There must be a better way to do this, no?

1. if we knew who would be a prospect on the first call, and get rid of those who will never buy, how much time would we save?
2. if most gatekeepers would get us to the right person, how much time would we save?
3. if we can connect with all of the folks who will ultimately be (or are already) on the Buying Decision Team, how many more sales would we close?
4. if there are no more objections of any kind, how much time would we save and how much more money would we make?
5. if buyers could make a buying decision in the time frame that we believe is possible (i.e. those buyers who call up and purchase quickly are good examples of what’s possible for every sale),

how much more business would we close? And why can’t we make these things happen?

THE REASONS YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE RESULTS YOU DESERVE

To begin with, you are beginning at the end of the buyer’s journey – the purchasing decision – and must wait while they catch up. As sellers, you have been trained to find appropriate prospects: you have not been trained to help them begin or traverse their journey through the behind-the-scenes decision path that is change-management/systems based, and has more to do with internal politics and time lines than it does with purchasing a solution or choosing a vendor.

As a result, you have learned ways to manage the fallout you’ve received from attempting to offer a solution at the wrong time. Or from attempting to offer a solution that folks might not know they need, or aren’t ready to concede that they might need. Or know they need but haven’t figured out how to get buy-in.

Pushback, objections, time delays, buyers who seemingly don’t know how or if to buy. Prospects that stop returning calls. Prospects who make promises they don’t keep.

The only reason you aren’t closing more sales, and the reason you end up wasting time with non-buyers and delayed sales cycles,  is not because of your solution. Your solution is fine. So is your care and respect and personality.

You’re wasting your time trying to place a solution before the buyer has lined up the change management issues they must contend with. But sales doesn’t offer you any other tools.

THE BUYING FACILITATION® MODEL WORKS WITH SALES TO MANAGE THE BUYING DECISION.

OK. I’m a hammer looking around for a nail. But it’s the truth. Buying Facilitation® is another model – like sales only different – that you must learn in addition to sales to manage the back end issues buyers must address privately before they can buy.

• Gatekeepers will help you find the right people to talk to rather than put you off.
• You can help buyers put together their entire Buying Decision Team on the first call.
• You will no longer get objections (fallout from the sales model) – price or otherwise.
• You will be differentiated from your competition immediately.
• Your buyers will buy in approximately 1/8 the time (sometimes with very large sales the number drops to 1/4).
• You will know who is a buyer and who is not, on the first call.

It’s not sales. But really – do you want to keep having those super long sales cycles and getting objections? Do you really want pipelines that aren’t converting? Take a look at my site www.newsalesparadigm.com and see what options you have to learn. There is no reason you shouldn’t be doing Buying Facilitation® AND sales, and stop wasting time. The sale model is great to understand need and place solution – but by using it too early in the buyer’s change management process, you’re not helping buyers buy. You deserve better.

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Read about Buying Facilitation® in these books: Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. Or buy the bundle with them both.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Registration is now open! Check it out Check it out here!

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

How much time do sales people waste? 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.

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

Coaches lose at least 50% of their clients after the first round of coaching. Just like sellers, coaches blame the clients.Where do the clients go? They weren’t ready to change/buy; they maintained their status quo; they used a competitor.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the coaching model (and here I’m going to buck the conventional wisdom) merely works within the bias of both coach and client, in the same way that placing a solution and asking information-gathering questions works within the bias of the seller’s bias and ability to fix a problem with their solution.

THERE IS A DIFFERENT APPROACH WITH DIFFERENT RESULTS POSSIBLE

I understand that coaches – like sellers – pride themselves on understanding, wanting to help, caring, and being professional. I’ve spoken and met with dozens of coaches, from all levels of expertise and price – from $300 to $3,000 an hour – and I’ve noticed the same problem: coaching gathers data about ‘the problem’ so the coach can understand and then ‘lead’ the client to an answer.

Make no mistake: once someone is gathering data, the questions are biased. As a result, the responses will be biased.

But change isn’t based on information, and we don’t decide to change because we offer or hear cogent, rational data. Until or unless anyone is able to make internal changes that their current system (that currently holds the need or problem) is willing to adopt, no change will happen. And change rarely starts with a shift in behavior; change begins once there is a belief or values shift internally: then the behavior shifts accordingly.

Say you smoke and want to stop. If you really understand – I mean REALLY understand – that smoking is unhealthy (and you’d have to be living under a rock not to understand this by now), you would have stopped already. The fact that you haven’t means there is a much larger issue than a rational or behavioral issue.

What is causing you to continue? Why do you want to stop? What happened when you tried before?  Those aren’t the relevant issues. The most relevant issue is Who Are You. If you don’t see yourself as a Healthy Person, you may have a belief set that allows smoking to be a bad habit, or an indulgence, or something you deserve, or that you – like your grandfather-who-smoked-all-his-life-and-lived-til-100 – won’t be affected by it.

CHANGE HAPPENS FIRST AT THE BELIEF LEVEL – IT’S NOT BEHAVIOR BASED

Coaching skills, as they are trained in the U.S. today, do not manage Belief Change. I have run coaching sessions with heads of the top coaching schools to show them the difference between what they are training and how to use decision facilitation skills to actually help change take place. They were all mightily impressed. One of them said she got more out of 45 minutes with me than her own coach after 2 months of working on the same issue.

But they all ended with the same comments: “This is so different from what we’re teaching we’d have to revamp some of our programs and we’re not prepared to do that.” Ah. Another paradigm I’ll need 20 years to shift! There aren’t enough years left!

