What does your GPS system do? It gets you from here to there without any input other than coordinates. It knows you must go left one mile, and then hang a right at Route 26. It knows you will drive about 40 minutes. It knows there is one alternate route. But it doesn’t need to know what you are wearing, or the gift you brought. It doesn’t need to know that there was an accident ahead that would cause you to slow down. It knows how to get you to where you want to be: it does not concern itself with the details of your personal issues.

Why am I putting sales and weddings and GPS systems in one article? Because I’m making a parallel between the buyer’s decision path and the sellers involvement with a solution choice.

THE TWO JOBS OF SALES

As a seller (if you can follow me here) you need to know the needs to help determine the right gift. You need to understand who is involved, what they like, how much money is budgeted. You need to understand as much as you can to determine that your solution and the buyer’s needs match. It’s the equivalent – using the above analogy – to understanding why you chose to go in your car, or what you decided to wear.

As a buying facilitator, you just need to understand systems and how change happens to bring in something new – the path from here to there.  A GPS system does NOT need the details of the activity. It does not care if you are going to a wedding or a funeral. Just left, right, left, right.

BOTH SELLING AND BUYING FACILITATION® TRIGGER THE BUY-PATH

Imagine if you had 2 jobs as a seller: one, to understand need and place a solution appropriately; one, to help buyers traverse their internal change management/systems issues so they get the buy-in and path to bring in something new.

You know how to do the needs assessment and solution placement. That’s sales. But do you know how to enter a buyer’s system with no questions about need? With no reason to gather data about how they’ll use a solution, or choose a vendor?

Do you know how to interact with a buyer to be their GPS system and manage their internal change? Because until buyers do this, you’ll be sitting and waiting and hoping for them to close.

What do you need to know or believe differently to be willing/able to put aside your curiosity as a sales professional, and put on the hat of a GPS system in order to teach your buyers how to put their ducks in a row – to go down the path of finding the right people, developing the right criteria, figuring out the change issues – so they can buy your solution.

Buying Facilitation® is a wholly different skill set than sales. It is a change management model. You use this to help buyers maneuver and discover, just like a GPS system goes from here to there. By using this model, you can get buyers to the point of being ready to buy – just like the GPS system gets you to the front door of the wedding. And then you can bring your gift and have some fun.

sd

Learn Buying Facilitation® on your own with our Guided Study program, or with a training program from us.

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

The differences between the solution sale and the buying decision: let’s go to a wedding is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Think of a decision you had to make with one of your teammates, or a family member.

What was the difference between what you wanted to happen, and the others wanted to have happen?

Where did you all end up vs where you began – and what was the journey between the two?

What did you end up knowing that you didn’t start off knowing – and how long into your journey did it take you to figure that out? And how did it influence the final decision?

What choice criteria did you start off with? What did you end up with? What didn’t you know at the beginning that ended up being vital for a good decision at the end? And who was it on the Buying Decision Team that discovered that missing piece – or was the group collaboration the instigation for expanded thinking?

What was the process you used to get between the beginning and end? How could you have done it quicker? What did you need to know or do differently at the beginning – or was there no way of knowing this until further along the decision cycle?

How did members of your family or colleagues (your Buying Decision Team) influence the decision – and how much of the decision cycle was spent in them figuring out what you probably knew to begin with? How many arguments or fights or discussions were there?

At what point in your decision making do you need all of the facts about the final solution possibilities (i.e. when thinking of moving, when do you need all of the data about the new house? When realizing you’re overweight, when do you need all of the facts about the gym? When thinking about buying a CRM system, when do you need all of the features and benefits) – and do they shift as you move through your buying decision journey??

THE TIME IT TAKES TO DISCOVER CRITERIA IS THE LENGTH OF THE SALES CYCLE

In any of the above situations, wouldn’t you rather have had a shorter decision cycle? Of course you would. But the time it takes to come up with your own answers is the length of the sales cycle.  And we don’t know all that we don’t know when we begin the process.

