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 people 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.

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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

You have been taught to be curious about needs. Do prospects need your solution? Are they in ‘pain’? The moment — the very moment — you hear that a ‘need’ matches your solution, you’re off and running. And you (wrongly) assume you have a prospect.

STOP TRYING TO SELL SO SOON

Here are some erroneous assumptions:

• you just need to get in front of someone, and once they understand the brilliance of your solution they will be buyers;
• if your solution matches their need, all you have to do is sell properly (and be interested, caring, smart, yada yada) and they will buy;
• you need to educate your buyer because until they understand your solution they won’t understand the value;
• you need to understand everything you can about your buyer so you’ll sound intelligent and engender trust and can position your solution accordingly.

I’m here to tell you that all of the above are false. A buyer cannot buy (learn all of the issues involved in the decision to buy in my latest book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) until

1. all of the members of the Buying Decision Team have put in their two cents about what they need a solution to do;
2. they know that a beloved vendor, or their internal resource (their own tech team, for example) cannot solve their problem;
3. they get the necessary buy-in from everyone who will touch the solution;
4. they know know how to resolve their problem without major disruption.

Here is the hardest thing for a seller to understand and believe: the only thing you will ever know about your buyer is how their need might be served by your solution from the one or two people you’re talking to.

THE REASONS YOU’LL NEVER KNOW YOUR BUYER

Using the sales model alone (i.e. without putting Buying Facilitation® on the front end) you will never know the following:

• what is going on internally, behind-the-scenes, that has created and maintained their problem, and the reason it hasn’t been resolved until now.
• the criteria they, as Buying Decision Team, will use to choose a solution or a vendor.
• how they will go about determining who should be on the Buying Decision Team and what internal political factors bias these choices.
• what sort of havoc your solution will play with the status quo if the folks inside don’t figure out how to resolve the internal systems issues first.

Buyers do not want your solution. They want to resolve a business problem. Your solution is the last thing they want. I recently heard a VP of Sales Ops for a tech company tell me that they had a very long sales cycle, but there was only one buyer (the CIO) and he couldn’t figure out what took him so long.

He totally forgot that there are several departments that must buy-in to new technology; that the CIO undoubtedly delegated all or part of the solution; that the internal tech guys would fight tooth and nail before allowing yet another tech solution to come in and make a mess of what they have in place.

If he used Buying Facilitation®, he could:

• teach the prospect how to put together a Buying Decision Team on the first call.
• lead the buyer through all of the systemic change management issues that he’d need to address to create an openning and willingness for the folks to bring in something new — they would understand how their jobs would change and be ok with that.
• help prospects understand how all of the current and new technology would fit and work together;
• help prospects understsand the upsides and downsides of the learning curve, and how to mitigate or get buy-in around the learning curve.

You do not know how your buyer will manage any of that. You merely know what you think they need. And if that were enough, you’d be closing a helluva lot more sales.

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Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to learn all of the issues buyers face when they are considering a purchase.

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

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

You think know your buyer. You don’t. is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

What would need to be true if your priority were to truly serve a customer? Would you need to get paid more? Would there have to be some sort of directive from the top? Would you need to learn new skills? Would your job be different? What would it look like? What would be different?

Years ago I attempted to get a publisher for a book about customer centric selling (a decade before that term became commonplace) and was told there wouldn’t be a market for it. The book was based on concentric circles, with the customer in the middle circle, and technology and sales in the next outter circle, and management, etc. moving out to the largest/last circle where the Board sat. The idea being that everything everyone did was based on the central concept of serving the customer.

Instead, we have corporations that put customers in different silos with different people serving each of their needs – silos that don’t talk to each other, I might add. We promise clients things we cannot do because we’re told we’re not allowed to. We don’t return phone calls because we get busy, and expect customers to understand. We change technology, or programs, because it’s expedient, without keeping the customer in mind. We develop solutions because they fit with our product line, rather than targeting them to the customer’s wishes. We outsource our help desks to other countries because it’s cheaper, and we don’t heed customer complaints about service.

OUR JOB IS TO SERVE

I believe a seller’s priority is to serve clients. It’s the only job a seller has. If a solution is the correct way to serve, then that’s what’s needed. If just a discussion and support for a different solution is what they need – even if it’s a competitor’s – so be it.

We’re in it for the life cycle of a client, not just one transaction, so we must set up our technology, our internal report structure, our support services, with our customer’s needs at the forefront.

And we must get rid of those damn silos. Customers hate when they get put on hold for each person they need to speak with for each problem, or when they speak with one team member who knows nothing of a conversation they had with a different team member.

