In the early 90s I wrote a column for TeleProfessional Magazine. My book Sales on the Line was doing well, and I was the voice of reason in the field. Stop using such obnoxious selling patterns, I’d write, or you’ll end up going out of business. Buyers buy using their buying patterns, not your selling patterns. Start off with facilitating their change decisions instead of the lousy script, I advocated. No one listened. Until there was no one left to listen.

Lately, I’ve begun repeating my dire predictions to the entire sales field: If you don’t add some new capability to your jobs, you better start looking for a new profession. Technology is taking over.

SELLERS MUST CARVE OUT A NEW JOB

As you watch marketing automation take over much of the work you once did – prospecting and networking, cold calling and schmoozing, following up and developing relationships – you are now left with the tail ends of the sales job: taking names (yes, they are still merely names) that marketing or lead scoring technology has handed over to you and trying to do the ‘final’ work of closing.

The sales professional is no longer a professional. You’re a closer. The marketing automation world has replicated the main aspects of the sales job: needs assessment and solution placement. But it’s not able to handle the personal touch. It is also following the wrong people in the wrong way, and offering the wrong data at the wrong time, and dropping many of the right people – certainly turning them off by their voracious hunt-and-push strategy.

Folks, here are your choices:

1. lose your job because telemarketing and marketing automation are taking it over;
2. sit and complain because marketing is giving you lousy leads;
3. earn less money, close few leads, and have longer sales cycles;
4. learn a new skill set and enter the buyer’s decision path much earlier and influence the sale.

Without technology, the job of sales only manages the last 10% of a buyer’s activity – the solution choice. You wouldn’t choose (or need data about) a new house until your family agreed to move, you decided on a school district, type of house, time of year to move, price range. Why do you expect buyers to buy because you can see a need and have a solution?

I’ve been yelling about this for decades. Now it’s time to learn Buying Facilitation®. You must listen to me. Really. Add a new skill set. Expand your job beyond what marketing automation is doing so poorly. Make yourself a true facilitator and Relationship Manager and Trusted Advisor. Really help buyers navigate through their decision path. Diminish the sales cycle. And keep your job. Call me and I’ll go through a buyer/seller interaction that uses Buying Facilitation® and you’ll see the difference.

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Buy the MP3′s of Sharon Drew making live phone prospecting and qualifying calls.

3-Day Public Training in Austin  June 14-16 Syllabus | Registration

Are Salespeople Going the Way of Telemarketers? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But if this assertion were true, we’d close a helluva lot more sales than we’re now closing.Why doesn’t a perfectly qualified buyer know they are supposed to buy our solution when there is a perfect fit?

It’s because it’s not about the ‘need.’

BUYERS DON’T BUY BECAUSE THEY HAVE A NEED

Buyers buy ONLY when their status quo – their system, as I call it – and everything in it, decides that adding something new would be of more benefit to the SYSTEM than leaving things as they are. Remember: the ‘need’ is only a part of the larger problem and has been there for some time (and they didn’t find it important enough to resolve yet).

As sellers, we seek out ‘need’, and bias our questioning and listening to hear what we want to hear,  to confirm our suspicion that there is, indeed, a prospect. But we are not asking about, and not hearing, what would tell us if the buyer is ready, willing, or able, to buy – very different from having a need. And we are certainly not managing the exercise buyers have to go through internally to help them get their ducks in a row so they would buy if they could.

Sales treats an Identified Problem (my vocabulary for ‘need’) as if it were an isolated event, not paying attention to the fact that there is no such thing as an isolated event in our buyer’s environments. Company rules are wrapped around the Identified Problem. People, their relationships and history, their egos and jobs descriptions are all wrapped around each other and the need, even if they are in different departments.

I once got a letter in secret from a department head in a department outside of my client’s area: she had worked with my client years before, and (I learned later) they had had a falling out. She told me that he was cheating, that he was using my material and our training with a different group that he wasn’t licensed to train (nor did he pay for). I was happy to find out of course. But it goes to show you that nothing, nothing exists independently.

