Where did they go?

They went off-line. They went back to their old vendors and their internal solutions. They decided not to resolve the problem now. A new partner showed up with a fix that kinda resolved the problem. They decide to hire a new staff person with the funds they were going to use to pay for your solution. All or none of the above might be true. In fact, you have no idea where the prospect went.

I’ll tell you where the buyer went: They went to that place where you can’t go, to that private, off-line place that sales doesn’t give you skills for. They made their decisions to buy – or not buy – based on criteria that you were not involved with.

But it’s not your fault.

SALES ONLY MANAGES A SLIVER OF A BUYING DECISION

Sales is a needs assessment and solution placement model. Everything you do in your job, everything you say, every problem you have with prospects, every objection you handle, is based on that one factor. In fact, the model of sales – whether you use Sandler or SPIN or Richardson – is based on finding a need and getting the folks with the need to choose your solution to resolve it. And unfortunately, sales treats an Identified Problem (or need, as you may call it) as if it were an isolated event – rather than the need sitting comfortably within a ‘system’ of relationships and rules, people and policies, vendors and partners, that maintain it daily.

Buyers don’t buy the way you sell – except the small percentage that do. And the sales model merely manages a tiny sliver of a buyer’s buying decision – that very last piece that includes choosing a solution. That’s right: sellers enter far too early in a buying decision cycle, and buyers have to go back – after they’ve already met you – and manage the behind-the-scenes, private, internal stuff on their own. And this stuff (that we can never understand because we don’t ‘live’ there with them) is often unconscious and hard to get to, even for them.

Sales ignores the subjective, idiosyncratic place where buyers go and figure out, amongst themselves, all that they have to figure out. As a seller, you don’t sit at the table when your prospect is at a meeting about next year’s initiatives. Sales doesn’t give you the skills to help your prospect with the new business partner who shows up with a partial solution and cuts you out of the picture. Sales doesn’t help you convince buyers that the tech team cannot resolve the problem in the same way that you do – but they are cheaper, and know the users, so they appear to have a huge value add. Sales will give you the tools to understand the Identified Problem and present your solution effectively, but not manage the fight between your prospect and their Board. So you sit and wait, and hope that the buyer comes back after they’ve said the magic words: I’ll Call You Back.

That’s right. You sit and hope. Because you have no control over it. Because sales doesn’t handle that end of the buying decision. You are out of the loop until they come back. And by then, they might not come back. You lose approximately 90% of your prospects.

THE SALES CYCLE IS DELAYED BECAUSE BUYERS MUST MANAGE CHANGE FIRST

We are now bringing in more prospects than ever. We have no idea of the real potential of each lead generated, but it’s highly likely that we are wasting valuable leads when using conventional sales skills on them. Did they have a real need when they responded on line? Were they just curious? Can they be converted to a closed sale? By using conventional sales models, you will only close the same percentage you closed without doing lead gen, and take more time doing it.

Let’s think about what’s going on inside: If you were overweight and could seriously use a gym, would knowing details about the nearest gym help you decide to work out? Hardly. You would belong to a gym already if you’d figured out that you needed one. To make a different decision than the one you’ve already made (i.e. not join a gym), you’d first have to decide to lose weight or be fit, ask your spouse if s/he minded getting rid of the nightly pasta, wake up at 5:00 instead of 6:30, etc. The seller of the gym membership sees the pot belly and assumes the need and problem and voila! has the solution.

A seller actually has no idea what a solution should look like because only the people inside the system know all the ins-and-outs of what’s going on. And herein lies the problem with sales. It causes unnecessary delays, needless objections, irrelevant price discussions because we are outside providers with unfamiliar solutions, pushing into a ‘closed’ system, and not having an additional tool kit to help buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision issues.

The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. They need to do this anyway – they will do this with you or without you, so it might as well be with you.

Frankly – and this is scary but true – buyers don’t have the skills to efficiently figure out how to go about managing the change that a new solution will entail. They can’t end up with department heads not speaking to each other, or a software solution that the users won’t use, or training that is ignored. Bringing in a new solution and ensuring that everyone and everything buys-in to the change, how to use it, ensuring it fits with everything else (all change is a systems problem after all) is an unknown. And so they fumble around and take forever. But the risk of them doing nothing and maintaining their status quo is much smaller than the risk of bringing in the ‘right’ solution and upsetting their policies and relationships. Buyers often do nothing rather than risk creating an internal mess.

