These numbers are far lower than they need to be: so long as your primary focus is on making a sale and you focus on needs assessment and solution choice (factors which are the buyer’s final considerations), and ignore the change management issues buyers must handle before they choose a solution, you are delaying a close by a factor of 8.

By using a different focus and changing your ‘first contact’ criteria, you can enter your prospect’s world and get onto the Buying Decision Team much earlier. And close more/quicker. But it requires a new skill to add to your sales model.

WHAT ISN’T WORKING WITH CURRENT APPROACHES

Here are some numbers my clients have given me over 20+ years:

When using a non-marketing-automation selling model (any form of needs-based consultative selling), and your first contact is to make an appointment as your first outcome, you close 2% from first call (with no idea who might be a prospect, you must start counting your ‘close rates’  from this first call – not from your appointment). It might show up as 15% if you track from first appointment.

When you go through lead scoring and lead nurturing, and then attempt to make an appointment, you are closing much less than 1%. And when counting from first appointment, the close rate shows up as 17% — real, only if the names ignored by lead scoring had no probability.

As a rule of thumb, any time you begin your sale with an attempt to get an appointment, you are being rejected by approximately 90 – 97% of perfectly good prospects.   

At least 50% of the people you are calling are viable prospects. Easily half of  these can close. Are you closing at least 25% of all of your raw leads? These folks are going to buy something similar to your solution within 2 years – but not from you. If you employ a change management model from the first call rather than attempt to get an appointment, you will close more, help put together – and become part of - the Buying Decision Team on your first call,  and making you invaluable immediately.

Note: until or unless the entire Buying Decision Team is on board, buyers will not have the full fact pattern to understand what a solution must include, regardless of what their need or ‘pain’ looks like to us. And generally, buyers do not know all of the Team members until they are close to the end, thereby delaying a purchase.

If you first connect using a qualification process that includes change management criteria, you can turn around a lead from ‘potential interest’ to ‘qualified prospect’ within 10 minutes, and reduce the sales cycle by 50% regardless of the size of the solution.

HAVING A NEED DOES NOT MAKE SOMEONE A BUYER

When you attempt to Qualify using need, purchasing capability, or timing,  or use a Trusted Advisor approach, you are omitting all of those pe0ple who

1. don’t know know exactly what they need yet and are not quite ready for solution data,
2. have not managed the off-line change and are not ready to buy – but are indeed buyers and know they have a need,
3. are doing their due diligence, but have assigned others to do on-line research for them and don’t seem to be relevant leads,
4. have not the full solution criteria because they are still getting their Buying Decision Team members on board.

The last thing buyers need is solution information, and they need very little of this on the first contact. Until or unless they get feedback on all who touch the solution, and then know how to move forward with change and solution adoption in a way that will create few ripples in their system, prospects cannot buy – separate from their need.

Personally, you may not care about the private, back-end buying journey. But by collapsing the buyer’s journey between first thought and purchase, by helping them get ALL Buying Decision Team members on board early to define the solution and change processes, and get the right policies in place quickly, you can find more prospects, close a lot more sales (400-800% higher close rate over sales alone) and waste a lot less time – not to mention forecast more efficiently.

THE BUYING FACILITATION METHOD® CHANGES THE NUMBERS

With a cold call and a good list, using the Buying Facilitation Method®, my clients close 35% from first call – often without an appointment, and always at least 50% quicker.

Buying Facilitation® facilitates the behind-the-scenes change management issues necessary prior to a purchase, puts you onto the Buying Decision Team immediately (first call) , and teaches the buyer how to recognize and manage their internal systems  issues up front. The model works in any situation in which back-end decisions get made:

• Periodic upsell  for new solutions
• Client recovery to re-engage with lapsed customer relationships
• Prospecting, telepromoting/telemarketing, and follow up from marketing automation
• Managing negotiations
• Pipeline reviews/management
• Qualifying – for proposal management, sales, marketing, pre-lead scoring

How are you currently adding new capability to your X?

At what point would you and your decision team be seeking to add something new to what you’re already doing successfully?

Let’s add Buying Facilitation® to every sales process – as a front end to marketing automation, or a new skill for sales folks - and close in half the time, manage our pipeline in a timely way, find the right buyers immediately and get rid of the time wasters immediately. And start the process from the very first contact.

sd

Call me. I can discuss self-directed learning, or site sales training, or the development of custom playbooks and sales scripts. We can also design front-end technology to enter the buying decision journey earlier. To help you learn:

• Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.
• Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.
• MP3
• Learning accelerators

First Contact: What to Do, Why, and How to Get Better Results is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Often our focus is on getting the end-result we think we want. We forget that without buy-in from the necessary  people and policies that maintain the status quo, we face the high cost of the resistance eminating from pushing change into a system that believes that it’s fine, thanks.