Hopefully, you will read some of my books and learn some of the decision facilitation material to help your clients or your friends or your staff. The baseline beliefs are the same as sales:

1. until or unless people are ready, willing, and able to recognize and manage all of the internal systems issues that have created and maintain their status quo, permanent change is not possible. That means they must address many of their unconscious issues, and regular questions only get to the conscious responses (vs. Facilitative Questions that get to the unconscious).
2. information does not create a new decision to change. Change happens when the internal systems issues that maintain the status quo are able to agree with a change, and make room for it internally in a way that will enable the system to maintain congruence.
3. the sorts of change that clients – buyers or coachees – seek require some form of internal change before anything new can be added to the internal system of behaviors. It’s necessary for their to be belief changes and systems buy-in as a precursor to behavior change.
4. Behaviors change once the underlying system has room for something new and is assured it won’t self-destruct if it changes.

The person smoking would need to become a Healthy Person before quitting smoking – change at the endemic, systems, Identity level, not merely behavior. Learn how to lead your buyer or your coachee through the decision phases that will allow them to change from the inside out (see Dirty Little Secrets – half of the book is about how change happens). THEN you can gather data and offer your wonderful solution.

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Coaching does not have to be like sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I hate to be a contrarian (Oh. Ok. I love it. Why change the habits of a lifetime?) but… it’s not the end-all and be-all that it’s being touted as.

Here’s the good news: Sales 2.0 is good for driving people to you. By simply offering a webinar, a free e-book, a White Paper, or some incentive, you can get folks to your site. If your material is good enough, they will Twitter about you, put a TinyUrl about you, link to your site, write you up on their blog. You can gather their data, have some sort of passive or active follow up, use the names on an opt-in list, and get hundreds or thousands of new names on your database.

If you want new names and a large database, Sales 2.0 is for you. I know many, many marketers pouring their hearts out to develop wonderful content to send out as bait to attract attention. And it works: after your event, you can follow people up with an email, or hire a telephone sales group to follow up with a phone call. Allegedly, SalesGenius has a dedicated phone sales crew that will call up a new contact within minutes of them signing up on their contact form.

And, what does that give you? An opt-in list (a different question – did the people opt-in for you to contact them after the event?) to send marketing material to. If you don’t actively follow up, you potentially have a new group of people who have been introduced to you and your material, and will hopefully go to your site and learn more or buy something. Hopefully is the operative word here.

And here’s the bad news: how do these folks decide to convert? How do they choose to make a purchase once you’ve captured their name? After you’ve sent them emails (and emails and emails)? Because this is still a one-way pitch: they are basically unknown addresses, who will  interact meaningfully only if they choose to, and only make a purchase if they need exactly what you are offering at the exact moment you are offering it.

Solution data is the last thing buyers need when making a decision to purchase.

People only use data to make decisions with at the point they need the data – usually as the last act in a purchasing decision. Not before. Primary decisions are made on values. With lots of buy-in necessary.

Let me say that a different way. Sales 2.0 suffers from the same problem that all sales suffers from: the assumption that because there is a need, or a problem, the only thing that must occur is some sort of hook-up between the need and the ‘right solution’ and, miraculously, a purchase will occur.

We all know that, sadly, there is a less than 10% conversion rate in sales. And yet the myth persists: great product, trusted partner, perfect solution, good prospecting, great closing techniques, getting past gatekeepers, getting to the decision makers, understanding who the decision makers are, having a great price or a special deal – yup. Sales keeps coming up with ways to persuade, manipulate, position. But still, after centuries of lots of new, new things, there is still a <10% closing rate.

Why, you ask? Ah. I’m going to tell you why. Because (obviously) that’s not how people buy.  Because the sales model only manages the solution-decision end of the buyer’s buying decision. Because a buyer – whether an individual or a group – has a bunch of internal, subjective, hidden, mysterious, unconscious (Are you getting the point? There is no way an outsider can influence this using the sales model.) factors and criteria they need to  address internally in some way, before a purchasing decision can be made.

And many of these factors are deep within the buyer’s culture, and have nothing directly to do with the Identified Problem. It’s the lunch meeting with the boss’s boss that was canceled; the fight your prospect is having with the next department. It’s the relationship and rules and people stuff we can’t control with the sales model. But has to get done.

Your buyer needs a new piece of software? or a team building course? But they have been doing what they doing for quite a while and haven’t changed anything. Obviously, the status quo will continue until it gets enough buy-in to agree to a change.

Indeed, making a purchase is a change management issue – a systems issue, if you will, that can be influenced by Buying Facilitation™. It’s not so simple as problem/need + solution = purchase or we’d be closing a lot more than we close.

Like sales, Sales 2.0 is a push modality, even though it professes to be a pull model. Because it doesn’t help buyers maneuver through their unique and idiosyncratic hidden dynamics that need to buy-in to making a change at this time – independent of the need.

So Sales 2.0 is basically a great tool for sales using a numbers game: have enough names, throw enough spaghetti on the wall, and some of it will stick.

So: don’t expect:

1. people who aren’t ready to buy to buy you because they opted in to a free webinar;
2. people who signed a contact sheet to read your emails;
3. people to know how to buy you because you’ve got their name from a cookie;
4. your sales to increase if you don’t find a way to help the buyer facilitate the unique change decisions (NOT buying decisions) they need to make that will ensure their system will be intact after purchasing your product;
5. to automatically convert an email address to a buyer.

Ask yourself this: why do you assume that the webinar, or the White Paper, or the Podcast you are offering is a precursor to a buying decision?

Just some food for thought. And because I like being a contrarian.
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Sales 2.0: 5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com