DECISION FACILITATION IS THE NEW VALUE ADD

Buyers need your help. By adding a new decision facilitation skill to the front end of sales that leads buyers through the ins-and-outs of their internal issues (much like a GPS system leads drivers without bias or knowledge of content), and delaying the needs assessment and solution placement until the buyer has figured out how to manage the internal change, it’s possible to help buyers maneuver through their off-line buy-in issues – and THEN you can use sales.

Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation model that can be added to the job of sales. By helping buyers get the approval they need, get the boss to free up the budget, have the tech team bring you in to work with them and, in general, manage all of the behind-the-scenes rules and negotiations and politics and change that must take place before buyers can by, the job of sales changes. The sales cycle get cut in half; money objections disappear; competitive issues and differentiation issues disappear; objections disappear. This way, you can actually help buyers buy – you can even be a part of the Buying Decision Team from the first call by helping them figure out their own next steps. But you have to be willing to add a new skill set to sales.

Once you have helped the buyer figure out how to elicit buy-in and manage change involving the internal politics, the management issues, and the partner relationships, and they know how and why and when they are ready to buy and have all of the necessary people on their Buying Decision Team, THEN you can sell!

Why Sales Fail is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here are my choices, in the correct order, with an explanation under each. We can all discuss these. Submit your comments below.

First a comment: the sales model only manages needs assessment and solution placement. Unfortunately it acts as of their ‘need’ were a isolated event. It’s not. Buyers live in a ’system’ that holds their Identified Problem in place and maintains it over time, creating work-arounds that become part of the system. Before buyers can make a purchase, their must be buy-in to the proposed change, and the buy-in must manage all of the people and policies and relationships involved in the work-around the buyer has in place. In other words, a buying decision is far more complex than just fixing a problem. Buying Facilitation® is a decision navigation model that helps buyers recognize and make their internal decisions and bring together the right people and so they can make a purchase. It’s an add-on to sales.

Here are the steps in selling with Buying Facilitation® at the front end. The first phase helps decisions get made to promote buy-in, change, and recognition of what needs to be addressed. We usually wait for buyers to do this, but now we can help. Have a look at the steps, and see how you can add them to what you’re doing.

Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.

Do NOT try to ‘get through’ the gatekeeper. She knows the best person to connect you with – she is your friend. And do NOT attempt to ‘go to the top.’ The top person is rarely ‘the decision maker’ and almost always delegates to the correct people. Sellers waste so much time trying to get to the CEO. Instead, ask for the CEO’s assistant, and tell her what you need, and she’ll get you to the right people. Question: who is in control of the conversation – you? or the Gatekeeper? It’s a no-brainer.

Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have them begin to examine how or if or why they would consider changing their status quo.

Until or unless prospects determine to make a change, it doesn’t matter whether you can see their need, your solution is perfect, they think they need you/your solution, they love your solution and you’re giving them great service, etc. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. Do you need to be working out more? It’s not about the gym. Using Facilitative Questions, prospects can collect their unconscious previous choices, and determine how, why, if, when they would consider adding new choices – like fixing a problem or choosing a solution.

One of the Facilitative Questions that I ask (as part of a series and not asked alone) when placing a sales training is: How would you know if it were time to add new sales skills to the ones you’re already offering your sales folks? This question gets them to think about the steps they need to take, the new choices they need to make, and if they are getting what they want now.

Remember: solutions are irrelevant at this stage. Facilitative Questions help the BUYER see the whole picture of what is going on strategically and tactically in their company, family, or system. Until or unless they know how to manage their system first, they will take no action. This has been left out of sales.

Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.

Facilitative Questions and Presumptive Summaries are used to help buyers look at their status quo with an unbiased eye. No matter what their ‘need’ or ‘problem’  if they don’t think they can change in a way that will maintain systems congruence, they will do nothing. Remember: the buyer’s environment/culture/system has lived with the Identified Problem until now, and can continue to do so. If they had had known how to resolve it differently, they would have resolved it already.

Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.

There are 3 levels of decisions necessary: systems, strategic, and tactical. Addressing them in this order is optimal. It’s important to note that things are rarely this simple: it’s usually an iterative process.

Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.

Once they determine that 1. their system would be willing to shift to add something/change/resolve something; 2. that their rules, relationships, people, are willing to change; 3. they know how to shift congruently, they will then be willing to bring in a new solution. Until or unless their status quo is reconfigured in a way that the insiders are willing to support, they will do nothing: the risk to their functioning is too high. Hence the longer-than-necessary sales cycle.

You sit and wait for them to do this anyway. They must do it with you or without you – so it might as well be with you.

Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.

Through your decision facilitation process, help the buyer recognize the right people to bring in. Usually they don’t know who it will be until way down the road when they’ve stumbled across the appropriate job descriptions… much like you don’t know all the trials you’ll face before you start a move. Prospects haven’t ever done this particular change before, and it takes a while for them to get it right. We can either help them navigate through, or we can wait. They must do it.

Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.

This step is about melding your solution with the entire range of issues they have to manage internally, including the people, policies, and relationships.

Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.

Once they do all of the above, they will know how to buy, and you can mention just those bits of data they need to know, to recognize how it fits within their entire picture. It’s not about the features and functions: How, exactly, will the Buying Decision Team know how to manage the new solution with their team, or bring one in so there is buy-in and nothing is disrupted.

Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.

This is part of a good sales job, of course.

WHAT CAN BE OMITTED

Develop marketing materials to professionally represent your solution either on-line or in person.

When working with KPMG, they shifted from their half a million dollar wizzy presentation to a $35,000 presentation then down to nothing. Once a buyer and their team recognize and manage all of the internal issues they must address, a large presentation is rather moot. First of all, you’re material is on-line. Second of all, they already know who you are and trust you (you’ve been on the Buying Decision Team with them). Third, they already know how to manage their buying decision process and how, exactly, your product will fit with their strategic and tactical issues. So a formal pitch is often no longer necessary.

These are not necessary at all:

Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect

This is a hold-over from another era. If your job is to first help buyers put together their decision team and figure out how to make buying decisions, your bright shiny face is irrelevant. You can do all of the above without meeting a client. And then when you get there, the entire Buying Decision Team will be there and you wouldn’t have wasted any time/visits.

Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

The sales model creates objections because it pushes data/solution info against a ‘closed system.’ When you hear an objection, it’s merely the system defending itself against change. Once you teach the system how to manage buy-in without disruption, there are no objections.

That’s it, folks. Let’s start a discussion. Let me know how your thinking has changed. And if you want to learn more, read my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it in which Buying Facilitation® and the new decision navigation system is developed in detail. And thanks for playing!

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Wanting to learn more? Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

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

The Steps of a Sale: from the buying decision to the close is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

A few weeks ago, I put up a contest. I thought we’d all look at the order of activities in a sales call as I see it: including both sales and a decision navigation, to help buyers recognize and manage their behind-the-scenes, private, and internal decision issues, and then make a purchase. In other words, adding the Buying Facilitation® model to the sales model (see recent post Buying Facilitation® and Sales: the dynamic duo), what would a seller’s activity look like.

Here are the original directions, and the list:

Below are 12 To-Dos, including the 10 steps of a sales cycle as I see them. They are out of order, and two of them (at least – probably three) are unnecessary. Please put them in the order you think they should be in, name the 2 or 3 that are unnecessary, and submit.

The first person to have the steps in the order that I believe is accurate as per Buying Facilitation® and how to help buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision and change issues, will get a free book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. The winner will be announced April 26. Please submit your answers in comment section of the linked post on sharondrewmorgen.com. And if you want, we can have an interactive webinar about this afterwards. Let me know if you’d like to and we’ll set it up.

Prioritize this list of 12 activities, by including 10 and omitting 2.

Note: for those who plan to use my books to get the correct order, I’ve changed some of the activities and wording so they don’t directly match other lists.