I’d like to share a story about how I helped my own tech guys shift their project work and our revenue as a result of having decision facilitation skills. At the end of the day, unless there is a decision – one person at a time – to adopt to, know how to, and be willing to change, there will be resistance and possibly failure.

FIRST SIGNS OF TROUBLE

I owned a body shop/recruitment company to support new technology. We had 43 tech folks going out to client sites as programmers, systems analysts/designers, project managers/leaders.

Within the first months, I began hearing murmurs of annoyance from the folks: “Stupid users.” “We have to spend twice as long redoing what they told us to do!” “Why don’t they get it right when we first talk to them?”

As a test to see what was going on that was creating so much failure and cost (time/money), I called in my head tech guy to design a requirement I’d been complaining about.

Julian’s first question was: “What do you want?” I didn’t know how to respond because 1. I wasn’t a techie and didn’t know how to explain to him in his language; 2. I didn’t have the right description, as it was mostly a picture in my mind. So I responded “I don’t know.” Julian smirked. “This is what I hear from clients. But I know what you want. I’ll take care of it and show you some screens next week.”  We were already in the middle of the problem.

What he created was from his own vantage point, using his own beliefs and limiting assumptions. “This is all wrong,” I said.

Julian’s eyes glazed over. In the UK you don’t tell the MD that she’s a Stupid User. I continued: “Imagine where we’d be now if you had started our conversation with ‘ What would you have if you had all of your wishes and dreams, and a computer could do everything that your brain would like to do?’ With that, I could have I would have ‘designed’ screens and offered colors and made up functionality. That would have been a far better start.

NEW SKILLS FOR INTERNAL CONSULTANTS

I realized that all of our tech guys needed decision facilitation skills to enable them to

• recognize how to bring together the appropriate elements to be included in a way that would serve both the strategic AND tactical elements,
• elicit the right data at the right time so the clients could get their projects completed efficiently,
• eliminate resistance.

I taught the 43 tech guys my ‘Buying Facilitation® model (a decision facilitation model that is a change management model, independent of  buying or selling). The results were instant, and dramatic.

• The systems designers were able to elicit the right data and develop the exact right design the first time with no redos.
• The systems analysts not only understood the tech issues, but were able to understand and address all of the personal/human issues and manage the change and potential resistance issues upfront, before they became a problem.
• The programmers got the proper information to code the first iteration, with a minimum of changes.
• The client didn’t need the work to be redone.
• The clients got to hear/see/feel their vision of success and agree to it before anyone moved ahead with technology.
• The projects were completed well before time – sometimes 25% sooner – and since we were being paid on a project basis, we made more money and the team was freed up for the next project.
• The clients trusted us so much that they handed over much of their own programmer’s work to us and were able to take on additional creative projects that they hadn’t planned.
• With 26 competitors, we captured 11% of the market (even with prices well over 40% higher than everyone…. my nickname was Sharon Drew Blood), and my clients signed sole supplier contracts.
• Everyone was happy, and I kept all of my employees for 4 years.

In fact, my competition tried to steal my employees; no one budged, regardless of the money that was thrown at them. I made sure they had plenty of personal time off, I took them for darts/beer at the local pub once a month, and I made sure they were happy. Plus I kept them doing what they loved, rather than having to deal with any ‘issues.’

I hired a ‘Make Nice Guy’ (who I also trained) to go make sure everything chugged happily along: if any sort of problem – client concern, project glitch, personality issue, tech malfunction – occured, it was his regardless of time of day. Or he could take the day off.

As a result, I had nothing to do but grow my company. And I was able to exit after under 4 years, with 3 branches in two countries (offices in London, Stuttgart, Hamburg), $5,000,000 revenue (remember this was a start up in 1983, in a huge depression) and a 43% net profit.

Your tech folks and internal consultants need decision facilitation skills in addition to technology skills. Because at the base of it all are humans who resist change, get confused, hang on to turf, and don’t always communicate properly. Let me know if  I can help you design a program for your tech folks or internal consultants: sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com

sd

Start the journey to help sellers get the skills they need to manage both ends of the buying decision journey – the off-line political and relational buy-in as well as the solution choice. Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

Listen to insights and illustrative examples regarding: what change is and why its fundamentally the same regardless of industry or organization type, what systems are and their role in the change management process.

