Recently someone told me that Buying Facilitation™ is an old concept, that its been written about in books since sales books have been written, and that he’s been helping buyer’s buy for decades. Of course he has, except that he, like the entire sales field, has a paltry success rate – certainly under 10%. Why? If the seller understands the need, has the right solution, and has a great relationship, what’s stopping the buyer from buying as often as they should? Why isn’t the buyer deciding on the obvious solution?

Indeed, I just heard a statistic that in mature prospecting situations in which sellers are waiting for a close, at least 20% of these situations don’t close due to ‘no decision.’  But a decisions has been made! It’s ‘We Have Decided Not To Buy Your Solution From You At This Time.’ So it is a decision. It’s just not the one you wanted. Or it’s possible that you never had a buyer to begin with, and have either told your managers you’d be closing, or convinced yourself that you have a buyer when you really don’t.

And I’m not even discussing the 30% that are in line to close but choose another vendor…. a waste because they didn’t know how to choose you. And what about those that you lost well before they got in line to be READY to close? The entire sales process is a giant waste of time and energy!

TWO DECISIONS

Buyers have two types of decisions. One is the focus of our sales efforts: the decision to buy a solution. Of course this has been written about for decades. But the other set of decisions they must make is around buy-in: until or unless all of the people, policies, relationships (partners, vendors, rules, etc) buy in to bringing something new in, nothing will happen and no buying decision will be made. These decisions are private and idiosyncratic, and we sit and wait for them to happen. Sales does not manage this.

I call the facilitation of these non-solution-oriented decisions – the behind-the-scenes decision issues that have nothing to do with the Identified Problem - Buying Facilitation™. You can call it anything you want. But until or unless a buyer recognizes and manages these often-unconscious decision issues necessary to get group/company buy-in, buyers won’t choose a solution.

This is where our prospects go when they don’t choose us: they get caught in their internal relationships and politics, their old vendors, their status quo. And the sales model does not handle this. It never has.

WHAT’S GOING ON BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Before you showed up with the perfect solution, the buyer’s environment (I call it a system) worked… well, it worked the way it worked. The problem we can resolve with our solution is not an isolated event: it sits within the buyer’s system as a piece of the pie, an ingredient if you will, not the whole pie. The system has accepted it and has created work-arounds for it. In other words, the problem we can resolve is not a big problem to the system. We see it as such because we concentrate on it so we can sell.  But if the system was being harmed by it, it would have fixed it already

It is only when the problem becomes an annoyance to the rest of the system that the buyer is willing to do something different. At that point, not only does must it choose a solution, but because the problem has been embedded and touches so many parts of the system, it must manage the work-arounds that were created along the way to make sure the system kept working with the problem in it. A decision to bring in a new solution (a buying decision) is a change management activity.

A decision to buy a solution must be backed by the full force of the team/group/company/family, otherwise the fall-out would harm the originating group and not be worth it. If the head of training will quit because she doesn’t want the new vendor to ‘do her job’ or if the tech team will not be able to integrate the new software or if the management team is wary of having outsiders come in, no buying decision will be made. The system is sacrosanct.

SALES FOLKS THINK IT’S ABOUT THE SOLUTION

Sales is necessary to help manage the needs assessment and solution placement AFTER the buyer has navigated through all of their decision issues. Unfortunately, buyers don’t know at the start what sorts of issues they’re going to have to handle. That’s where we come in. With an entirely new/different skill set – NOT SALES as I repeatedly say in my new book Dirty Little Secrets – it’s possible to be a GPS system for your buyer and help them navigate through their decision issues. Not toward a solution, necessarily. But toward a resolution of the factors they need to address to get buy-in. First help buyers make their buyIN decisions, and then you can help them make their buyING decisions.

Buying Facilitation™ is not sales: it does not do needs assessment; it does not do solution placement; it does not manage objections (but it mitigates them). But it will make you first a decision facilitator and true consultant, will differentiate you from your competition, and it will help buyers make decisions 80% faster. Buyers have to do all of  this anyway, with you or without you. And the time it takes them is the length of the sales cycle. You’re already waiting for them – you might has well offer them true leadership while you’re waiting (It’s not sales. It’s not sales.).

Get a copy of Dirty Little Secrets. Take a training with me at the end of May here in Austin. Do the Guided Study program. Mitigate the 20% failure rate by spending time only on the right prospects, and helping them close a lot faster; get 35% more prospects at the beginning, and early on get rid of the ones who will never close. If you want to discuss, have a look around NewSalesParadigm.com or call me: 512 457 0246.