The last thing buyers need is information about your solution. The first thing they need is help shortening the change management issues they have to contend with.

We can help buyers make their buying decision cycle shorter by being a GPS system for them to help them – without any bias – navigate through the route t0 internal buy-in.

Soooo do you want to enter at the end? or at the beginning?

The only decision that can be made in a very short time, with few internal change issues, are personal decisions that involve one person (you) and are cheap. Almost all decisions involve others – and all decisions are a change management problem.

How are you selling? How are buyers buying? And how are you getting involved at the beginning of their change management decisions — or are you sitting and waiting while they do this themselves?

Read Dirty Little Secrets to learn more about how buyers buy. And then either get the Guided Study program, or the Learning Accelerators, and start learning Buying Facilitation™ so you can get involved earlier. The sales model doesn’t help you there – nor does understanding what they need or having the right solution. To help buyers buy earlier in the decision cycle, Buying Facilitation™ is the only skill set to offer you the tools to help.

Let me know if you want more information. I’ve got lots of learning material to help you decide. But ask yourself: Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy? Because they are two different activities.

sd

Here are some places to listen to Sharon Drew discuss Buying Facilitation™:

• SEMI – A Trail Of Dead Sales People – Sept. 23 – https://m360.smei.org/ViewEvent.aspx?id=20780&instance=0
• CustomerThink Sales Summit - Start at the beginning: add new Trusted Advisor skills earlier in the buyer’s journey – Oct. 5-7 with Dave Brock. Time TBA. - http://www.customerthink.com/summit/sales_edge_2010
• Focus.com - The Focus Interactive Summit: Evolving your sales game plan –Oct. 21 - http://www.focus.com/interactive-summits/

Buyers want a shorter buying decision cycle is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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.

Buyers must manage their off-line, politically-driven change issues before they can consider making a purchase even if they have a need that is an absolute fit with a seller’s solution. (How many times have you seen the perfect client fail to buy? This is why.) Sales manages the tail end of the buying decision – the solution end.  Buying Facilitation™ manages the off-line, internal decision end… with a very different skill set and outcome than sales. Sellers sometimes have a hard time with this concept because they are still thinking ‘sales.’ But both models are necessary. We’ve just never had access to skills that help buyers navigate through the private stuff that goes on without us, while we sit and wait.

I asked my colleague David Deans who recently wrote a blog post that used the term ‘buyer facilitation’  if he’d give me his definition: “The context in which I use the words buyer, seller, guidance, enablement or facilitation together is totally generic in nature — relative to the traditional commercial buying-cycle.” David is speaking about guiding and enabling the buyer at the solution end of the decision. In that context, buyer facilitation helps the sellers manage the placement of the solution, and how the solution will be accepted and chosen to fill the need: in relation to other vendors, price, solutions, and solution/need fit. In other words, it’s a more specific word for sales.

HOW BUYING FACILITATION® WAS CONCEIVED

For those of you having difficulty understanding the difference between Buying Facilitation™ and sales or buyER facilitation, or trying to use sales thinking instead of change management thinking, let me tell you specifically, and in far greater detail than you ever wanted to know, what I’m doing here. And for those of you who find yourself falling asleep, please feel free to stop reading. This is a level of detail I rarely, if ever, share. When I teach sellers how to do Buying Facilitation™, I make it much easier :)

Buying Facilitation™ is a GPS navigation tool that gives buyers navigation capability to both recognize and manage the unconscious decision issues they need to address before making a decision for a purchase or change. Ultimately (net/net) we are teaching all of the possibly unrecognized folks who might touch the ‘need’ or solution how to buy-in, to choose our solution where and if possible – a sort of  ‘influencing with integrity.’ Using it, we speed up the sales cycle exponentially, discover prospects we wouldn’t have discovered, have prospects buy who didn’t realize they had a need. We are not focusing on ‘need’ or ‘solution’ or ‘relationship,’  but on the internal stuff that only insiders know about. The personal stuff that makes our buyers disappear for so long. The policitcal stuff that makes good prospects never come back.