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

A technology case study: implementing what the customer wants is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

“I WANT MY PANCAKES. YOU PROMISED WE WERE HAVING PANCAKES AND THAT WAS AN HOUR AGO AND I WANT THEM NOW!”

His Dad tried to calm him and asked him to be reasonable (something a very literal-minded Asperger’s sufferer defines differently than a ‘normal’ person). “Max. Your cousin is very ill. She may be dying. You’re going to have to be patient. We’ll get you the pancakes as soon as we can, but we’re all worried and waiting to hear from the doctor if she’s going to be live.”

“YOU PROMISED ME PANCAKES. I DON’T CARE IF SHE DIES. I WANT MY PANCAKES LIKE YOU PROMISED.”

Max proceeded to ‘have a melt down’, as it’s called in the Asperger’s world. (I personally call it ‘Having a loopy thing’ as it feels like I’m in a continuous visual/sensory/auditory loop of confusion and expectation that I can’t get out of and I have trouble breathing. Thanks to coaching and therapy, it now happens rarely.)

Later, as he was eating his pancakes, his Dad tried to explain to him about empathy, and that he owed his Aunt an apology for saying he didn’t care if his cousin died. To which Max replied: “Dad, are you mad at me because I have Asperger’s ?”

Of course, there is no simple answer to that question.

My ‘thing’ – and Aspies have a ‘topic’ they concentrate on – has always been systems: how people interact; how decisions get made; how mistakes happen; how families work; how communication works/doesn’t work. The good news is that with all of the years I’ve studied and developed my ideas, and all of the decades I’ve had coaching and therapy, I’m able to work with global corporations, and actually do some good in the world, albeit with a charming twist to my personality (I’m told. To me, it’s normal and I can’t figure out what is so unusual.).

As an Asperger’s sufferer, I don’t always know the ‘right’, or politically correct, thing to say. I have a set of time slots in my brain that everything gets compared with – so when I think  someone should have responded to an email I might write back to find out what’s going on (called pushy by some), but which feels reasonable if I’m not given any other timeline (Why people don’t just respond “Busy now. Will connect next week.” is beyond me.). I sometimes miss nuance, and take things too literally.  My speaking patterns are different from ‘normal’ folks, and I relate quite intensely and super-honestly.

When I was giving a speech recently, I began by saying that I had Asperger’s and folks might find my speaking patterns unusual, but if they could hang in, they’ve find my content thought-provoking, useful and visionary. And fun – I’m a lot of fun. My client came up to me afterwards and said that a handful of people came up to him saying that I was ‘needy’. “She told you she’s got Asperger’s. I found her charming, brilliant, and very authentic.”

I’ve had years of coaching, therapy, and group work to learn social skills, but I still have an ‘interesting edge’. Thankfully, it doesn’t seriously affect my ability to be professional, although it is noticable. With Bethlehem Steel once, the head of the group I’d worked with for 2 years was handing me off to another division head. I overheard the new guy ask my regular client: “Is she always like this?” to which my client replied. “Yes. And she’s wonderful. You will grow to love her.”

Over the years, I’ve been ignored, thrown out of groups, and walked away from, in situations where folks aren’t open to anything out of the ordinary (My clients are visionaries who relate to my brain and heart.). I’ve had wonderful meetings that turned to nothing as folks were uncomfortable with my communication differences. I’ve had people refuse to work with me, saying that I’m just different. When any of the above happen, I”m absolutely baffled. Sometimes I think that because my models are so challenging that folks use my style as an excuse to not have to consider something new.

Internally I can’t understand when or why or how I make some folks uncomfortable (and others not at all), or why when someone says ‘How are you?” I have to respond ‘fine’ even if that’s not true. (Why we ask each other how we are when we don’t want to know the answer is still a mystery to me.).

To be fair, I’ve also been given huge possibility and my brain has developed some truly creative/innovative stuff. And wonderful partners regularly move beyond their immediate comfort zone to think out-of-the-box with me becauses they easily trust my honesty and care. Because the same problem that causes my social issues gives me the ability to innovate and make a difference in the world.

I was deeply touched by Max’s question: are you mad at me because I have Asperger’s? Unfortunately for me – and for others who don’t fit into the norm – the answer is yes. Many of you are mad at me because I respond differently or ask unusual questions. But my world inside feels/looks different from other’s worlds. And I get very curious about things others don’t notice.