WHAT SKILLS DO WE NEED

Do our sales skills give us the capability to serve our clients in a way they need to be served?

I suspect our sales skills do little more than attempt to sell our solutions. What would we need to be doing differently if our jobs were to really, really serve our clients? And what skills would we need?

Of course I”m going to talk about how Buying Facilitation® will help you help the client navigate through their change management journey and bring all of the right people together in a way that takes them forever to do on their own. But think about it: facilitating the buying decision path does more than serve our customers: it shortens the sales cycle, differentiates us, and gives us the tools to be great Trusted Advisors.

So let’s make ‘serving’ a priority, shall we? Facilitating our clients, making more money, helping our company, and making everyone’s lives easier.

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Listen to Sharon Drew do Buying Facilitation® and hear the difference between sales and helping buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision issues.

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

What is a seller’s priority? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

They split the sales team into an Inside Sales group that makes appointments, and Corporate and Field Sales teams to close them. The structure, as well as the compensation, promotes failure: Inside Sales is paid per appointment (with a tendency to push for an appointment with whomever they speak with, regardless of their appropriateness); the other sales functions are paid based on how many they close.

It’s a perfect storm: inappropriate leads are given to sellers who spend gobs of time pushing a solution to whomever ends up agreeing to an appointment (who may not be appropriate buyers, and certainly don’t represent all those who might buy), and get a very low percentage of closed sales. So the company hires more and more Inside Sales reps to get appointments, hoping that a higher percent of the appointment will result.

DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A SALE OR AN APPOINTMENT?

My clients came to me complaining of a very low close rate. It never occured to them that just maybe there is a problem with their selling model; they manage the problem by adding sales reps. They believe success is at their fingertips by playing the numbers game!

There is a very large elephant in the room here: Before a buyer can buy they must manage the behind-the-scenes change management issues that address the disruption, the people, the relationships, the rules, that must be handled behind-the-scenes to get the buy-in necessary to bring in a new solution in. Sales enters at the point of  ‘need’… but that’s the tail end of the buyer’s buying decision path.

Our continued fascination with making an appointment as a precursor to making a sale is based on the belief that a buyer will buy based on the strength of the presentation. And although we get extremely low closing rates, we continue to do it and often throw more sellers at the problem, doing the same activity. That’s the definition of insanity!

Imagine if it’s possible to discover leads/prospects who can be made ready to buy without making an appointment!

Imagine if it’s possible to close the buying decision path gap in a fraction of the time and closing 5x more sales without introducing your solution – or pitching, presenting, or creating a proposal.

START WITH A DIFFERENT SET OF ASSUMPTIONS

Once you begin with the assumption that buyers just need to understand your solution and how it would benefit them, you’re a solution looking for a problem. Then your sales folks are order takers, or tele-sales reps, or consultants running around looking busy. But all sales – regardless of the industry - close between 2-7%. Where do the rest go? And why are you pitching, wasting time, or making appointments with, folks who will never buy?

You end up hiring more and more sales folks to close fewer and fewer sales… especially these days when Buying Decision Teams are more diverse in geography and function.

Right now you are paying your sales folks to find the low-hanging fruit: buyers who most probably would have found you and bought from you anyway.

Let’s compensate our sales folks for helping buyers navigate through the entire buying decision path and help buyers where they need the most help to solve a problem – managing the buy-in of all who will touch the solution - something sales does not do at the moment, as it remains focused on needs assessment and solution placement.

Once you add Buying Facilitation® to your seller’s skill set, you will be able to close much more business. Because now you’re spending far, far too much time following prospects who will never close and paying your sales people for the wasted effort.

I’ve heard sellers tell me that they didn’t need to learn BF because they earn 6 figures doing what they are doing badly. Imagine if you compensated your sales folks on an expectation that they close 40% of their leads. It’s very possible – my clients do that easily. Then, there would be no reason to hire more folks just to get the numbers you’re trying to get. And you would have a much higher ROI.

Stop compensating your sales folks on meager expectations. Stop having your sales folks set up appointments first. Start with the very first ‘Hello’ and teach them how to buy. Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy?

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Buy Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and learn the difference between selling and managing the buying path.

Listen to Sharon Drew make prospecting calls on this MP3.

Compensating our sales folks 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

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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 believe we are currently paying our sales folks to waste 90% of their time. They are spending time  pushing solution information to the wrong people at the wrong time, and have no idea who will actually close until, well, until they don’t.