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Currently I am holding a contest, The 10 Steps of a Sales Cycle, for a free signed copy of Dirty Little Secrets. Join now for your chance to win.

Two Types of Decisions: Buy-IN, and BuyING is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Whenever we stand in front of a room and pitch data, we have no idea how the folks are viewing us or our solution, what the politics in the room are and how the personalities are weighted, how we are being perceived in relation to our competitors, their old vendors or their on-site team mates who are currently providing a work-around until a new solution gets chosen.

We’ve made great pitches to buyers who have needed us, but haven’t gotten the work because we haven’t managed the off-line issues that we are blissfully unaware of until we lose the sale. That doesn’t need to happen.

Watch my brief video and begin thinking about how to use the presentation process differently. After all, you’re there, in front of the prospect anyway: consider adding a decision facilitation session to the front end of your conversation before you show them your solution details. They won’t make a buying decision until they do that anyway, and if you don’t help them, they’ll do it off-line, without you.

Do you want to be on the Buying Decision Team? or do you want to sit and wait while they make their decisions without you. Because they need to make them anyway. Might as well be with you.

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Today, Oct 29, is your last day to get your freebies for purchasing Dirty Little Secrets.  I hope you’re all enjoying the new book. I’m sure enjoying our emails and your questions. I’ll soon put together call-in coaching sessions so I can help you learn. Stay tuned. And thank you for your care.

A New Presentation Model: Facilitate the Decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

You know those times when buyers show up and, barely before you can ask them what they need, buy? That’s because they’ve already done what they need to do BEFORE they contact you and they are ready. Unfortunately, the majority of buyers don’t realize what they have to do until AFTER they’ve started discussions, leaving us to think they are in a position to buy. They aren’t.

Before I tell you what it is they must do before buying, I’d like to say that I’ve asked hundreds of people where their prospects go when they say “I’ll call you back?” Here are the responses I always get, and have gotten (the same ones) for decades. And in this order:

1. they are going to find a cheaper price; 2. they are checking out the competition; 3. they are checking us out.

My response: “Really? How do you know?”

The answer, after a few beats of silence: “I don’t. It’s just a guess. I guess the answer is ‘I don’t know.’

Lots of guesses.

Here’s the deal. Sales focuses on product/solution placement/need. All of our activities are (net, net) focused on understanding need and making nice so we can place product. We think we do such a great job we could almost convince ourselves of the quality of our hard work and effort – and brains and professionalism, of course. But it’s pretty hard to reach around to pat ourselves on the back with a lower-than-ten-percent close rate.

So we blame the buyer and the product and the environment. And we all look at each other with grave understanding when the buyer never comes back. But no one, no one, is blaming the sales model.

How do you go about deciding?

I have a question. When you seek to purchase or rent a new home, what percentage of time do you spend understanding your choice of the residence, vs. the time you spend in discussion with your spouse, finding schools and choosing school districts, talking to neighbors and friends, traveling around neighborhoods to make choices, talking to banks, filling out paperwork, finding a buyer for your current home and cleaning closets and painting garages, and the most dreaded of all – moving. Moving out and moving in and packing and unpacking.

All of us know that before we make a purchasing decision, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that needs to get done to make sure nothing falls apart along the way. And for sure, when we start down the path, we kinda know what needs to happen but we sure as hell don’t know all of what will happen. Will the bank lose the paperwork? Will the roof of your current home spring a leak – the day before the new buyers sign the bank papers – and you’re out $5,000 because the house still is yours?

Can the real estate agent manage that stuff for you – even if she understands what you need to do? Well, not using the ‘sales’ model. But before you can move in to your new house, you’ve got to do all of that. Before any change takes place, and purchasing a solution will effect a change in the buyer’s environment, all of the internal, hidden issues that surround the ‘need’ must buy in to the change and somehow be addressed. You would never put a down payment on the house first, and then figure out the schools and the financing and the sale of your own house. First you resolve the internal, private, ‘systems’ issues and THEN you are ready to make a purchase.

And so with your clients. They have stuff to do in their teams, their corporations, their families. And understanding needs, or knowing what solution would be best, doesn’t help them navigate through the mysteries.

Sales is a product placement tool. So blame the sales model for not knowing where your buyers go. And if you ever want to add a new skill set to your sales model and facilitate the buyer’s internal decision issues – separate from their need or your solution – have a look at Buying Facilitation™. Then you can use your terrific sales skills.

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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 influences 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.

What Are Buyers Doing While We Wait? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com