So the best I can do is find the right friends, colleagues, and clients who have open hearts, are seeking greater success and authenticity, and can  feel/hear/see and love me as I am – with or without the pancakes.

sd

Sharon Drew is a featured speaker at the Search Insider Summit – May 4 – 7 , 2011

Asperger’s, Max, and Me is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here are some questions to start the conversation. Please note: I don’t have answers completely formulated yet, so your input will be vital.

How are you using social networking to help you sell? Please discuss the goods, bads, and uglies.

Do you use it as a vehicle to be introduced to prospects you wish to pursue, via LinkedIn or Facebook? If so, what are you doing and how? What is working and what isn’t? What would you need to have at your fingertips to have more success that isn’t currently available?

Is it a vehicle to get information? To help you close a deal? To develop a relationship? How are you accomplishing this? What sort of success/failure are you experiencing?

What sort of information do you get through social networking/media that is different from just using the web to gather data? How does this information help you sell in a way that directly leads to a closed sale? and is this giving you a much higher close ratio (i.e. not just a one-off big deal, or a few great relationships)? Are you able to help the person develop their buy-in team this way?

If you are using social media to develop relationships, how is this working for you? Is there an appreciable difference in how long it takes you to close with/without a social networking component? How does the ‘trust’ factor bias the new relationship (for good or bad) or is there no/little discernible difference in trust?

Is there an obvious increase in your closed sales, or just an easier way to find those prospects ready to buy, or just a lot more activity? Or is there a diminished number of closed sales as you spend time chasing leads that aren’t buying?

Is there something you could be doing in a new way? Do there need to be different/new technology that would offer more success – i.e. what seems to be missing around capability that would help you have more success?

I believe we’re at the beginning of this field, and we don’t have all of the capability we will eventually have. Do we need templates that will tell us who to speak with, the sorts of conversations we should be having, steps to take? That’s one of my thoughts. Please share yours.

Let’s chat and get a handle on what’s happening, possible, and still needed. And then we can all figure out next steps.

sd

To find out how to best help others decide to connect with you, take a look at my Learning Accelerators to see if any of them can offer you an additional tool kit.

Sales and Social Networking: thinking it through is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

When your Identified Client gets flack from a colleague for wanting to use you as their vendor, who is the decision maker?

When the old vendor shows up with a solution similar to yours, who is the decision maker?

When your colleague/employee/spouse doesn’t want to bring in a new solution at this time regardless of what you think you need, who is the decision maker?

When the tech manager doesn’t get along with the sales and marketing folks, and all three need to sign off on your solution, who is the decision maker?

When your prospect is going through an IPO and the investors don’t want them to spend money, who is the decision maker?

When the big boss has a favored vendor, and it’s not you, who is the decision maker?

And, when you ask your prospects who the decision maker is, what, exactly, does that give you? And what will you do about it (using the sales model) that will make a difference?  Just asking.

sd

Come see me in Boston next week (Thursday, Sept. 23) at SEMI and we can discuss this in person. Or have a beer!

Or, if you want to learn how to address the above issues so they don’t happen, have a look at my Guided Study program or my Learning Accelerators.

Who is the decision maker? No—really! 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.

sd

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

The statistics I’ve heard say that 20% of buyers who are already in the pipeline ‘make no decision’ and 30% chose another vendor. How we know those numbers I don’t know and I suspect someone made them up. But there is no such thing as ‘making no decision.’ No decision is a decision. Or a decision that isn’t the one you were hoping for. I’m also suspect that sellers close as many as 50% of those in the pipeline. We’re not even going to get into how many prospects they went through just to get to their pipeline!

Here are a few questions for you to think about when you consider the possibility of managing the entire sale, and remember: using the sales model, you cannot be inside with the buyer when they go through their internal shenanigans, have their meetings and fights, talk with regular vendors, discuss with business partners. So given you can’t sell while they are doing their thing (that’s what we sit and wait for, remember?), I’d like you to have a think about what you CAN do (Of course, Buying Facilitation™ is the answer, so let’s see if you can get there with just a little help :) from me…):

What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to use ‘selling’ as your second step and first direct traffic to the change issues buyers must address on their way to deciding anything?

For those who believe you’re  ’in control’, how would you know that you are not managing the entire sale now and are at risk of losing each sale because you have no control over the off-line issues buyers manage privately?

As buyers must do this stuff anyway (and they don’t know what they are going to do until it hits them in the face – they really, really need your help), what’s stopping you from being willing to add a different/new skill set to the one you’re already using? I mean really, really different.