With its focus on placing solutions, the current sales model (including marketing automation) has no way to manage the natural resistance of groups while they figure out their pre-purchase change management strategies. Sellers merely catch the low hanging fruit and the sales model does not faciliate the buyer’s complete – and confusing - decision path.

If we were paying sellers according to what  they SHOULD be closing they’d be earning a fraction of what they are earning. In reality, we can  close twice as much business with half the sales force.

EXTENDING EXPECTATION: SELLERS SHOULD BE CLOSING MORE

Unfortunately, we start off by assuming that if we find folks who COULD buy our solution, and have a recognized NEED, that they are prospects. If this were true, we’d be closing a helluva lot more sales.

Sellers spend 90% of their time attempting to close sales that will never close. The sales model doesn’t offer a skill set to help buyers with the part that keeps them from buying: they must manage their confusing, political change management issues along their decision path. And yet the field resists learning Buying Facilitation®:  As someone recently said to me: Why should I bother learning how to help buyers manage their change issues when I already make a good salary closing the paltry sum I’m closing?

According to Forrester, 80% of our prospects buy a solution similar to ours (or ours) within 2 years of having contact with a sales rep. What does this tell us? The time it takes buyers to get their ducks in a row to get internal agreement to buy is the length of the sales cycle. We must add a skill set to help facilitate the buy-in journey and actually teach buyers how to find their ducks and get them quacking.

EXPAND THE SALES JOB TO ENCOMPASS THE ENTIRE DECISION PATH

Our prospects aren’t buyers. Typical closing rates are  less than 10%  (7% in conventional sales; less than 1% from marketing automation; 2% in banking and insurance). When we close,  we are merely showing up around the time the buyer shows up with their checkbook and have already done their behind-the-scenes work.

The statistical average of closing a sale by following each prospect with an apparent need (15 calls over 9 months) is greater than what we’re actually closing. By containing our sales activities to the solution choice, we fail to close all those who will buy once they get their internal buy-in.

A seller’s performance and pay is currently dependent on whether or not a buyer is ready, willing, and able to buy AT THE TIME THE SELLER IS FOLLOWING THEM.  Using the sales model, we have no idea who is going to buy at the start of the  sales journey.

Apparently, companies assume

• there is no way to tell who will buy,
• it’s not possible to enter the private world buyers live in to  enable them to manage, their decision path more quickly,
• buyers are stupid or they’d buy more/better/faster,
• it’s not a sellers fault if prospects they have been following (and are most probably in the pipeline) don’t buy.

Why not assume that the performance of the sales folks is poor because of  the sales model itself. By merely addressing the last 10% of  the buyer’s decision, and with no skills that would  faciliate the entire buying journey, starting with the buy-in, change management, political issues buyers must manage before they can buy, we are not making it easy for buyers (who need a solution to manage merely a portion of their internal problems). Indeed, adding Buying Facilitation® to the front end of sales skills mitigates the buy-in issues by adding facilitation skills.

BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES THE BUYING DECISION JOURNEY

Imagine if the sales job was to first enter the behind-the-scenes buying decision path and help buyers navigate through all of the non-needs-related decisions they must make and buy-in they must get (focusing on internal relationships, politics, strategies, etc) en route to choosing a solution. Then they would collapse the time it takes for buy-in to happen by half, and triple the number of folks who buy.

Imagine if sellers were paid only on closed sales (rather than spending over 90% of their activity on chasing leads/prospects who will never close) with an assumption that it’s possible to close 5x what they are currently closing?

Imagine if sellers started a conversation by helping manage buy-in. They’d know, from first call, exactly who would close and only spend time on buyers.

Sellers can increase their performance by at least a factor of 5. Knowing this, would you still keep paying them the same base salary? or continue hiring more sales folks to get the sales you need?

Is it worth a test to trial Buying Facilitation® to a pilot group and see the difference? Call me and we’ll discuss options. Then you can pay your sellers what they are really worth — a lot.

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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; get an MP3 to hear Sharon Drew using the model; contact us to learn about training your sales folks.

Buying Facilitation® licensing program: July 1-7, Austin TX.

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

What are we paying our sales folks to do? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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

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

SELLERS MUST CARVE OUT A NEW JOB

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

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

Folks, here are your choices:

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

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

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

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

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

Do you know which of the opportunities are the top 10 – and are you certain they are the top 10? How are you and your team – VP of sales, sales execs and managers – connecting with the prospects to know what they need to ‘be ready to buy’ ? How do you know, from where you are sitting, at what stage of the buying decision path they are on?

And how do you define ‘opportunity?’

