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

There is no way to truly understand anything else.

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

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

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

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

Rep: What? I just need to know.

SDM: Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN DO BUYERS START FIGURING OUT STUFF?

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

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

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

WHAT IS BEHIND THE SCENES?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

Check out my new book coming out October 15: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements. I’ll be doing a webinar on the material close to the launch date, so stay tuned.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that inluences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

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

I have a question: if your job is to get people to buy your solution, why do you spend so much time doing stuff that doesn’t bring in business?

I  recently spoke with a sales guy who told me that for two years he’s been making appointments to do presentations for a relatively small ticket solution, and then waiting for a year before 30% of the the buyers purchased. His biggest challenge was getting the appointment. Do the numbers and it turns out that the first 90% of the prospects wouldn’t give him an appointment.

Why would anyone work so hard just to close 3% of their prospects? And why is he getting paid to waste so much time and resource? And And, why does he keep doing it that way if  it’s a failed prospecting model?

Why? Because these sorts of low numbers are expected. Because that’s what sellers do. Because they’ve never learned the process of helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decisions they need to make.

Think of this:                          _____________________________________*_____

The product sale is at the end of the line, after the star. It’s merely a sliver of the buying decision process buyers address on the way to making a purchase. They do the lion’s share of their decision making off-line. That other part of the line, on the left. And you’re not there with them.

So what, exactly, is your job? Buyers are doing the first 80% on their own; you are getting rejected 90% of the time on that sliver because you’re entering the buying decision at the wrong time; and you’re complaining that the buyer is stupid.

Your job is to help buyers make buying decisions – not sell. Sales won’t get you more than what you’re getting now. Is that enough? Seems to me you deserve more.

What needs to happen for you to actually be willing to stop selling, and use another set of skills to help buyers manage their buying decision process?

Let’s change your job to a decision facilitator. Until or unless buyers figure out when or what to buy, and from whom, and their off-line issues are ready to allow them to go through some sort of change, they won’t do anything, regardless of their need and your solution.

Change your job.

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What Is The Job Of A Seller? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Let’s begin with my friend Jeff Thull. Jeff’s work (Exceptional Selling) most parallel’s my own. He works with companies doing complex sales, and connects the solutions to the client’s business drivers. He’s prolific, professional, and certainly is focused on incorporating the buying end into the sales effort. Buying Facilitation would add yet another tool into Jeff’s fabulous toolbox of skills, and would actually add another layer of systems management to the very front end of the seller/buyer relationship and actually offer an additional toolkit for the buyer to recognize, and manage, all of the systemic elements that need to be included, shifted, and reconfigured for any change to take place. Not only would Buying Facilitation add to Jeff’s current (amazing, professional) skills set by minimizing the purchasing
decision and time it takes to garner internal management decisions, it would also support effortless buy-in for the client side and also parallel Jeff’s focus on ethical, values-based collaboration.

http://www.primeresource.com/

Brian Tracy is of course, well, Brian Tracy. He’s not only the carrier of SALES as we’ve known it, but he’s smart, kind, professional, and really cares about people. He was certainly very giving to me when I needed a friend’s ear. Brian has more product than any other sales professional out there, and it’s all professionally done and very relevant to the seller who is seeking to learn the basics: give your customer what they want, at the price they want to pay, and give them the service they deserve. Buying Facilitation could easily tack on to Brian’s thinking: give sellers additional tools that are not about product but are geared to help the buyer make their best decision (the ones that are outside of the seller’s purview – the ones that the buyer’s have to make privately, internally, to be ready to make a buying decision that their status quo can tolerate). Once they know how to line up their internal decision process, then the pitching and information gathering, the presentations and the follow ups all become easier. I look forward to getting feedback from those of you willing to try adding Buying Facilitation to what you’re already doing with Brians work.  http://www.briantracy.com/

Tony
Alessandra is adding streetsmarts into the equation: how does it REALLY get done. And, Tony has built several  assessment tools to help you figure it out. He’s an amazing speaker. Really fun and professional, and his clients adore him. Adding Buying Facilitation to his work would make the decision making even quicker, while maintaining all of Tony’s unique take on the buyer/seller relationships. http://www.tonyalessandra.com/

Tomorrow I’ll take this even further. In the meantime, I look forward to some feedback.

Adding Buying Facilitation® to Consultative Sales: Friends is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com