What would you need to know to believe that you could bring about 3x more prospect who close in half the time is very viable (tested and proven) when Buying Facilitation™ is added as a skill to the front end of sales? And how would you know before you decide to learn it that you would be able to have that success?

What is it about the sales model that creates money objections, closing problems, and differentiation issues? And what would you need to do differently to have your prospects behave differently – with no objections, closing in half the time, and no other vendors being considered?

How would you know that it is very very possible to manage the buying decision from the first moment of consideration, through the internal shenanigans, through the buy-in issues and change management issues, to the solution and vendor choice – and not be in the dark while waiting for your pipeline to close? And not sell at all?

How much would your manager love you if you were able to tell him/her exactly when your prospect will close – and not lose any to ‘no decision’ or other vendor choice?

Just asking.

sd

Manage the sale, don’t just make it is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

“I guess I don’t appreciate there is more to learn. My team has read your books, and we apply your model best we can. But I’m not sure we’re getting different results from it.”

SDM: Really? How are you using it?

“Once we get the appointment…”

SDM: Stop. What do you need to get an appointment for?

“To get in front of folks. We need to show them what we’ve got so they understand it. We have to educate our customers so they understand our product and it’s a visual experience.”

SDM: So it seems you’re still using conventional sales thinking and haven’t applied my material….Don’t you get rejected by over 90% of your prospects when they don’t want an appointment? And then, once you’re there, do they buy?

“You certainly hit the nail on the head. Yes, we can’t seem to get as many appointments as we’d like, and then we don’t close as many. But we need to show them what we’ve got and really get in there and understand what they need.”

SDM: How would you know that adding Buying Facilitation™ to the front end before you try to get an appointment or start discussing need or solution would help you get different results? Or get all the right people into your first meeting when you do finally show up? Or increase the number of folks who want to see you by a factor of 3?”

“You can do all that? How? We’ve tried for years.”

SDM: Before I answer I’m curious as to why you have assumed that you’d get the same results using Buying Facilitation™ as you would when using the sales model? And, what would you need to believe differently to consider adding Buying Facilitation™ to the sales process in order to get more prospects and have the Buying Decision Team fully present when you finally do get an appointment?

“I guess I just assumed that all results would be somewhat similar, regardless of the sales technique.”

SDM: Sales only handles needs assessment and solution placement end of the buying decision – the last 10% of what they need to do to resolve a problem. If the buyer’s work-arounds have them comfortable with their status quo, they won’t see a need to take the time to make an appointment with you, and certainly won’t be ready to know how to listen to your pitch even if they do accept an appointment. If I tell you about a great membership deal at a gym before you decide to lose weight or get fit you won’t know what to ask about or how to properly listen to what I’m saying, as I won’t know how it would apply to me until I made the underlying decisions: when will I choose to be fit; how should I change my diet – or can I keep eating what I like; where/how do I fit workouts with my schedule; am I willing to commit to a life change, etc.

Sales enters at the wrong time, and has no capacity to help buyers think through their internal change issues that they must address privately, and often ploddingly,  before they can make new decisions or solution choices. I talk about this in my books that you’ve read. So the questions are:

How will you know that adding a new skill to the front end of what you are doing will give you different results?

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to go through the discomfort of making some changes to your habitual sales behaviors? And how would you know, before you begin, that Buying Facilitation™ could actually give you different results?

——

The sales model is terrific when you are really sell a solution, but useless when it’s time to help buyers navigate through their private issues that take place in meetings or over golf with other managers or when department heads are not getting along. But buyers need to do this anyway or they won’t buy your product.

What do you need to believe differently to be willing to add a new skill to what you’re already doing successfully? And how would you know before you begin that it’s possible to get at least double your success rate by using a new skill?

You may want to answer those questions. There is, indeed, more to learn.

sd

Is there more to learn? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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.

WHAT IS A FACILITATIVE QUESTION?

Facilitative Questions actually work with the natural decision sequencing of the brain, and gather internal criteria in a way that makes new decisions and change possible.

Think of a time when you had a less-than-optimal habit, say, eating bad foods, or smoking, or procrastinating. I imagine that you had lots of data to let you know that you might have to choose different options. But you haven’t, and your old behaviors prevail regardless of how they may be harming you or others.

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to consider adding new options to the choices you’re making? And how would you know that any particular options would be more acceptable than others?