THE FRONT END VS. THE BACK END OF THE BUYING PATH

Sales merely manages the last 10% of the buyer’s journey. It has no capacity to address the private, off-line, and often unconscious (certainly not based on needs or solution choice) aspects of a decision path that are, by definition, idiosyncratic. Sales was designed merely to assess need and place a solution.

Here are a few things buyers must do before they can buy. As I introduce each one, see if you can determine where your buyer is on this path, because until they complete each of these they will not buy, regardless of their needs or how well your solution fits, or how much ‘pain’ they are in.

1. get all of the right people onto the Buying Decision Team (BDT). Each BDT member brings their own criteria for a solution, and the solution requirements will not be stabilized until everyone puts in their 2 cents. Presenting from, or gathering data from, anything less than the whole BDT will result in insufficient data to choose a solution – or pitch – on.
2. get buy-in from everyone who will touch the solution. If a solution is chosen without the requisite buy-in, the system will face massive chaos/disruption.
3. all of the people, policies, historic vendors, old technology, systems issues, must know how they will shift when something new is added. Will they need to outsource staff? Where? When? Who? Who will supervise? Project lead? What happens to their current work load?

Just because we see a problem and have a great solution, doesn’t mean the buyer is ready, willing, and able to buy – otherwise you’d close a lot more sales.

Why are prospects in your pipeline?

What criteria of yours have placed them there?

How accurate are you with your projections? And why aren’t they more accurate?

What’s the difference between someone who will buy and someone who might initially look like a buyer but isn’t? And how do you know the difference?

So long as you place prospects in your pipeline because you believe 1. the buyer is ready, 2. they have the money, 3. they know they need your solution, and/or 4. they like you and are in ‘pain’, you will have a wildly fluctuating success rate.

Here is what you should know before putting a prospect onto the pipeline:

1. that every single one of the Buying Decision Team members is on board, and bought in to making a change and a purchase;
2. that there is a change management/implementation plan – that the seller is a part of – for when the solution will be purchased;
3. that any of the buy-in or change problems are addressed with anyone who will touch the solution;
4. that all existing technology and jobs that will be effected by the solution will be somehow included into the solution purchase so there are no loose ends or mystery.

Just because a seller thinks a buyer is ready doesn’t mean the prospect belongs in the pipeline.

Manage your pipeline by managing the buying decision path. Otherwise, your forecasting is ineffective. Buying Facilitation® will teach you how to manage the buying journey and understand exactly when, who, why, and how the solution will be purchased. Then you can forecast with accuracy.

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Fire up your sales folks at your next sales conference, have Sharon Drew give your keynote.

Look at our Learning Accelerators to add some new skills to your sales so you can manage your pipeline effectively.

Learn how buyer’s decide: read two sample chapters of Sharon Drew’s latest book Dirty Little Secrets.

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

Pipeline management: is your forecasting accurate? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

For the past 23 years (but who is counting) I have been offering sales folks the means to enter the buying path at the start of the buying decision journey – beginning with one person’s idea, and well before the entire Buying Decision Team is formed. I know every single step that a buyer and the team go through, and when my clients use Buying Facilitation®, they help them efficiently navigate through their own behind-the-scenes processes. But the marketing automation field is entering too late in the buying decision to make a difference, and is gathering insufficient data to help the buyer buy.

Once I realized how the marketing automation field was directing their marketing promises, I called all of the marketing automation firms and suggested that if they really wanted to enter the path earlier, we could partner. But I was met with controlled derision: they were right and I was wrong. So simple in their eyes: Gather data on contact sheets, and then figure out who is a buyer. Right.

Now, with clients running around screaming about their paucity of success: they are not delivering on their promises. They are not closing business effectively, not lead scoring accurately, not qualifying properly, and are not following the buy cycle at the right place with the right data. Of course they’re not.  They are entering far too late.

But now they’ve got a problem. How can they fulfill their (false) promises? They have spent 3+ years, bazillions of bucks, and political capitol with clients, and how can they admit defeat and add something new?

For me, it’s so frustrating watching the mess going on. Folks complaining. Other companies growing up quickly attempting to fill in the gaps – but all still focusing on the last 10% of the buying path.

It’s technology, for goodness sakes!!! They can add whatever they want, start wherever they want, collect whatever they program in! Why are all of the egos showing up – especially in the face of  proven failure! And I LOVE the way they reconfigure the numbers so it appears they are being successful.

But when you ask them: where, precisely, is the Lead in the buying decision path? What part of the Buying Decision Team do they make up – and how many of the full Buying Decision Team is on board? Of all of the folks who will touch the solution and need to add input to the final solution, who is involved? Who needs to be but isn’t? How will all of the change management issues be addressed pre purchase?