When we meet our prospects (unless they call us with a checkbook in hand and have done ALL of the change management on their own prior to calling … and this happens about 1% of the time) it’s not time to assess their need. And it’s certainly not time to discuss our solution.

Sales gathers data around need – the obvious data about how the problem got there, what a solution should look like. And all of this data is imperative in order to sell a solution. But it’s not the first thing that buyers need to do: buyers may or may not know about the problem, but obviously haven’t done anything about it or they would have already!

Before buyers can buy, they must get buy-in from all elements (people, policies, rules, providers, technology) that touch the ‘need’ in any way, or the risk of disrupting the system is too high. It’s very possible, however, to help buyers do this first. But not with the sales model.

A SIMPLE CALL CAN EVOKE A NEW DECISION

Let’s take a simple telemarketing call. Of course, these don’t happen anymore, but let’s pretend. Let’s say they are selling a magazine subscription. Doesn’t get easier than that, right? Instead of calling to say, “Hi. I’m Jim. Let me tell you about our magazine selection and our special offer” which does nothing but push solution, it’s possible to do Buying Facilitation™ even here.

Here is a one/sided script, just to show you how to help the buyer manage the internal issues she’d have to deal with even to purchase a magazine:

“Hi. My name is Jim, and this is a sales call. I’m selling magazine subscriptions. I know there are hundreds of different magazine titles, and I’m wondering how you currently subscribe to the magazines that will give you the sorts of data that you enjoy reading about?”

Given we all have so little time, at what point would you consider adding one or two new titles to the magazines you’re reading? And how would you know that we were a trustworthy vendor to buy from?

Obviously this isn’t a large or complex sale, so getting to the point is necessary. But notice the sorts of decisions I asked her to consider, just in these few sentences:

1. how to you choose to get informed in the areas that are of interest to you?
2. how would you choose to use your time when you put aside magazine-reading time?
3. given that we’re on a telemarketing call, how would you know to trust us?

The magazine is not the issue here: there is absolutely nothing to sell until or unless the person decides on the above points.

First, help your buyer figure out how to make the necessary decisions with the right people, get buy-in from all of the relevant people and policies, get agreement to change, and THEN you can sell. We’ve never had skills to do this sort of thing before. But we do now.

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When is it time to sell? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Do you spend a lot of money learning how to follow prospects on line, so you can guess where they are in the decision making process?

Has all of this activity substantially increased your ROI?

What you’re forgetting – or ignoring – is that no matter what information the buyer needs, or how often they (and their colleagues) visit your site, or how deftly follow their activity with your ability to track ‘Digital Body Language,’ at the end of the day, you will not be there when they sit down to decide. Nope. The internal decisions that buyers make to choose a solution, to decide to make a change, to select one vendor or solution over another, are off-line. That’s right: you are not there when two department heads have an arguement about which vendor they prefer, or when the tech folks start clamoring to take over a project, or when a partner shows up with a good-enough solution.

The highest closing number I’ve heard – and this number is based on a few very large companies having the funds to set up the technology to follow the ‘Digital Body Language’ from start to finish – is 15%. That means, they are only wasting 85% of their time and effort. Yet because the sales model is so inefficient and typically yields a 7% close, folks think 15% is great. It’s like saying that a doc has to amputate one of your legs, and won’t you be lucky that you’ll still have one leg.

WHAT IS MISSING FROM LEAD GEN?

With all of this talk and money being thrown at ‘lead gen’ what is missing? What’s missing is that it continues to focus on the secondary phase of the buying decision: the solution placement end (OK and the needs assessment – but that only pays lip service to solution placement. You wouldn’t call someone on a whim and ask them about their needs if you had nothing to sell.).

The decision to bring in a new solution is the last thing the buyer does. There are many, many things they must do first:

1. line up the entire Buying Decision Team (which they have not figured out at the beginning of their journey);
2. figure out if they can resolve the problem with known resources (i.e. internally or with a current vendor/software);
3. figure out what has to happen for them to get the appropriate buy-in so that the people and policies won’t be disrupted when something new/foreign comes in;
4. figure out how to meld the old with the new so there is little disruption.