• Develop marketing materials to professionally represent your solution either on-line or in person.
• Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect
• Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.
• Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.
• Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.
• Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.
• Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.
• Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.
• Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have them begin to examine how or if or why they would consider changing their status quo.
• Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.
• Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.
• Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Join the contest by making your order in the comments section of my contest post.

Since none of you got this right, so far (although a few of you got close!), I’m going to give you a few hints. 1. only make an appointment to see anyone when/if the buyer’s entire Buying Decision Team is brought together, otherwise you’re wasting a lot of time; 2. you have nothing to sell if  have no understanding of how to go about their off-line buying decision activities – so pitches don’t happen until late in the buying decision cycle.

Ok. Enough hints. Go at it over the weekend. Really think about the differences between WHAT a buyer needs to buy, and HOW a buyer (and their decision team) go about managing their internal craziness in order to get buy-in to choose a solution.  On Monday, I’ll discuss what folks sent me, and give you my list and explain why I put things in the order I put them in. Thanks, folks.

sd

Contest ends Monday: one more chance to order sales activities is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Below are 12 To-Dos, including the 10 steps of a sales cycle as I see them. They are out of order, and two of them (at least – probably three) are unnecessary. Please put them in the order you think they should be in, name the 2 or 3 that are unnecessary, and submit.

The first person to have the steps in the order that I believe is accurate as per Buying Facilitation® and how to help buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision and change issues, will get a free book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. The winner will be announced April 26. Please submit your answers in comment section of this post on sharondrewmorgen.com. And if you want, we can have an interactive webinar about this afterwards. Let me know if you’d like to and we’ll set it up.

Note: for those who plan to use my books to get the correct order, I’ve changed some of the activities and wording so they don’t directly match other lists.

• Develop marketing materials to professionally represent your solution either on-line or in person.
• Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect
• Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.
• Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.
• Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.
• Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.
• Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.
• Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.
• Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have them begin to examine how or if or why they would consider changing their status quo.
• Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.
• Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.
• Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

I look forward to discussing your responses. I’m bound and determined to get us all adding new skills to the sales model, and hope this is one way we can all start thinking differently. I look forward to your thoughts. And thanks for playing with me :)

sd

For those of you wishing to learn Buying Facilitation® with me, I’ve just scheduled a public training [pdf] for May 19-21. I occasionally put these up on the site for those folks wanting to learn the whole model, with me teaching it. Unfortunately, I don’t actively solicit attendees, as there are only spots for a maximum of 18. If you have interest, and want to know more, either look on my other site www.newsalesparadigm.com under ‘events’ or call me at 512 457 0246.

Contest: the 10 Steps of a Sales Cycle is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Buying Facilitation® is a great model for helping buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes political and relationship issues that must achieve buy-in before they get consensus to purchase a solution – you know, that mysterious stuff buyers go through privately while we sit and wait for them to buy.

By using both two models consecutively, selling and buying becomes a very different experience than the one we are accustomed to: the timing is different, the skills are different, the outcomes are different, the relationship is different and the competitive and money factors fade away.

Indeed, sellers can enter the buying environment much, much earlier, be a coach as buyers gather the appropriate players and handle their buy-in issues, and lead them through all of the behind-the-scenes decisions they must  make by being a part of the Buying Decision team – not as a seller, but as a management consultant and change agent dedicated to buyers achieving excellence. They have to do this stuff anyway: might as well be with you. You sit and wait while they do it anyway.

THE BUYER’S DECISION JOURNEY FIRST, THEN PROBLEM RESOLUTION SECOND

By beginning the buyer/seller relationship with a different agenda and skill set as a neutral navigator and using unbiased, systems-based Facilitative Questions to help buyers think through their range of relationship/political issues (like the department heads that need to get along, or the pesky tech team who try to take over the initiative, or the boss that wants to use her favored vendor) you can lead buyers through the non-problem-based, confusing stuff they need address to help them chart a course through their pre-purchase decision issues.

And then, once they determine how and why and if and when they can resolve their problem with minimum disruption, know who will be involved, and the criteria they all need to meet to move forward with any change,  then you can start the process of understanding the specifics of their problem and know the right way to introduce your solution. First, neutral, unbiased change agent/coach. Second, gather data about full spectrum of need, and then place solution.