Here are details of Buying Facilitation™ skills:

1. Managing Internal Decision Making: I’ve coded the 3 phases all decisions go through as they go from unconscious to conscious, strategic to tactical. Everyone uses these decision phases, regardless of  the type of decision, whether it’s conscious or not, and whether it’s a personal or group decisions. These phases are written about in detail in my book Dirty Little Secrets.

2. Managing How Appropriate Factors Get Considered: Different from conventional questions that pull data, Facilitative Questions pull unconscious criteria from where it’s ‘stored’ in the brain (indexes, or indicies), using the proper words to ensure that the appropriate considerations are taken into account. To formulate Facilitative Questions demands the questioner listen for systems, not content, and be unbiased – biased only by the knowledge of systems and decision phases. Why is this necessary? Because people must pull together all of their conscious and unconscious criteria before making a decision; the time it takes them to do this is the length of the sales cycle. They need to do this anyway (We never make decisions that go against our values.). In sales, Facilitative Questions illuminate internal, private decision issues (people, policies, problems, vendor issues, money issues, alternate solution choices, rules, history, etc) that need to buy-in to any change (a solution or vendor choice for example).

3. Managing How People Recognize All Options: Presumptive Summaries help with the thinking process. They bring together the underlying messages that are a critical part of their thinking. These do not just summarize the content. They actually make conscious some unconscious choices.

4. Managing How Sellers Become GPS Systems And Change Agents: No one has ever taught us how to listen for systems. But this skill enables the seller (or coach or influencer) to formulate the Facilitative Questions and Presumptive Summaries without bias.

As you can see, the skills of Buying Facilitation™ are all based on being a neutral navigator to help Others manage the political, personal, and sometimes crazy private decisions they must address before being willing to change… regardless of their need! They have always done this off-line, behind-the-scenes; sellers have never been privy to this.

Hopefully, you can now recognize the two different skill sets, with two different results: Buying Facilitation™ manages the unconscious, internal decision issues to efficiently get buy-in for change and solution choice; and sales manages the need, the solution, and the solution placement.

I hope I didn’t bore you.  But I hope that you now understand the difference between Buying Facilitation™ and buyer facilitation, between being a GPS system to navigate private systems choices without bias, and sales which understands need and places solutions. I’m happy to start a discussion here, or contact me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

sd

There is still time to get the freebies for: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation™ - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions. You still get the freebies with the bundle order.

Buying Facilitation® vs. buyer facilitation is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Selling with Integrity was my nascent attempt to explain the idiosyncratic way buyers buy behind-the-scenes, and our jobs as sellers to serve them by being neutral navigators, GPS systems, and decision facilitators. But I wasn’t that clear, and I ended up writing about our spiritual values and how we, as sales professionals, can actually use our positions to actually lead buyers through their own criteria and values. I actually wrote several articles with titles such as ‘The Seller as Servant-Leader.’ Indeed, an article with that title was the most requested reprint from Leadership Excellence magazine.

It is with great joy that I am now seeing the words ‘selling with integrity’ all over the net these days. Sure, twelve years after my book came out, but now in the publish consciousness nonetheless. It is with dismay, however, that I hear the words being used as part of the ‘sales’ effort – how to gather data nicely, really CARE about a client. In other words, same-old same-old with a NICE twist.

At no point have I seen any focus on the other part of the decision process that buyers must address before they can consider making a purchase – those sniggly, private, silly, political, relationship-based, confusing, and definitely confounding steps that they must take off-line before being in a position to actually make a purchase choice. Sales doesn’t handle this, and so we’ve sat and waited, pitched and Tweeted, developed strategic content and white papers, designed SPIN and trust-values-relationship-question-based selling models to do all we can to make a sale. All, of course, to mitigate the truth: sales gives us absolutely no way to control or influence whatever the hell is going on within the buyer’s buying system behind-the-scenes — and without us. So now we’re calling it ‘selling with integrity.’