Sales doesn’t do this. Which means, if you’re not using Buying Facilitation™ or some form of non-sales decision facilitation method, the best you’ll be able to do is: A. with technology,  monitor activity or place data about your solution; B. with sales techniques and a sales person, gather data, get into relationship, spout solution details, and manage the events.

Do you need to drive prospects to your site so you can gather names and follow them? Of course. But don’t forget the additional steps: contact your prospects; help them discover how they need to manage internal buy-in, and who needs to be involved. Once they figure out how to move forward with buy-in, and the criteria they’ll use to choose a vendor or solution (and you knowing this doesn’t help them decide!), then you’ll be able to sell. Lead gen gets you good prospects. But these prospects are worthless if they don’t buy.

Read my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. It will help you.

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Lead Gen isn’t enough is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume – and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry – that when we notice a ‘need’ that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.’ Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption.

A NEED DOESN’T MEAN A PURCHASE

What we forget is that the ‘need’ has been sitting in a buyer’s environment (I call it their system) for some time. Sitting somewhat comfortably, or it would have been fixed already. Not only that, but the environment has created work-arounds – jobs, rules, relationships – that keep the ‘need’ in place daily. It’s most likely not sitting there waiting for you to come along and fix it. And unfortunately, sales treats the identified problem as if it were an isolated event.

But we show up, assuming because there is some sort of lack that our solution can resolve, that we have a prospect. We do everything we can to get in, find ‘the decision makers,’ understand, promote, pitch, and promise. But it doesn’t work, because the prospect may not be a prospect.

1. This need may be sitting comfortably-enough and not causing any conscious problem. Do you have any extra weight on you? Why haven’t you gotten a gym membership? What about your anger management issues, or your fights with your spouse or kids? Done anything about those?

2. The need may have been there so long that it’s determined just one part of the givens. Oh – we’ve always used our own tech team to design our sites. Yes, our in-house trainers do a good job.

3. The need may be in one area but needs buy-in from adjacent groups who don’t care about changing. So what if the L&D team wants new software if the HR person thinks everything is fine.

In order for a prospect to make a purchase, they would have to change something – most probably a string of somethings. They would need to get buy-in to do something different. They would need to be willing to change a few things around, and have the ‘things’ be ready,willing, and able to change (For example before you got a gym membership you’d have to be willing to get up earlier, eat healthier, get your wife to walk the dog, take lunch to work, etc. It’s a system that behaves like a house of cards.).

How can you determine if a seeming prospect – a person or group with a lack that your solution fulfills – is really a prospect? S/he may not know either, and may tell you there is no need when with just some decision facilitation they can recognize the need. But to do that, they’d have to consider the internal change issues first. After all, this is the very first thing a prospect considers well before they actually consider buying anything. And sales doesn’t manage it.

Use Buying Facilitation™ to help your prospects determine how they’d move forward toward change. Show them how to determine how to get buy-in

Prospects Aren’t Really Prospects 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.

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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

Buyers buy when all of the members of their decision team – all of the members – agree that it’s time to resolve a problem.

Buyers buy when their internal system – their culture – knows how to make room for something new without disrupting the status quo.

Buyers never buy on price unless everything looks equal.

Sales people waste their intellectual capital by merely focusing on pushing a solution: they know so much about the environment their product resides in that they can be true decision facilitators for buyers.

When buyers begin the process of resolving a problem, they do not know the full extent of their needs.

When buyers begin the process of resolving a problem, they do not know the sorts of buy-in issues they will have to contend with on their way to group buy-in.

When sellers try to understand a prospect’s needs, they are coming in too early in the buyer’s decision cycle, before the buyer has gathered their full Buying Decision Team and before they have found internal agreement to change. And they are ignoring the system that the need resides in.

Any purchase means change for a buyer, and the buyer must follow the rules of change management before a purchase.

Sales does not address the off-line, behind-the-scenes, private decisions that buyers must make prior to their ability to purchase anything.