Those are Facilitative Questions. They:

1. are posed in such a way that they actually teaches you where to look internally to  recognize and choose the criteria that is maintaining your current state, and the first place you’d need to address when beginning to consider change (change must begin with a belief change);
2. are used to help you determine what you need to do differently to be able to bring in a new choice congruently;
3. don’t gather or share data but helps you define your (possibly unconscious) criteria for choice;
4. are part of a sequence of how brains decide – not as a one-shot influencing strategy;
5. can potentially re-weight your (unconscious) criteria/beliefs so you can actually begin making new choices…. but based on your own criteria, not external information (which may unwittingly fight against something new).

Obviously, there are times when information-gathering is important, and using conventional questions is necessary. But for those times when you seek to help others take an action they haven’t taken to date – to make their own best decisions – it’s necessary for them to recognize and manage the internal criteria that are keeping the status quo in tact, and then take the further step of figuring out how to make a change that won’t disrupt the status quo.

Think about why you pose questions and how. How would you know that adding a new form of question to your selling or coaching skill set would help your prospects make the decisions they need to make to allow you to serve them?

sd

Want to hear Sharon Drew using Buying Facilitation® to introduce dozens of different types of sales, customer service, fund raising, complaints, and problem solving situations?

What are questions for? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

If you want to find out if you’ve done what you need to do, will get the results you want, have a look at these two links – I think they are very useful:

• Some Hard Line Questions
• The Decision-Driven Organization

Jim is a guy who comes into a company, makes a big mess (on top of the mess you’ve already made for yourself) and then cleans it all up so you barely recognize it – and it’s in better shape than you could have wished for. I don’t mean to keep quoting him, but the guy is SO quotable:

“Too often change gets treated as though it can be simply installed, managed and engineered. The key to implementation is bringing your people together, interdependently, and thinking in terms of “we” versus “you and I”. People only support what they help create.”

If you need some help strategizing to get to a place where you feel successful, listen to this:  “What I am is a get it done, hands-on, go-to-guy, dedicated to making the changes and achieving the goals you want to see within your company.  I encourage planning and push execution. I utilize a combination of strategic and tactical approaches to help you create a strategically aligned, horizontally integrated, customer focused interdependent company..”

I love what he says about hiring a consultant: “The consultant’s role is to augment your thought process through discovery, engagement and dialogue. The consultant’s role should never be to take control away from you or anyone else in your business.”

OK??  Got it? He’s the ‘fix it up chappy’ as Dr. Seuss would say. I sure hope you never need him cuz your business is just rolling along perfectly. But in case you need some help, call Jim.

Sharon Drew

Asking The Hard Questions: Jim Altfeld is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

(Facilitative Questions don’t gather data: they help the brain think and are used in  sequence to how brains decide. Example: How would you know when it was time to reconsider your hairstyle? teaches the brain how to think about When, If, Why, How, Who needs to be in the consideration process.)

and use conventional questions just to gather/share data, I recognize how important even conventional questions are in the sales process. So many sales people use questions manipulatively, as a way to open up the conversation so their solution will be an obvious answer.

Duane Sparks, developer of Action Selling, owner of  The Sales Board (www.actionselling.com), cares about questions. He has a series of books that examine the aspect of questions: The Answer to Sales, Selling your Price, Masters of Loyalty, and Sales Strategy

Here is what Duane responded when I asked him about the importance of questions:
“Questioning is the heart and soul of my work.  And, the thing that I place the most emphasis upon in the sales process.  Today, in my opinion, it is the most artful part of the work that we do as salespeople.  It has long ago replaced “gabbing” as the key characteristic of the effective salesperson.  Mastery of Questioning is a life-long objective for those of us who get this at a deep level.

I believe that we earn the right to ask deep level Questions by asking entry level questions.  Since most salespeople have the skills to ask entry level questions, I have focused on training salespeople on how to ask advanced, high-gain type of questions. ”

While I look forward to the possibility of having Duane add the use of some powerful Facilitative Questions that will help buyers recognize all of the buying criteria they need to address, and actually teach them how to bring aboard the rest of the buying decision team to help buying decisions get made quickly and with integrity, I want to complement Duane on his commitment to questions. Too few folks in sales are targeting their time on finding customers, influencing them, closing them, yadayada, and not enough on truly caring about their customers.

Duane is one of the good guys in sales. Take a look at his books, his assessment tools, his online programs, and his tips. You’ll learn a lot about the integrity of managing the solution placement end of the buying decision funnel.

Why Are Questions Important? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

But you didn’t close the deal.

Later you heard lots of conflicting stories: they already had a preferred vendor, the CXO had a friend in one of the competing companies, their inside folks were going to handle it, they decided to do nothing, you were too expensive, the competition came in lower than cost just to get the deal….