I’d like us to consider going back to the original meaning of my title: by actually becoming a neutral navigator, by having the skills to be a decision facilitator, by truly leaving behind sales until the buyer has managed all of their internal crazy stuff  (the old vendor appears, a partner wants to take over the initiative, one of the department heads threatens to quit if they choose you as a vendor, etc.) and is ready to make a purchase and ensure stability within their system. I’d like you all to consider that there are actually two parts to a buying decision, and sales gives us hundreds of tools to help with the info-gathering, solution-placement part…. and none to help with the behind the scenes part.

I’d like you to consider that ‘selling with integrity’ might mean adding a new skill set to what you are doing and making it your job to wait with the sales skills, and instead SERVE the buyer by having no bias or intent around solution placement, and instead be the gentle, off-line laser or GPS system that leads the path through the internal decision issues. It’s not the sales model you’re used to (see my new book that discusses this www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com). But it’s ‘selling with integrity.

sd

Selling with Integrity is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

The short answer is, you don’t. At least not when you are accustomed to. Because that’s not the first thing buyers need from you. The buyer first needs assistance navigating around their off-line decision issues. See, we actually enter our buyer’s sphere far too early in their decision cycle. And we end up attempting to gather needs, understand, and place product before a buyer really knows how to have this conversation with you.

The first thing buyers do – well  before they are ready to choose a vendor or a solution  – is to figure out what needs to happen internally for them to be assured that they can achieve excellence AND keep their organization in tact.  THEN they are ready for you to understand their need and place your solution. The sales model does not help the buyer at this initial part of their decision cycle because it’s private, unconscious, idiosyncratic, and for insiders only. But they must do it – and we needlessly wait as they do. It would like finding the house or car of your dreams before you discussed a move or a purchase with your spouse or bank.

GOING INTERNAL

Where do buyers go when they say, “I’ll call you back?” They go internal, to make sure the department heads are in agreement, that the status quo can allow change without creating a mess, that the historic fight between rival teams is cleaned up, that the new software will work with the old. Until or unless they manage the interal stuff of relationships,  initiatives, rules, etc., they will not be in a position to buy anything. Regardless of their ‘need’ or ‘pain.’

Think of moving. You and your spouse find the perfect house. Are you going to buy it? Well, that depends on if you can get a loan, or if the school district is viable, or if your spouse really wants that separation, or … And these things are private and off-line and have absolutely nothing to do with the house or the realtor.

It’s possible to add a front end to what you’re already doing successfully and use a different skill set to help buyers maneuver through their internal pitfalls. But it’s not sales. And it has absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with understanding: as an outsider you’ll never understand. Can I understand if, in the example above, your spouse is thinking of separation? Or how to handle the bank if you were overdrawn for 3 months last year?

Once a buyer manages the internal issues sellers can use rapport and sales and understanding skills to make sure the solution is superb. But trying to understand the personal stuff is impossible.

GATHERING DATA AT THE WRONG TIME DOESN’T HELP BUYERS BUY

Sales is faulty (see my new book on this: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) and only manages needs assessment and solution placement where it is imperative that you understand. I’m suggesting you acquire an add-on skill set to merely act as a GPS system that says left/right/left, through the maze of the types of decisions buyers must make as they consider their internal, systemic issues that hold their status quo in place. Until they do this, they can’t buy from you anyway. But when you use Buying Facilitation™ first with them and do some neutral navigation that is system- and change-based, you will be placed on their Buying Decision Team.