And my favorite: how are you scoring your leads? The answer to that one: it’s subjective, and, um, well, um, we really don’t think we’ve got it right.

I know what buyers need to do before they buy.  It’s so painful watching the mess they are making. I’ve got the golden egg, I’m open to finding new ways to partner and collaborate, I’m trying to make a difference – but the field is truly committed to failure and has been for decades.

Makes me want to get out of the field and find folks who truly seek success. Makes me question why I’ve spent so much of my life trying to make a difference in a field that just wants to fail.

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

Trying to make a difference in a field that enjoys failure is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

As we continue to seek better ways to do the same things that failed before ( look at the numbers below, all industry numbers or from averages of my global clients) I think our industry might be facing extinction.

We continue to ‘understand’ more and ‘push’ harder, follow footprints and nuture. But our close rates remain well below 10% because we are focusing on the wrong end of the buying decision journey.  Can you imagine any other industry where a lower-than-10% success rate is deemed ‘success’? Would you go on a plane with that success rate? Or visit a doc?

THE HARD REALITY

• We close .6758% of our leads if we begin the dialogue by seeking an appointment.
• We close 17% of the prospects we get appointments with – but we lose over 90% of the full spectrum of prospects by seeking appointments as our first outcome.
• When using conventional (i.e. non marketing automation) sales, we close 7% and have closed this number consistently for decades, regardless of the sales model.
• We spend 90% of our time scoring/nurturing leads/names – 93% of whom won’t buy using conventional sales approaches; 25% of  the total would buy if they were facilitated earlier in their buying journey.
• We close 10% of our proposals, wasting 90% of our time.
• We waste 85% of our time attempting to present to prospects who have claimed ‘interest’ but are nowhere near ready to buy.
• 80% of our prospects will buy a solution similar to ours within 2 years of speaking with us – but not from us because they haven’t figured out how to buy/change and get the appropriate buy-in.

The problems causing all of the above statistics are all based on where, how, and why, we enter the buyer’s world. We are

1. entering at the back end of the buying journey,
2. treating ’needs’ as if they were isolated events rather than part of a functioning system,
3. ignoring the behind-the-scenes, political and relationship issues buyers must address before they can buy,
4. acting as if they have already completed their change management piece and are merely choosing the best solution,
5. entering too early with a solution when it takes time for the entire Buying Decision Team to form is the length of the sales cycle; no purchase will happen until all of their input is included in a solution choice.

With a focus on needs assessment and solution placement, we sit helplessly while our buyers are facing confusion along the route of their ever-more-complex buying journeys. With marketing automation keeping us out of the loop until late in the buy cycle, we don’t have the personal ability to influence buying behavior as we once did.

And we have little capability to qualify – regardless of the selling model used. We’re kinda assuming that because it LOOKS like it might be a lead, that it IS a lead. But it’s merely a name. In fact, sales is becoming transactional.

FOCUS ON INFLUENCING THE BUYING JOURNEY, NOT MAKING THE SALE

Buying Facilitation™ can dramatically shift these numbers because we enter differently and at a far earlier place, use different skills, have different goals and outcomes, and get very very different responses and results.

Someone recently asked me why the sales community fights with me, when all that’s necessary is adding a front end to what is already being done. My answer: I have no idea.

Stop fighting me. Unless you love the results your getting and aren’t wasting more than, oh, 15% of your time on deals that won’t close, or don’t mind losing prospects that could become buyers if you managed the entire buying decision journey from the start.

If you were 100 pounds overweight, would you fight a doc that tells you you need to lose weight? You can see that problem and at least believe that losing weight would be a great idea. But when I give you the numbers in the selling industry, you fight and tell me that you want to continue failing. You tell me that those numbers don’t apply to you. Or YOU do it so much better, but your teammates don’t. Or you start counting from your presentation.

WHY CARE ABOUT THE BUYING DECISION JOURNEY?

Why does helping the buying decision journey give you different numbers?

• Because the time it takes the buyer to recognize and manage all of the internal people/policy issues that will shift as a result of a purchase is the length of the buy cycle.
• Because until all of the Buying Decision Team members are on board they don’t even know the full fact pattern of their need.
• Because they will say ‘no’ to an appointment until they have a handle on the internal change management issues and the folks who need to be involved.
• Because unless you are able to use your first call to help prospects set up their Buying Decision Team, you will continue to have 3 or 4 meetings over 6 months rather than get an appointment with the full Buying Decision Team on the first – and possibly only – meeting.
• Because you are pitching, presenting, and proposing the wrong information – or information they do not know they need yet, or information that has not-enough people to understand at an early place in the decision cycle.