Let me break that down for you:

BUYING FACILITATION®

Step one: Make contact as a change agent. Lead a prospect through the discovery of where they are, what excellence would look like to them in the area your solution can resolve, and if there is a difference.

Step two: help the prospect discover all of the internal factors (many unknown, many historic, and all that they have to manage before considering doing anything different) that keep them where they are.

Step three: by using the right Facilitative Questions (based on helping prospect discover and manage their unconscious criteria), be placed on the Buying Decision Team to continue leading the buyer through all of the off-line, private decision issues they’ll need to address so they can garner buy-in.

Step four: continue to help prospects

• collect the right people,
• recognize their internal systems issues that are maintaining the status quo,
• help them re-organize,
• plot out the steps for adopting a solution that the whole Buying Decision Team would buy-in to,
• recognize any fall-out before they can even consider the right solution.

SALES

Step five: gather the appropriate data to see how your solution would fit and serve.

Step six: discuss your solution in detail, using the buyer’s buying criteria as they have discovered it, and introduced in a way that will teach the buyer how to manage the internal politics that you and the Buying Decision Team have just worked through.

SALES TODAY

In general the steps of sales today start with my Step Five (except when using the Internet as a lead generator, and then many companies start with Step Six, mistakenly assuming once the buyer makes contact they already know your solution fits and they are ready to buy). But make no mistake: buyers need to do the first steps anyway – with you or without you. It is here that you lose your sale.

How many times have you had the exact right solution and the buyer doesn’t buy? It’s not because your solution doesn’t fit or because they don’t like you or your price: it’s because they couldn’t get buy-in to do something different, or the internal politics demanded a different solution, or the status quo prevailed because they didn’t know how to keep their system in tact and determined that the risk and cost would be lower to do nothing.

You lose sales because buyers have a tough time navigating their internal decision issues, and sales doesn’t offer a model to help them do that.

Remember: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle – answers that most likely have absolutely nothing to do with your solution or their need, and everything to do with internal politics, relationships, and the unknown.

Buying Facilitation® is not sales. It’s a decision facilitation model that leads buyers through all of the internal navigation issues they must resolve privately and off-line before they get agreement to do anything different. Using sales, there are no skills to start where BF begins (As my book Dirty Little Secrets says over and over, don’t compare this to sales.) but you lose sales, lose time, lose money because you don’t.

Buyers are going to do this with you, or without you. And they do it very haltingly and inefficiently. Learn this model, add it to the front end of what you are doing now, and close more sales quicker – a lot more sales, a lot quicker.

Do you want to sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities, and you need skills to support both.

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Buying Facilitation® and Sales: the dynamic duo is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

2. Buyers will make no purchasing decisions until they get buy-in from the components (people, policies, initiatives, groups) that are in any way connected to, or adjacent to, their

Because we invariably meet our prospects before they have gone through their change activities and our sales cycle is longer than necessary, we enter at the wrong time, with the wrong focus, and get bad results.

Now we can be a support person at both ends of the buying decision: First, as a decision facilitator; next, as a solution provider.We will be able to help them recognize and manage their decision elements and be put on their Buying Decision Teams early on.

5. Until buyers understand, and know how to mitigate, the risks that a new solution will bring to their culture, they will do nothing.

Buyers begin solution discovery prematurely, without first understanding the route they will have to take to get buy-in for any systemic change or purchase.

Now we can help them understand and manage their risks, and get agreement for change and a purchase. If the outcome is not based on their need or our solution. Neither of us will initially understand the route buyers must take to get the systemic buy-in.

But our understanding of systems will help them get the right people and initiatives together quickly.

9. Buyers buy on unique, idiosyncratic criteria that are agreed to by their Buying Decision Team (people not necessarily directly involved with the Identified Problem but having some historic connection), not on the strength of their need, your product or service, or your relationship.

They buy for reasons that largely have nothing to do with us. And we sell for reasons that largely have nothing to do with them. This fact has kept buyers in their buying decision cycle longer than necessary.

