where we lose our sales – as buyers manage the internal politics, and the strategic/change issues – not because our solutions aren’t relevant or because we haven’t done a good job selling.
The [...]

Years ago, when the marketing automation field began publicizing that it would ‘follow the buy cycle’ and ‘place data exactly where it should be placed in the buyer’s decision path’, I knew that would be impossible, using the sales model. As a solution placement device, sales merely manages the last 10% of the buyer’s journey [...]

Because sales operates in needs assessment/solution placement terms, and not on the buying decision paths, we don’t consider that there is an actual system to how buyers buy. But there is. And it’s scalable.
BUYING DECISIONS ARE BASED ON SYSTEMS AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
We live in systems (My book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell [...]

Logic would tell us that our modern – post Dale Carnegie – sales processes are failing.

Marketing automation people are techies who just love the idea of extracting data with wizzy technology. But they are not sales people. As a result, there are some ‘features and functions‘  missing. Like, how to close sales.
The glaring issue is the concentration on the top of the funnel vs. the bottom of the funnel. The sales industry [...]

Recently, I’ve noticed many folks using the term ‘facilitating buying decisions.’ First, let me state that we have a program by that title, that can be licensed to train in companies. It’s a very fun program, teaching sellers how to sit in a buyer’s seat and learn every aspect of how they choose vendors and solutions. [...]