So you’ll close much, much quicker if you enter as a decision facilitator. You will find buyers who didn’t think they were ready and help them get ready quickly (and no, it’s not solution-focused). You will find prospects who didn’t know they were prospects, and get rid of those who really aren’t ever going to be buyers… on the first call. You will make the right appointment with the right people and the right folks will show up.

No more time wasting. No more sequenced appointments as the whole team gets on board. No more following bad leads. No more waiting for sales to close, with an inability to forecast.

That’s why you should care about the buying decision journey. That’s why you should add Buying Facilitation™ to the front end of what you are doing now. Otherwise, marketing automation is going to take over your job. And maybe then you’ll end up on the buy side with  your new job, and understand what I’ve been talking about all these years.

Just saying.

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Want to learn Buying Facilitation™? check out these learning products.

• MP3 – audios in which I prospect, cold call, etc.
• Learning Accelerators – learn specific bits of Buying Facilitation™
• Guided Study – learn the entire Buying Facilitation Method®

Learn Buying Facilitation™ | Implement Buying Facilitation™ | License Buying Facilitation™

Fighting for Failure: why modern sales practices are illogical is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. In my work life, I have focused on the sales profession, as I believe (as the very foundation of business), it offers the capability of making each person, each interaction, and each company, based on true service.

Unfortunately, with the focus on profit, solution placement, timelines, and commissions, the potential for true servant-leadership has been overlooked.  Indeed, it’s possible to make money AND make nice.

SELLING AND SERVING

The sales job focuses on needs assessment and solution placement. Of course this is necessary – but only as the final stage of issues buyers have to address. Sales overlooks the off-line, behind-the-scenes decision issues that buyers must face privately before they get the buy-in to make a purchase.

But this is where the true servant-leader connection is: imagine having the capability to serve folks by first helping them discover all of the internal, values-based decision issues they must address, and being a support for them in the process. And once this is done (and it makes the sales process about 600% more efficient), then we can sell.

But we can’t continue to use our positions merely to influence others. Let’s look at what we’ve been doing until now.

Sellers, unfortunately, have a belief that if by offering the right data, in the right way, to the right demographic, or use the right incentives/push/pitch/influence, that people will buy, or acquiesce, or agree. Yup: I’ve got the important data that you need - now let me tell you about it and explain to you why you need it.

But that premise is false: sales only close 7% of prospects. And that’s an average. Why doesn’t this model work? Because it’s based on information push, and ignores the underlying values that people must match before they are willing to buy anything.

People don’t make decisions based on data: all decisions are made according to our internal values/criteria/beliefs (There is no such thing as an emotional decision, even if it looks that way to an outsider.). We do not choose to do something that goes against our values, so all behavior is a rendition of our beliefs in action, even thought it might be unconscious.

When we create data-driven vehicles for marketing and sales, we have no idea if the mode, the message, the presentation, or the actual verbiage, go against someone’s internal criteria. As a result, we have no idea how our message will be received. That means, we’re either lucky or we’re unlucky. Bad odds: with the best solution in the world, we are dependent on luck for our results. Not to mention that we are missing opportunities to connect with, and serve, another person.

THERE IS A WAY TO INFLUENCE WITH INTEGRITY

But there is a way to help buyers discover how to make the decisions and manage the change (and every purchase – indeed every decision – is a change management issue) by using their own values.

It’s possible to help buyers:

1. assemble the appropriate Buying Decision Team members.
2. define the criteria they must ultimately meet.
3. explore every opportunity to resolve their issues with familiar resources (like current vendors or by fixing current.
4. get necessary buy-in from whoever, whatever touches the final solution.
5. operate with the new solution without facing major disruption.

Buyers need to accomplish all of these things anyway, with us or without us. Sellers sit and wait while they do them. We can continue to wait to make a sale, or become a true Servant Leader and lead our buyers through these decision points. It’s not sales – it’s change management – but it will afford an opportunity to serve, and buyers will fold the seller in to the decision, with no objections.

I’ve developed a new type of question (Facilitative Question) to help people uncover their unconscious criteria to make new decisions, or re-weight old beliefs. It works alongside my Buying Facilitation™ model as a decision facilitation tool to manage change. Questions like:

How would you know when it was time to add a new skill set to the ones you’re already using successfully?

What would you need to trust to recognize that by facilitating buying decisions and entering the buying journey earlier that you can close more deals and make more money?

How would you know that adding a change management skill set would be good for business, and enable a true collaboration of trust and respect?