I recently spoke with a potential vendor who I was referred to. She automatically assumed I was ready to buy because of the referral (I certainly was not), and she went ahead gathering data (that I found myself very reluctant to give since I didn’t know her or trust her yet) and trying to sell her services. When I told her that until I knew how I would have a good chance of getting the results I wanted I wouldn’t be able to buy, she was quite adamant: “You’ll know when I give you results.” Well, in my mind that’s kinda foolish. That means I have to buy her services, pay her a lot of money, go through internal disruption, and I won’t know until AFTER all that whether I’m going to be successful or not??? Before I’d be able to choose her, I’d need to figure out the criteria I’d use to know if her suggestions, her personality, my needs, my market, my folks who would be working with her, my company, would act together in a way that would bring me the change I’m seeking. And if it would be worth the money and disruption. She’d have been far better off to have used a Facilitative Question:

How would you know before we begin that you would have a good chance of reaching your goals? What would need to happen within your organization to make sure they are ready for the type of change you are requiring?

It’s not about my need or her solution. It’s about the issues I need to manage internally in order to allow change to take place in a way that minimizes disruption.

Until you realize there are actually two different types of decisions buyers must make – the vendor/solution decision that you handle, and the behind-the-scenes issues that they must handle first – you will be trying to understand too early and not be present to help them with the main decisions they must make first.

You can add a new set of skills to what you’re doing already, and actually become a part of your buyer’s buying decisions. And, when it’s time for you to understand, you will be there with just the skills you need to do it. But first, let’s help manage the private process that you’ve left unattended until now.

sd

To learn how to do this, consider buying my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it

How do we sell if we don’t understand needs? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

• maneuver through their internal, behind-the-scenes buy-in issues to ensure a trouble-free change process, and
• choose a solution that will address their stakeholder’s criteria for systems excellence while maintaining the integrity of the system.

Sales addresses one of these jobs, but not the other. In fact, we’ve never been taught the skills to help with the off-line issues buyers address: as per the explanations and skills offered in my new book Dirty Little Secrets, helping buyers maneuver through their off-line buy-in issues requires a wholly different skill set.

We need to have the ability to be a GPS system for our buyers. You see, they need to meander through all of the internal systems issues that created their problem to begin with, to get to the route cause, figure out how it got there and has been maintained over time, and address all of the elements that hold it in place daily so that a new resolution can enter without fallout, without sabotage, and with acceptance and support.

As a simple example, let’s use fitness. Let’s say I’m not working out as often as I should. Getting good data about a gym, understanding why I’m not working out, or knowing that there are great trainers available to help me get fit, doesn’t address my baseline issues. I will not only have to figure out what has stopped me from working out and being fit until now, but I’ll have to manage some unconscious, unknown ‘stuff’ that has allowed me to ignore the gym issue until now.

• How do I currently handle my belief that I’m a healthy person if I only do those activities that make me comfortable?
• What has stopped me from attending the gym until now? And what sort of shift would I need to make to change my internal view of myself?
• What other issues do I need to manage to become a healthy person (i.e. eating issues, family issues, time issues, social issues) and what has stopped me from managing these until now?

As sellers, we treat the ‘need’ as if it were an isolated event and have no way to help buyers manage the off-line issues they must privately address as they consider changing to excellence. And, when we attempt to ‘understand’ what’s going on, it’s akin to you trying to understand why I choose to get up at 6:30 a.m. instead of 5:30 to get to the gym— and then attempting to convince me to do what would get me to the gym, rather than supporting me in managing my beliefs about my family obligations that you cannot influence because you are an outsider.

Indeed, we cannot – and should not – understand these personal, internal dynamics. But we can help buyers understand them. After all, until they do, and until they address them, they will do nothing, and we will sit and wait and wait until they do. We have waited helplessly in the mystery of what buyers do for decades, if not centuries.

BE THE GPS SYSTEM, NOT THE SELLER

We can use a different skill set to help buyers maneuver through their first steps. We cannot be there when they have to have those private meetings, or have an argument with the tech team, or handle a 3-year-old vendor issue, but knowing the environment – the system, if you will – that must be attained, generally speaking, before a buyer can buy, we can add a new skill set to our sales skills, and help buyers buy.