How am I doing here? Did I miss any of the excuses as to why you didn’t close?

But do you know the Real Reason you didn’t close?

WHY DON’T YOU CLOSE ALL YOUR DEALS?

It wasn’t your product, or your presentation, or their need. Your prospect just didn’t know how to choose you. And – another devastating fact – they didn’t need all of the information you gave them in order to decide. Their decision had nothing much to do with your presentation. In fact, you might not even have needed to do one to get the business.

Now that we’ve got the bad news out of the way, let’s look at the good news: you can use your time in front of the prospect to help them decide to choose you – not in terms of either your product or their need, but through a decision making exercise that will help them make the decision to choose you over the competition. You’ll save yourself a heep of time and close the deal.

I was training one of the Big Five – oops. That’s now the Big, um, Three?? Whatever. The highly paid consultants that come from Harvard and wear expensive watches.

So I was training these senior partners – smart folks all, obviously – and was shown one of their presentations You’ve seen them; they are gorgeous. Big fat bound books of pictures and graphs, charts and projections that cost between $350,000 and $1,000,000. It takes teams of Senior Partners weeks and weeks of full time work to put them together, not to mention all of the human capital getting friends of friends of friends who know someone ‘inside’ to give them the ‘skinny’ on the ‘facts’ that would ‘focus’ the presentation properly.

‘How many of these do you close?’ I asked. They were embarrassed. Less than 20%. Several highly paid consultants were taken off of paid work in order to create million dollar presentations and they wasted over 80% of their time! And they kept doing this? Why? Because they didn’t know how to do it any other way. And the excuses they had for the prospect not closing were fabulous: John heard from Mary who had a cousin that worked there, that they were going with their old vendors because the new CEO used to work in that vendor’s company 3 years ago.

The basic belief they held, as do all sellers who use Presentations as a route to a closed sale, was that if they could prove to the buyer that they understood the Need, and could address it from every angle to ensure the value proposition was obviously cost effective, and could prove their worth as a prestigious company (Don’t all presentations include the yada yadas that explain the vendor company??), they would be the Chosen Ones.

Yes, with good data understood and presented, the buyer was obviously stupid if they didn’t buy. Right?

WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING?

Here’s what happens. Let’s start with who is in the room.

Who are you presenting to? Always, in my history of working with my own clients around their presentations, always there is at least one person – sometimes more than one – who ‘shows up’ unexpectedly. And my clients never know the relationship this unknown person has to the recognized prospects.

It’s not about their job description or title, it’s about the weight this person’s voice has. If you don’t know one or two people in the room, you have no idea of the relevance of your presentation as you don’t know the filter this unknown person is seeing you through or how they influence the others. Are they in a different department and want to see what is possible for them when moving forward? Will they be moving in to the client’s department and working with you? Are they people with the PEN who sign the checks and give the final ok – and you weren’t aware of them? Are they consultants who help the buyer make decisions? Are they folks from a different department who use a different vendor that they like and want to challenge their colleagues to choose someone else?

And you have no idea of the political weight their opinions carry.

Next. Ask yourself these questions:

• How do you know that each person in the room needs the same information? Is your intent to throw it all at them – like throwing spaghetti on the wall – so something will stick?
• Are you presenting just to position yourself and your product and have no idea how the buyer will hear it? Or how they will weight different aspects of your presentation….in relation to the other vendors who come in with great presentations and good suits?
• How do you know that the prospect will take away what you want them to take away?
• What if only one small bit of your presentation is relevant, and you’re boring them all to tears for an extra 45 minutes?
• What if you have unwittingly omitted the specifics of the sort of buying decisions or unique implementation issues they face?
• What if they haven’t reached internal consensus on what they actually need in order to resolve their Identified Problem, or whether or not to use familiar vendors?
• What if they already made their decision and they are using your material to bring to their preferred vendor?
• What if they are clueless how to move forward and will use your presentation to get them on the road to a solution and have no idea at this moment what that would look like, what it would take, or how long it would take?

If you can’t answer those questions in a way that directly leads to buyers making buying decisions, you must ask yourself why you are doing a presentation.

INFORMATION DOESN’T TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO DECIDE

A client once returned a call days after my call in to him. It took so long because he had gotten an RFP from a big company who had always used a competitor before now, and his team was putting their heads together to figure out the best way to win the business.

“Why aren’t they using their old vendor this time?” I asked. My client had no idea.

Turned out that the prospect was actually planning on using their regular vendor, but needed a second bid! And my client would have wasted weeks of time.