Sellers mistakenly believe that if they understand the problem/need, and their solution can resolve the need, their job is to ‘get in’ and make a case. That is not the way, or the reason, buyers buy. A buyer does not buy because they have a need for a seller’s solution.

Have I piqued your interest? Stay tuned. My new book handles all of the above.

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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.

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 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.

Buyers Don’t Buy Because You Sell Well is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our favor. We certainly would not lose as many sales as we do. The problem is that the buying decision is so, so much more complex than we can imagine as we stand on the outside looking in.

Sales mysteriously treats an Identified Problem (my word for ‘need’) as if it were an isolated event. But it’s not. There are ramifications to any change, and the ramifications are ones only buyers can see from the inside and we will never be privy to.

WHEN DO BUYERS START FIGURING OUT STUFF?

Buyers don’t start figuring out their behind-the-scenes issues until after we’ve met them, except in cases when buyers call us and buy… in which case they’ve made all of the behind-the-scenes buying decisions before they contacted us and we are just lucky.

We come in at the wrong time, pitching a solution to a small portion of the ultimate Buying Decision Team, and have no tools to help buyers do what they must do first: manage all of the off-line buying decisions that need to happen for them to get buy-in for change.

I have said this over and over: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. Before they can buy anything they first look into their current teams, partners groups, rules, historic decisions for a simple resolution to a business problem. They come to us by default, and even then end up going back inside (to their old vendors, or the other department heads, or the tech team) to do an internal check on resources before placing an order.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE SCENES?

I’ve fully described the actual steps that happen behind-the-scenes in my new book coming out soon (Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it). To think about this, let’s start with this question: How did a buyer’s ‘need’ get there? It didn’t arise overnight, and people and policies inside agreed to allow it to happen. So the ‘need’ got created behind-the-scenes.

Not only that, the system and rules and people and policies have allowed it to remain as it is – or they would have changed it already.

Before a buyer will buy or choose any solution at all, they must first figure out and manage the very idiosyncratic and mysterious ramifications of change. What will a solution change internally? How will the people and policies interact differently if/when they decide to resolve an Identified Problem and bring in something… something different that isn’t already there? Obviously, the sales model doesn’t equip us with the tools to help buyers manage these issues, and we cannot do it for them.

And no solution will be purchased if there is any possibility that the client can resolve their problem on their own.

As we think about sales, and wonder how to close more sales, quicker, we must realize that by merely focusing on the solution-placement area, and we do our ’understanding’ – understanding need, understanding the decision making, understanding the requirements, helping buyers understand our the judiciousness of our offering - we are not helping the buyer do the behind-the-scenes work they must accomplish before making a buying decision. That work is private, idiosyncratic, personal, unique, and not open to outsiders. And, unfortunately, buyers don’t know how to do this work easily because it’s new to them. But we can help – with a different set of skills.

We can help them by being true servant leaders, true trusted advisors and relationship managers, and guide them through their systemic, off-line, buying decision issues. But it’s not sales. In this time of economic uncertainty, add Buying Facilitation™ and differentiate from your competition – and truly help your buyer buy. And, stop selling.

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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.

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. I’ll be doing a webinar on the material close to the launch date, so stay tuned.

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.

Buying Decisions: What Happens Behind-The-Scenes is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Where they go, in fact, is to get ahold of their colleagues and figure out how to get agreement for whatever outcomes the new solution will cause within the  buyer’s environment. We rarely think that way as sellers: we see a problem, figure out if we have the appropriate solution, and go forth, fearlessly, to match the need with the solution.

We forget the vast amount of internal politiking, or behind-the-scenes jockey-ing, or deals, or relationship management issues, that go on in the prospect’s environment around their search for a solution. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to be intimately involved with these off-line discussions and are left with the results.

It looks like this: hot prospects don’t return and go quietly into the night, never to be heard from again; prospects purchase a small portion of a solution with some excuse as to why they can’t buy the rest  (budget, timing, partners, initiatives, etc);  prospects return to discuss price; prospects want their internal folks to join the effort and work with you to implement.