Think of the first decision issues as a GPS system understands the route. One mile, two left turns, etc. Think of the prospect as the driver who has to get somewhere (and who has not used a GPS system before, getting lost frequently but getting there eventually), the car as the system of internal, private issues that are on a journey and that will eventually find the ‘party,’ and the destination as the place you can sell your product.

The GPS system can’t know the scenery, or the fact that the car had been in an accident the day before. But it clearly understands what the generic route to excellence looks like and continues to know the route to the destination even after the driver has stopped for gas.

When we attempt to use our sales skills at the wrong time in the buyer’s decision cycle – and almost all buyers come to us well, well before they have figured out their route – we are helping buyers delay their purchasing decision, opening us up for objections and competition and money issues.

Sales only manages half of the buying decision process. For the initial issues buyers must manage, become the GPS system to help them navigate through their systems issues so they can buy. And with you as the decision facilitator, they will incorporate you into their solution design in half the time, with no competition or proposals or objections.

My new book will explain the buyer’s route, and offer new skill sets for you to help them buy. If you buy it before Oct 29, you’ll get freebies from wonderful sales luminaries. Not to mention you’ll learn how to reduce your sale cycle by half, and be ahead of your competitors.

sd

There is still time to get the freebies for: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation™ - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions. You still get the freebies with the bundle order.

Be The GPS For Your Buyer is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

On the sales end of the equation, you NEED to understand the prospect’s situation to make sure you are placing the appropriate solution in the right place. This same data will give you ability to fine-tune your presentation and pitch to ensure the buyer understand how your solution will fit in their environment. You also need to understand the buyer’s vision, and criteria for Excellence.

There is no way to truly understand anything else.

I know I”m bucking up against some resistance here, but hear me out. You will never understand the private, idiosyncratic issues going on within the buyer’s environment. You might ask questions about these things, hoping you’ll glean enough data to help you target your pitch. But if that worked, you would have closed a lot more sales. And, an outsider can never understand what is really going on inside of anyone else’s situation. There are relationship issues, company politics, history, working relationships, ego issues, rules, vendor issues, partner issues. An outsider can never ‘grok’ the import, the nuance, the residual feelings, the unconscious biases, that go on between people…especially people you don’t know and in groups you aren’t a part of.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the off-line decision issues for decades. This last year, folks are beginning to talk about them and start using the terms I’ve been using all along. Yesterday I got a cold call from a local vendor who actually had something I might be able to use. As the call was ending, I said I didn’t have the bandwidth to think about it now (book launch took over my time) but I’d take his number and call him when I was ready. He then said to me: “Can you please tell me when you’re going to make a decision?” I smiled, knowing he was probably told by a manager to start ‘finding out’ about people’s decision making (and knowing that my work had finally come into the mainstream of sales thinking) and didn’t have a clue what it meant or how to go about it.

Here is the rest of my conversation with the sales guy:

SDM: What will ‘knowing when I’m deciding’ give you?

Rep: What? I just need to know.

SDM: Why?

Rep: If you’re not going to be deciding within a month, I’ll call you back. Would a better question have been: Can I put you down for an order in a month?

This is a real conversation. Did the seller need to know when I was deciding? What would he have done with that data? What did he expect that question would do…make me commit? He never managed my issues: What did I need to know? How was I going to choose to buy?

Imagine if our new jobs as sellers include helping buyers understand how they will line up their internal, off-line decision issues – the people that need to be involved, the historic issues that must be resolved, the buy-in that must be encouraged - that need to take place so they are free to choose a solution. Not the issues involved with a purchasing decision, necessarily. Often, the internal issues have absolutely nothing to do with the buyer’s need, yet they must be handled.

Here is a simple way to look at the new skills I’m suggesting: in the first stages of the buyer’s decision making – you know, that behind-the-scenes part that we are not privvy to  - buyers are unfamiliar with the steps they need to take as they lurch toward solving a problem. If you could take the part of a GPS system and just offer coordinates for choice, the buyer (driving the car that the GPS system is not involved with) would easily find where they were going (they must drive alone, and watch the scenery that you can’t see) and you could be there at the end with the solution.