For some reason, sales folks seem to believe that information will teach people how to decide. So you pitch, present, gather data, etc. But you still close an average of less than 10% of your prospects (from first call to close) and it takes about 50% longer than necessary. So all of your truly wonderful, informative, and professional presentations haven’t gotten you much more than frustrated.

If information doesn’t teach people how to decide, what does?

People decide when their criteria have been met. And until the full set of criteria are addressed, no decision to take action will happen. Remember how long it took you to decide to change your hairstyle? Or choose to replace your car? Or move? Or end a relationship? The time it takes to come up with your own answers, based on your own internal, unique, subconscious values and beliefs, is the length of the decision cycle. And until you know how your internal beliefs and choices will line up around a new answer, you will do nothing.

Note that as outsiders, sales folks will never understand the range of internal, unique criteria (outside of the factual problem that requires a solution) that people seek to meet when they make a decision. Would you make any personal purchase until you understood, and met, some sort of criteria? And, if you were a boss needing a solution, would you make a business decision without including the relevant members of the team and ensured their criteria were met? What if you all had different criteria? What if you as boss had one set of criteria that the team needed to buy-in to, and they hadn’t quite gotten there yet? How ready would you be to make a decision of they all weren’t on board?

The conventional sales model doesn’t manage the buyer’s internal, hidden, and unique criteria that hold their Identified Problem in place. After all, if there weren’t some sort of very powerful criteria – say longstanding relationship issues between teams, or incomplete initiatives, etc, the Identified Problem would either not be there, or would have been resolved before now.

Have you asked yourself what has stopped the buyer from resolving that problem until now? You’ll get some pretty interesting answers once you start asking that question – answers about historic failed initiatives, or beloved vendors who weren’t so quality-conscious but still loved by all, etc.

The point is, that behind each ‘problem’ that your product can resolve lie a long list of people, policies, initiatives, thoughts, feelings, history, relationships, that not only created the Identified Problem, but hold it in place. And giving them great product data doesn’t resolve the underlying systems/people/strategic issues that would need to be resolved before a decision can be taken to fix them.

HELP DECISIONS GET MADE AT THE PRESENTATION

You can use your time in front of clients in a far more significant way: you can actually lead them through their decision cycle – and then do a real-time, customized presentation that addresses their specific buying criteria (rather than offering your choice of data that may not be as relevant). So, first get them to decide how they will work together, how they will decide together, then how they will choose a vendor, and lastly the data they need presented to them before they decide.

Here is how it goes: start your presentations by asking the group what they’d like to get out of your time together. Once each of them has spoken, summarize what you’ve heard. It will not all be about fixing the Identified Problem. In fact, you will hear different ‘needs’ from each person in the room. One will want to hear how you’re different. One will want to hear how you price your product. One, a way to make sure you integrate your product with the current set up. Another will want you to prove to them that you can actually make a difference.

You first must get the group into agreement as to their end result:

• What will their environment look like once a product fix is introduced into their environment? Once the Identified Problem has been resolved?
• How will a vendor’s offering help manage the work-around that has been handling the issues that created the current need for resolution?
• How will the folks in the room work together with a vendor once they’ve chosen a vendor? And what criteria do they ALL want a vendor to meet?

In addition, note that some of the important underlying criteria will be missing because some of it can’t be discussed with a stranger, and some of it is subconscious.

Next, ask:

• How would you know that my offering could meet your needs?

Let them all come to an agreement as to how they would choose you. Do what you can to keep a conversation going until there is relative agreement in the room.

Your criteria here is to get them to reach some sort of mutual agreement as to how they want to move forward – with a vendor, with a solution, and, specifically, from their meeting with you (beyond just your product and services). And talk about their outcomes for a fix. If they are not all on the same page, they won’t be able to hear or discuss the information you do end up presenting. I have actually walked out of meetings without presenting anything until the prospects made collaborative decisions, and then I was hired without even doing a presentation just because of the strength of my opening questions.

Now it is time to actually present, and your presentation must conform with the needs they had specified. This means that your presentation materials must have one piece of data on each overhead – a clear representation of one element of your product or service. You will then present only the specific overheads that match the room’s criteria. In other words, your presentation will be customized for each situation and client-driven, not based on what you want to present.

As always, the question is: do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? When it comes to presentations, you have focused on what you want to sell. I’m suggesting that by using half of your time to help your prospects decide how to buy together, your presentation – and your sale – has a greater chance for success.

Presentations: How To Compete When In Front Of A Prospect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com