Until or unless people choose to reconsider all of the elements within their status quo, and can find a way forward that doesn’t disrupt their status quo irreparably, they will do nothing.

Start the buyer/seller relationship by helping buyers manage the idiosyncratic decision issues they must address internally. Then, once they’ve determined their route, you can sell. It’s a good way to help people get to the very core, the very heart of the matter and create real change. And it gives us the opportunity to truly serve by leading the change.

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Read about: The Heart of Business & Leadership Involves Helping Others Buy. Gain new skills with the  Learning Accelerators and hear Sharon Drew use the Morgen Buying Facilitation Method®.

The Heart of Sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Click here to view the post at Eloqua

Here at Eloqua we believe in transparency.  We are open and honest about our growth, about our successes, about our mistakes.  An essential ingredient of transparency is the willingness to embrace perspectives that are not in total sync with yours.  After all, it’s listening that ultimately allows us to speak with more confidence.  With this in mind, I am pleased to publish this guest post from best-selling author Sharon Drew Morgan, who argues we should all “stop selling” and instead “start helping people buy.”
Marketing automation has amazing potential as a way to close more sales, make the selling process more efficient, and help buyers get the content they need. The field is working hard at discovering all aspects of the buying process and how to influence it. With that in mind, I’d like to add my 2 cents.

With all of the money, brains, and technology behind it, marketing automation is only closing a fraction of sales it could be closing. Somewhere between the data collection, the lead scoring, and the telesales, around 90% of leads are being lost. That’s a shame for both sellers and buyers.

What’s missing is the current inability to enter the buying decision journey earlier. I’m not talking about the essential content data, the webinars or the white papers. I’m talking about the stuff that goes on behind-the-scenes that we aren’t privy to, but are essential issues that buyers must manage privately to get the necessary buy-in for a purchase.

A few truths (that we sometimes forget):

1. until or unless all of the Buying Decision Team members are on board, the buyer won’t have the full complement of buying criteria and must delay a purchase accordingly.
2. until or unless there is buy-in from every person, group, or piece of technology that will touch the final solution, no purchase will be made. The disruption would be too great.
3. until or unless all familiar avenues for a fix – i.e. current vendor, repairing what’s already there – are tried, buyers cannot make a purchase.

It appears to us as if there is ‘no decision’ and the status quo is being maintained. But what’s really happening is that they are focusing first on maintaining the congruence of their working environment – and if they had the capability to fix their problem they would have already. Note that the industry guess is that 70% of buyers will buy eventually.

Politics, and people, and partners all get into the space between need and solution. Buyers must manage their non-need related politics and people issues before they can buy. And neither sales nor marketing automation address this.

When we follow folks on line, and do lead scoring or lead nurturing, we truly don’t know where along the continuum they are. What % of the Buying Decision Team does this person represent? What, exactly, are they doing with our data? Who is fighting the change?

We are operating on the hope and guess that by offering the right data at the right time, and by using the right lead scoring criteria, we will close. But we’re not!

I’ve developed a decision facilitation capability that makes it possible to enter the buying journey far earlier. No, it’s not ‘sales’ – it’s change management. It will lead the buyer through the off-line decision issues, help them get all the right Buying Decision Team members on board quickly, help them determine their buying criteria (the private stuff, separate from our content or their need), or dismiss their old vendor.

Buyers have to do this anyway. And this is where we’re losing our sales – not because our technology isn’t good.  Our technology is brilliant: It just doesn’t go as far as it could be.

Let’s expand our reach and add some capability. And close more. We just first have to move beyond the belief that ‘content is king’. It’s not: the buyer is king. Would you rather sell? Or have someone buy? They are two different activities, and we’re only focusing on one of them. We know how to manage the content end. Now let’s help buyers manage their own buying journey.

Guest Post: Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy at Eloqua is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I recently got a call from a prospect who said all of the above. Yes, they know everything – and do whatever they need to do, and do it well. Why aren’t they closing more? This is the perennial problem for a sales professional. It makes no sense: sellers can see the problem – seen it hundreds of times. You know your solution fits. Perfectly. The buyer knows they need you. The buyer is ok with the price. You two have a great relationship. And then they disappear, with about 90% of the other prospects you’ve been nurturing.

It’s an age old problem, one I’ve been talking about for 20 years. But after the conversations I’ve had this week, I thought it might be time to review.