Now we can help the Buying Decision Team discover their criteria so they can resolve their internal systems issues and move forward to a product purchase in approximately one-eighth the length of the sales cycle.

- – - – -

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I’ll give you three more secrets! And, go to the book site, Dirty Little Secrets and look at the cool freebies you’ll get from really smart people if you buy the new book! Not to mention, the really cool book you’ll get to read.

sd

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

Check out my new book coming out October 15: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters. Pre-purchase the book or buy the bundle.

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.

Two Days to Launch: a sneak preview of 3 of the Dirty Little Secrets is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

IS IT TIME TO TRULY HELP BUYERS BUY?

There are actually two major things a buyer must do prior to making a purchasing decision. Of course they must ultimately choose a supplier and a solution (that’s the role of sales). But they also must manage all of the off-line, behind-the scenes change issues that must take place internally so they can get buy-in to bring aboard something new (i.e. a solution). And this idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff buying decision activity is not addressed by the sales model – and yet it takes up 2/3 of the time it takes a buyer to do all they have to do before they buy.

We cannot be a direct part of this process. We are not there: we are outsiders, the conversations happen between colleagues, and we are not a part of the buyer’s team. Sure, we know (and learn) how to be professionals, and care, and understand. Yet the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers – not the ones we want them to have but answers based on the idiosyncratic needs of the internal system – is the length of the sales cycle.

One of the problems we’re having selling now is not about a buyer’s need, or our solution: it’s the internal, behind-the-scenes issues buyers are having difficulty managing internally.  And these issues are now very politically motivated and economy-driven.

Because sales only manages the solution/product placement end of the buying decision, it offers us no tool kit to help buyers manage the conversations that go on off-line, between departments, with old vendors, etc. And because it focuses on the very last thing buyers do – choosing  a solution – and not the nitty-gritty issues that cause buyers to buy (or not), we are basically out of control.

DO WE WANT TO SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY?

Sales is at a critical point: it’s stalling, taking far too long to close, and prospects aren’t even entering the conversation in ways they used to. Not to mention that our typical closing rates are far, far too low.

The problem is not with the economy, or with the buyer, or with the seller, or even with the need or the solution. The problem is with the sales model itself: it merely manages information gathering about ‘need’ and solution placement options to sell a solution.

As we continue to ‘push’ on the solution-placement end, it’s getting harder and harder to sell. But imagine if we adopted a new set of skills that actually worked WITH the buyer’s Buying Decision Team to help them manage their own internal decision making. Not based on their need or our solution, but based on the management of their off-line elements. Not using sales techniques, but using decision facilitation techniques. Not about ‘understanding’ but about leadership through change management.

To do that takes an additional skill set. Sales doesn’t do this. We’d have to learn how to facilitate the buyer’s off-line decision issues that often have little to do with a need or our solution.

Are we ready to change? Is it time to do something different? Is it worth the discomfort to add something new to our typical selling habits? And what’s the cost if we don’t.

Dirty Little Secrets Site

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

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

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process, and is meant to be read alongside of the new book, Dirty Little Secrets.

Why Sales Are Faltering In This Economy, And What To Do About It is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Let’s look at it this way: if a buyer’s buying decision were a 3 inch line, the sales piece would be the last 1/2 inch. Let me  give you an example with the client I blogged about yesterday. 

Good Practice sells a wonderful JIT on-line learning tool. If they approach a university as a prospect, there are several problems that the university would have to handle prior to considering bringing in an additional learning solution or a new provider:

1. the university has a learning and development department offers employees blended learning material for the employees: there is competition for eyeballs and budget; there are ego issues re developing new material.
2. the university has an HR department that oversees what material is given to employees, how budget is spent, who is on the decision team to invite in new providers or seek new solutions; they define the terms to ensure suppliers meet the rigor of their academic standards and the needs of the staff.
3. even more than budget, universities have, um, interesting time lines that drag on forever while different groups form and reform, initiatives are completed one at a time, and people shift their jobs.
4. these folks have really good tech departments that just love designing new programs.

