RSSPartnering: Who’s appropriate? Who’s not? And how can you tell?
Mar 5, 2010 Sales Related
I get approached daily by folks wanting to partner. I, too, attempt connections with maybe 10 people a day for the same purpose. So how do we know who is right for us to partner with and who isn’t? And how can we tell before disaster strikes?
Of course, we all make mistakes – like that time I partnered with a man in India (Ok, ok. I should have known, right?). The idea was to make me a recognized brand throughout India, and then have him represent me as a trainer and speaker. We were to share the costs. Except we didn’t. I paid my half, and then was forced to pay his, when I received a call from our publicist 5 months later asking me if I’d please please pay him. When I asked my new partner about it, he said, “Oh, right. Well, I didn’t like what he did.” He did a fabulous job, I said. “I agree, but he didn’t give me the type of follow up paper (outside the contract) I wanted. So I didn’t pay him, and I don’t want you to either until he does what I asked.” Next.
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Tags: Facilitative Questions, mistakes, partnering
Get onto the Buying Decision Team on the First Call
Feb 22, 2010 Sales Related
When I tell sales folks their sales cycle is double what it should be, they assume I’m lying. But I’m not. I’m just using a different model than sales to being my client contact: Given that the typical sales model builds in time delays and leaves the seller out of the behind-the-scenes discussions going on, there is no way to get onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call.
My clients consistently close sales in a minimum of half the time it used to take them. Why? Because Buying Facilitation® gets them onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call, and they immediately being helping navigate the buyers through their often unknowable internal decision issues.
It’s not rocket science: the sales model pushes against the status quo, causing the status quo to defend itself. Sales treats a buyer’s alleged need, or ’problem,’ as if it were an isolated event; it has no capability to support buyers as they discover and manage the off-line change management issues they must address internally and privately prior to making a purchase. Indeed, the buyer’s internal system fights any chaos that would take place if the new solution entered too soon, and thereby rejects outside influence.
Think about coming home with a brand new luxury car before discussing the purchase with your wife or managing the budget or garage space: just because the family might need a car, until or unless all of the internal factors are managed, no change can take place without chaos.
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Tags: Buying Decision Teams, Buying Facilitation®, Facilitative Questions, partners
What are questions for?
Feb 18, 2010 Sales Related
Lately, I’ve noticed many people using the term Facilitative Questions when they really mean facilitating questions: they are using questions to help people think things through, to add some new thoughts that might persuade or influence them to consider different options. In sales, they are often used to get prospects to think about ‘needs’ in a way that might influence them to consider purchasing the potential vendor’s solution.
Facilitative Questions are used to help people re-weight their unconscious criteria so they can make new decisions that possibly achieve a new level of excellence according to their own standards – they do not influence, manipulate, push/pull, or bias in any way. Nor do they use ‘information’ as a basis.
Information – having it, sharing it, or receiving it – does not teach someone how to make a new decision: we (and our prospects) make decisions in accordance with our unique, private, weighted criteria that are sometimes (often) unconscious. And until or unless any new decision choices are agreed to by our status quo, no change will take place no matter how necessary.
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Tags: criteria, decision, Facilitative Questions, questions
Facilitative Questions are NOT open questions
Feb 2, 2010 Sales Related
Sitting and listening to NPR Saturday afternoon, I heard someone say, “You need to ask OPEN/FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS.” For the 20,000 people who have studied with me and spent weeks learning how to formulate Facilitative Questions, and for the thousands who have purchased my latest book Dirty Little Secrets that has part of a chapter on this new form of question, you will be surprised that anyone would assume open questions and Facilitative Questions were remotely similar.
I suppose the good news is that, like the other terms (‘decision facilitation’ and Buying Facilitation®) I coined over the past 20 years, my thinking is being accepted into the mainstream. But the bad news, what I was warned about but didn’t think would happen to me, is that folks are interpreting the terms in any way they want, regardless of the real definitions.
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Buying Facilitation® vs. buyer facilitation
Dec 21, 2009 Buying Facilitation®, Sales Related
Lately, I’ve noticed folks using the term buyer facilitation. While I can make a good guess that the term is a version of Buying Facilitation®, it is being used in a ’sales’ context. So maybe, the term is to be used in conjunction with Buying Facilitation®. After all, the buyer must manage both the internal decision issues and the need-related decision isuses before a purchase happens.
Here is a complete definition of Buying Facilitation®:
Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation skill that acts as an unbiased GPS tool to assist buyers in navigating through their unique, behind-the-scenes change issues to ensure they get the buy-in necessary to bring in a new solution.
I named my model Buying Facilitation® because it’s precisely what we need to be doing in addition to selling: helping buyers facilitate the internal, off-line, behind-the-scenes, personal decision process that we are not privy to. It manages that important meeting between colleagues over lunch, the fight that needs to be resolved between department heads before budgets can be used, the political issues that will get the right folks to meetings, that the right considerations and implementation concerns are on the agenda. We are indeed helping facilitate the buying decision, but it’s core is change management. It’s the stuff that often has nothing to do with need or solution. And the stuff that sales methods don’t address, yet needs to happen before buyers can go ahead with any purchase.
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Tags: buyer facilitation, Buying Facilitation®, Facilitative Questions, gps
Why Open Questions Don’t Work
Sep 21, 2009 Sales Related, Top Posts
For decades, if not centuries, we’ve written books about, lectured about, and trained about, the virtues of Open Questions.
I’m here to denounce the myth that they are good in all instances: I actually believe they are used most effectively at the back end of the selling/buying cycle and have no role to play in the buying decision activity that occurs before buyers make their solution choice.
Let’s first consider why they are used at all. Questions, in and of themselves, create parameters for the questioned person. So if i asked you what you had for breakfast, you couldn’t tell me about a trip to visit your Mom. Questions effectively set the boundaries for your answer.
Open Questions give the questioned person a large field to answer in, making it possible for the person to think fully and expansively. In the field of sales, Open Questions are used to have prospects/buyers ‘open up’ and ’spill the beans’ so that sellers can gather the data they need to know to sell better. The word I hear a lot from sellers is that they want the prospect to ‘REVEAL.’
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Tags: buying decisions, Decision Facilitation, Dirty Little Secrets, Facilitative Questions, off-line decisions, open questions