We can’t understand the exact specs of a solution until the buyer has traversed the journey. Knowing ‘how they buy’ or ‘how they decide’ won’t help the buyer choose you. Add Decision Facilitation to your sales skills. It will make your job easier to not have to understand so much at the front end, and save it for the back end when the buyer really can hear about, and use, your solution.

sd

Check out my new book: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters, testimonials, and much more. Then buy the book.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation™ - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions.

What do Sellers Need to Understand – and When? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

As we approach prospects, we end up pushing against their ‘system’ that is ‘relatively ok’  (or it would have changed already) and doesn’t wish to be disturbed until it is assured that anything new will not cause permanent disruption – something they must come to terms with themselves and has nothing to do with their need or our solution.

As a result, sales folks have to suffer the indignities of rejection caused by us showing up with the right solution at the wrong time, determined by the way the sales model itself is structured. To manage this rejection, and because we see an obvious match between their ‘need’ and our solution and believe it’s the right time to involve ourselves, we have developed work-arounds to ‘get in’ and get heard, get seen, get liked. We push against the system as we

• send introductory letters to ‘grease the wheel’ for our prospecting calls,
• network to get to know prospects better so they will like us (and buy our solution),
• meet face-t0-face to prove our professionalism (so they will like us and buy our solution),
• learn opening, closing, gatekeeper, objection-handling techniques,
• finely hone our shining personalities and brilliant persuasion techniques,

all because we unaware of  the stage buyers are at within the change management issues in their internal buying decisions – and then complain about the rotten results we’re getting.

In reality, if buyers wanted to be different, they would have done something different already! But before they take action now, they must go through internal stuff that we can’t understand or see or even be a part of because we are outsiders. And sales doesn’t give us a GPS system to help buyers manuever through their own trip.

The most curious part for me is why sales folks fight to continue these often-useless activities. As I have been introducing decision facilitation and Buying Facilitation™ into the field for decades I have been hoping the field would say “YiPEE – I can ADD some new skills to what I’ve been doing and BUYERS WILL BUY MORE AND FASTER.” But instead for 20 years folks have fought for the right to do what they’ve always done and get a 90% failure rate.

Why is it such a struggle to want to change when there is such a tiny success ratio? I guess we are so used to the struggle that it has become our nature. We’re doing what our buyers are doing: choosing the status quo rather than change.

I wonder.  Sometimes I take responsibility thinking that I haven’t been clear enough with my model – although in my new book I think I finally am – see a review.

Sometimes I think the centuries of sales have just reached a concretized form that will never change.

And yet, over the years, dozens and dozens of companies have hired me, and the field is now finally talking about the ideas I’ve espoused (we now commonly speak of  ‘buying decisions’ and ‘decision facilitation’ and ‘buying patterns’ and ‘buying criteria’ – all phrases I coined decades ago) so I know it’s possible and remain ever hopeful.

Our jobs are only difficult because sales focuses on solution placement and leaves buyers to figure out the route through change on their own. We can help – but not with the sales model. I hope my new book Dirty Little Secrets and my Buying Facilitation™ model will help you manage the front end of the buying decision process.

It really, really doesn’t have to be this difficult. Contact my client Peter Casebow and ask him how we brought his sales to a one year, 3 meeting sales cycle, to a 3 call, 3 week close. But they weren’t using sales to do this.

Let’s make it easier. Let’s stop trying to sell, and really support the buyer’s buying.

sd

Listen to Sharon Drew Morgen speak on MaestroConference on Oct. 14 at 12P.M. PST

Check out my new book coming out October 15: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements.

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, and is meant to be read alongside of the new book, Dirty Little Secrets.

How Does Sales Make Our Job Harder? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com