In other words, their internal system is relatively incomprehensible (even to themselves) and sometimes in competition. Until or unless they are able to manage all of the above internal factors, it makes no sense to pitch a product or discuss need. And an outsider is not privy to, or part of, these discussions. But they can be with Buying Facilitation®.

BUYING FACILITATION® SEQUENCES AND CLARIFIES INTERNAL DECISION MAKING

Buying Facilitation® helps them sequentially pull together all of the above issues so they can look at their possibilities, weigh what they have now against some future excellence, figure out how to bring together all of their decision points, and see what they need from outside vs. what they can do themselves. But it’s based on the buyer’s definition of excellence – not ours. And sometimes, they want to do it all themselves but may discover they cannot.

Re this last point, one of our Facilitative Questions to these university groups is:

What is stopping you and your tech folks from designing the sort of JIT online learning tools that will give your managers the type of skills they need to achieve the excellence they seek?

This is asked about 1/3 the way down the sequential Funnel: if the tech team thinks it has the time and bandwidth to design new tools, they will not bring in anyone from outside to do it.

Instead of directing a conversation around ‘need’ or ’solution’ – which is absolutely necessary AFTER they’ve made their internal decisions and gotten buy-in from HR and L&D and the tech team - Buying Facilitation® teaches them FIRST how to: get internal buy-in for adding a new solution, bring together a Buying Decision Team, figure out what excellence looks like, and resolve internal issues on their own…but with us on their Team.

They have to do this anyway, and the time it takes them to do it is the length of the sales cycle. Plus, I’d rather be on their team as they decide. If they can do it all on their own, they wouldn’t have bought me anyway and I can save myself months of follow-on conversations and have served them.

We have always sat and waited for buyers to do this behind-the-scenes stuff. And sales doesn’t manage it. With Buying Facilitation®, we can do this WITH them – and THEN we can sell.

My new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it is about the systems involved in a buying decision, and the change management involved. Hang in there: it will be out October 1. In the meantime you may want to look at 2 free chapters from the ebook Buying Facilitation® that partners the new book.

It’s been an interesting 20 years, talking about decision facilitation in the field of sales, with sales focusing on solution placement. What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add a new skill set to the one you’re already using?

sd

Buying Facilitation® Comes Before Sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

These sales folks are long-term professionals, responsible for millions of dollars of business annually. Yet they are discovering wholly new responses and possibilities for starting client relationships.

What are they doing differently from what they used to do? They are directing their efforts to supporting the off-line issues prospects have to address before they are in a position to consider making a buying decision. They are not using sales techniques. They are not gathering data, or understanding needs, or pitching. But their results are far more successful than if they were selling.

My client sells JIT learning solutions to large numbers of users in corporations, universities, and government agencies. Usually, their sales cycles are long because of the different types of decision makers involved: L&D, HR, technology, Training. Now, using Buying Facilitation, with a single cold call, they are learning how to efficiently lead buyers through their normally confusing journey through internal buy-in for change.

Here is what my clients are noticing on these cold calls:

1. time: cold calls are going from an average of 4 minutes to 24 minutes.
2. acceptance: without asking for a meeting, they are being asked to come in for face-to-face meetings in order to meet the whole Buying Decision Team.
3. respect: within the first 15 minutes of the cold call, their opinion is being sought and prospects are asking how to best bring my client’s solution into their environment.
4. creativity: the prospects are opening to new possibilities that they hadn’t considered, with initial plans to use my client’s solution as part of their internal resources.
5. rapport: laughter, fun, teasing, collaboration. Within minutes they are in a “We Space.” It’s delightful to hear.
6. numbers: they are going from getting 10-15% agreement for a face  meeting, to being asked to come in and present about 40% of the time (with no numbers yet available as to how that will increase by the second call).

FACILITATING DECISIONS

Are we selling? Well, no. But the buyers are being given the tools to put together the right decision teams and make plans to design internal change initiatives that include my client’s product. On the first call.

By helping buyers manage their off-line decision-making and helping them understand and consider how to welcome and manage change, they are opening the door to a sale, entering the buyer’s environment far earlier than they could if they were selling, and becoming part of the Buying Decision Team on a cold call. They are indeed collapsing the sales cycle.