In other words, they aren’t purchasing what you think they need. Why? Simple: Because they haven’t gotten the buy-in they need. It’s got nothing to do with your solution or their need. The tech team shows up and wants to do the project; the HR department wants to be involved; the old vendor develops something new that might take care of the problem.

It is possible to help the buyer choose you – but approaching the need resolution with the sales model doesn’t help much to help with the buy-in process.

Have a look at my video and send in some comments. Let’s begin a conversation about the buyer’s off-line decisions and how to help them make their best decisions.

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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.

Check out my new book coming out October 1: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read a free chapter. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements. I’ll be doing a webinar on the material close to the launch date, so stay tuned.

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.

Managing Off-Line Decisions is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

A lot. But not what you think.

When I began talking about helping buyers buy in 1988, people thought I was a little nuts (and what does that have to do with anything?). I persisted, and finally, about 3 or4 years ago, people began using the phrase as if it had always been around.

But the term is not being defined as I’ve been using it: the definition I’ve been hearing is focused on getting buyers to make a purchase. My definition is a bit different. Well, OK. A lot different.

I’ve always believed that the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the buying decision. Their. Own. Answers.

What does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean anything about their need – they can’t even fully articulate their need when we first meet them cuz it’s too early in their decision process. It means that buyers live in this tangle of people and policies and initiatives and vendors that actually create AND MAINTAIN their status quo. That’s right: the ‘problem’ that you think you can resolve is part of their system and is happy to be there, thank you very much. Or they would have resolved it already.

So we come in, waving our magic wands, telling them we can fix it. But they mostly don’t want us to. Or at least they don’t come back and buy, even though their need and our solution seem to be a fit. Why?

Because their tangle, their system, their stuff that maintains their need, is a complex system of craziness, and processes, and work-arounds that touch the need, and don’t want to be messed up.

BUYERS MUST MANAGE INTERNAL CHANGE BEFORE CHOOSING A SOLUTION

Before buyers can buy they have to help this tangle agree to change: that’s where they go when they say “I’ll call you back.” And we haven’t had the ability to go there with them. Because sales doesn’t do that: sales is a product/service placement model – not a decision facilitation model. All of the information gathering we do is in service to placing our product to manage their need. We don’t touch the lion’s share of what the buyer must do to be ready to buy.

In fact, the very last thing that a buyer does is make a product purchase. First they must make sure there is buy-in from all of the people and elements that touch the problem, and make sure that there is a behind-the-scenes approach to change. Buyers won’t resolve their problem with our solution until everything in their companies lines up and agrees.

It’s not a buying decision; it’s change management.

That brings me to Buying Facilitation™. Buying Facilitation™ is a decision facilitation model that sellers use to help buyers maneuver through the internal systems issues that they must address so they can get buy-in to change (and bringing in a solution is change) AND THAT OFTEN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NEED.

It helps with those meetings our prospects have with their other vendors. Or the new partners who want to resolve the problem in a different way.

Using sales, we cannot influence those off-line meetings. But Buying Facilitation™ helps buyers do that. But it’s NOT SALES.

You know how to sell. You just don’t know how to help buyers buy. Are you ready to do something different?

How would you know that adding a new skill set to what you’re currently doing would give you the results you deserve?

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What Is Buying Facilitation®? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Since I’m the Queen Contrarian, I’d like to say that the ‘need’ we think that buyers have is not a real need.

First of all, we often meet them at the wrong end of their buying decision – when they are just starting their search for a possible solution. Not only have they not committed to making a purchase, they are too early in their decision process to fully understand all that their ‘need’ entails.

Next, if they REALLY had a need, they would have fixed it already. Any ‘system’ uses work-arounds when something in the system isn’t functioning optimally, so our buyer’s ‘need’ is already being taken care of in some fashion. That means their need isn’t urgent.

And, finally, the buyer doesn’t know at the beginning of their discovery, who needs to buy-in to a new vendor or a new solution. So we are walking down the path of understanding need (which they can’t really know in the beginning) and sharing data, and the prospect has no idea what the final parameters of the need will look like once all of the right people get onto the Buying Decision Team.

Because this is such a big topic, I’ll devote more time to this later on. For now, have a look at my video, and start a discussion around this. I’ll be sending in blog posts from Scotland, so I may not be as involved as I will be when I”m back, but I think it’s a good conversation to share.

Enjoy.

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What Is A Need? 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

‘How are you currently training your sales folks?’ I asked.

“We’re not. We bring them together once a month, discuss product, and complain about not closing sales. And give each other advice.”

‘How is that working in terms of the results you’re getting? It must be working well or you wouldn’t be doing it.’ I continued.

“Sure. We’re doing our numbers, and have been reaching them consistently for years. So we’re fine.”

‘And, out of curiosity, what has stopped you from buying from Joe and actually adding some new skills training somewhere along the way?” I asked.

“My boss doesn’t believe it in. He says that we’re doing ok, and why fix something that isn’t broken. I’ve tried to convince him that we need some new skills, but he won’t hear of it. I got on the call this morning with you to see if you could call him and convince him.”

‘I can’t convince anyone – especially people who don’t think they have a need and see no problem with what they are doing. If he actively wanted to speak with me I could help him expand his range of choices. But first, I’m curious about why you’ve stayed in a relationship with Joe, and discussed the possibility of  hiring him to do a sales training with you if you knew you couldn’t buy any training from him,’ I said.

“We like each other. We’re in a relationship. Plus, you never know. We might get lucky.”

“And,” my client added, “I can tell he has a need, and I have the perfect solution, and I know they have money. I want to be there when his boss changes his mind.”

The Buyer Must Recognize A Need To Change

How many sales people are doing a ‘relationship’ sale, spending time learning about ‘need’ and ‘decision makers’, and pitching product, until the buyer ‘is ready’?  And then sitting and waiting, hoping the sale will close?

Using Buying Facilitation and Facilitative Questions, prospects can be led to recognize a need that they hadn’t recognized, or recognize the action steps they need to take en route to Excellence, or discover who else needs to  buy-in to choose a solution to purchase. A couple of generic examples taken out of their normal  sequencing:

How would you know when adding new skills would give you the results you deserve?

or

At what point would you consider adding new skills to the ones your folks are already using successfully?

Facilitative Questions, used correctly, might open up possibilities that didn’t originally occur to the prospect. But they are not using ‘convincing’ or any form of manipulation; they merely are a series of sequenced thinking guides that help the person recognize what they need to consider as they discover if new decisions are necessary.

Convincer strategies, charm, good information, and possible ‘need’ don’t help someone decide something different. And until someone recognizes the desire to have something they don’t, and the internal system/environment (the people, the way they run their business, etc.) is ready, willing, able to bring in something new, nothing will happen. No matter the need that we recognize. And ‘convincing’ is useless: we’ve tried for decades to ‘understand need’ and ‘be right’ and all it has gotten us is a 90% failure rate.

If Joe used Buying Facilitation, he could have facilitated a different conversation with his boss – and helped the boss work through any issues he had about what success might look like with additional skills. He even could have helped him work through his own ego issues (How would you know that an additional skill set would add to what you’re already doing so successfully, without compromising all of the hard work you’ve done?). But trying to convince, trying to offer rational details and reasons when the other person has their own version of reality, just doesn’t work.

Stop selling. Help the buyer decide how to buy based on their own mysterious criteria – not on the need you perceive that they have. It’s not about you or the need. It’s not about you understanding their criteria. It’s about you doing something totally different from selling: truly facilitating their own discovery of their buying criteria, and recognizing the elements they must address as they change. It’s a systems issue, not a need issue.

To learn more about facilitating buying decisions from the standpoint of the stages buyers must go through before a buying decision, go to: www.newsalesparadigm.com and see if anything there will help you learn more. As always, we’re here to answer your questions about how Buying Facilitation can be added to your sales skills and help you close more sales.

Also, have a look at this week’s posts. On a myriad of topics, the blog will give you the tools to do business with integrity.

A ‘Need’ Doesn’t Mean A Buying Decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com