Most of all, they are truly serving their prospects and helping them discover their own excellence. If we can’t help our buyers achieve excellence, we’ve got nothing to sell anyway.

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p.s. If you want to contact my client Peter Casebow to find out how he is finding the change, and how it is affecting his business, email him.

A Case Study In Buying Facilitation® is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

What has finally become obvious (and I’d like to think that I had something to do with it being so obvious) is the yawning gap between the Implicit buying decisions buyers must make on their own, and the Explicit ones that sellers play such a large part in helping them make.

The Explicit decisions include everything to do with fixing the need (I call it an Identified Problem – certainly not ‘pain’ cuz they would have fixed it already if it were ‘pain’): making sure the issues are resolved and work far more efficient, possibly even Excellently; that the decision makers are happy and make sure the solution fits well and is affordable with minimum risk; that the sellers are available before, during, and after to manage the implementation, the fit, and making the buyers comfortable with their choices. Once the Explicit decisions are made, the solution is purchased.

But if that were all it took,  we’d be closing a helluva lot more sales than we’re closing. The problem is the Implicit decisions.

What happens when the guy in the next department doesn’t want to collaborate – and you share one tech team and budget? What happens when there is no precedent for bringing in an external vendor? How does it get managed when the Senior Manager wants a solution and has the budget for it, but the team doesn’t want anyone to come in. What about when the current vendor has been around for a decade, works in every department with great professionalism, and everyone wants this vendor to just design something new rather than bring in a new vendor? And what about the work-around that’s been managing the Problem Space until they choose a better solution – does Fred in Accounting get fired because the boss is bringing in a new accounting package?

Buyers have managed these decisions on their own while we wait. There is really no way that an outsider – even a smart one – can understand all of the unconscious, historic, hidden, mysterious, and highly personal decisions that need to get handled before buy-in can occur. Sales has had no model to help buyers manage these implicit decisions. One of the ‘dirty little secrets’ that I talk about in my upcoming book (The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it) is that the buyers have no idea how they are going to handle these decision issues either, if for no other reason than they don’t know what they are going to find when the start picking up the rocks. In other words, sales enters the buying decision cycle far too early.

One of the problems is that because the buyers don’t know the exact route they need to take, and sellers can’t know these personal and idiosyncratic systems issues, no one really knows how to manage the Implicit decisions. I’ve coded the system behind how decisions get made in systems (cultures, environments) and can lead folks down their decision cycle generically so they can pick up the pieces they need to address along the way and bring in the right people. Very often, they can figure this out immediately with me, rather than taking one month or one year, and deciding to bring together their buying decision team for a phone meeting (or whatever) within a week of our first conversation. And we do this consistently, time after time, in every industry or size of sale.

Buyers have to go down this route anyway, and goodness knows we sit and wait for them while they figure it out. This fact alone is the cause of the huge delay in the sales cycle.

I’m  not competing with sales; I’m adding a new piece – a front end, if you will – to the typical sales model. It’s not about gathering data. It’s not about understanding the buyer’s needs. It’s not about ‘being there’ when they are ready (Buying Facilitation teaches them how to be ready). It’s  not about becoming a trusted advisor or a relationship manager.

It’s about being a decision facilitator and taking a leadership role to help buyers walk through the Implicit stages of their buying decision process BEFORE they are ready to answer questions about their Explicit needs.

Let’s start using a two pronged approach to sales: first help buyers walk through their unconscious Implicit decisions; then they can walk with us through their conscious Explicit decisions. Because by not doing this we’re losing a lot of sales, spending too long in the sales cycle, causing objections (yes, we cause our own objections) and NOT serving our buyers.

So, do me a favor: start thinking of sales as a two-phased process, and the sales models we’ve been using for decades handle the Explicit decisions. And Buying Facilitation(R) – which is NOT SALES but a decision facilitation model that handles buy-in – can handle the Implicit. After all, would you rather sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities.

I’ve been teaching this stuff for over 20 years, and we have had quite extraordinary results (remember that it’s NOT SALES) with many global corporations in every industry.

For more, go to www.newsalesparadigm.com

Buying Decisions: The Implicit Vs. The Explicit 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