THE SALES MODEL ONLY MANAGES 10% OF THE BUYING JOURNEY

It’s not the fault of your solution. The problem is with the sales process. It merely handles a tiny part of the buyer’s decision making. They actually have a rigorous set of change management activities they must complete, among colleagues and departments (or family members), before they can consider making a purchase. I’ve written a whole book about this (Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it). Let me share some insights (and then, if I’ve made some sense to you, go buy the book! or at least read the sample chapters).

1. you are acting as if the buyer’s need/problem were an isolated event. Stop it. It’s not. It’s part of something larger that you aren’t privy to and that has sat there, functioning ‘well-enough’, for some time.
2. if the buyer really believed they needed your solution they would have gotten it – or something like it - already.
3. buyers don’t want your solution. They want to resolve a problem in the most efficient, effective way that creates the least disruption.
4. understanding what the buyer needs is not going to help them make a buying decision, even if you’re right, and even if they need your solution.
5. sellers can only understand that part of the ‘need’ that they can see or surmise. There is much more going on that is unseen, endemic, and visible only to insiders.
6. whatever data you collect from technology does not give you what you need to help buyers navigate through their behind-the-scenes political issues.
7. just because someone looks like a prospect and acts like a prospect doesn’t mean she’s a prospect.
8. your problem is not a sales problem; it’s about what buyers need to go through with colleagues and business practices before they can decide to buy. You know how to sell. That’s not what is going on here. That’s not keeping the buyer from buying.
9. if you hear yourself saying “That buyer is stupid” please consider that it isn’t the buyer who’s stupid.
10. until or unless the buyer figures out how to manage all of the off-line, behind-the-scenes decisi0n issues they need to address amongst themselves and colleagues (and vendors and investors and and and) they will do nothing regardless of their need. They never need it as bad as you think they do. They have work-arounds.
11. to make any change or purchase, the buyer must go through some private stuff that you can’t be a part of so long as you continue operating out of a sales mind. They’re going to go through this with you or without you: might as well be with you. But the sales model doesn’t offer skills to help this part of the decision journey.
12. buyers buy using their buying patterns, not your selling patterns. Buying is a change management problem, not a solution choice activity. Choosing a solution is the very last thing that happens.
13. buyers don’t even know how to make sense of your solution data until they are far into the choice process.
14. with the capabilities of technology the sales job is doomed. Unless you add some new skills, what you are doing is not going to be needed for much longer.

Did I get your attention? Great. Because I can fix all of the above. Buy my book. Have me do a keynote for your company. Have me come and train. License my material. Get some of the Learning Accelerators. But whatever you do, do it while you still have a job.

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You have a buying process problem, not a selling problem is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

How do you decide whose advice to take when you have a sales problem? Do you go to the old tried-and-true masters? The new thinkers?

Do you want to know how technology is making a difference? Or just how to decrease the forEVER sales cycle?

Well, all of the answers should be found in this anthology of the best sales thinking in the world today (Full disclosure: I’m in the book.). Eric Taylor and David Riklan, the Creators of the “Mastering the World” book series, are releasing their newest masterpiece Mastering the World of Selling. They did some research, found the best of the best, and asked us all to submit our most provocative, forward-thinking, and representative articles.

From Dale Carnegie to Buying Facilitation™, from webinars to ebooks, this book is like the bible of selling. Not only is the book filled with usable ideas that you can immediately apply from whatever sales thinking floats your boat, but the book is actually well written.

Find more leads. Generate more business. Close more sales. B2B? B2C? Complex sale? Small product sale? Influencing? Presenting? It’s all there. And, if you act right away, most of us have given Eric and David free stuff you can get when you buy the book.

Run to Barnes and Noble. Get onto Amazon. Buy copies for your whole team. Any way you do it, get the book. And then write me a note and thank me.

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Mastering the World of Selling is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here is a story from a client in Australia.

Jack was the MD of the Sydney office of his firm, with his supervisor living in the States. He was successful, and left to his own devices much of the time, but needed his superior for large out-of-budget decisions.

One day he decided that if the company manufactured a new tool, that there would be a huge savings and would address the lagging market share. He spent a month looking around, and found a tool manufacturer in Germany. The sales rep and engineer flew from Berlin down to Sydney (a loooong bus ride) and started designing this tool. Over the course of a year, they all met 3 times (Are you calculating the costs yet for these trips?). Once he had the tool in hand, my client flew to the States (Are you still calculating travel costs??) to talk to his boss. The conversation didn’t take long.

“A new tool? Looks great. We’ve been trying to figure out how to tackle the market-share problem, and we think we’ve come up with several ideas. We’re going to try these – roll them out and follow them. And if we don’t have the success we think we’ll have, I’ll give you a call and we can talk about this new tool. Give me about 2 years to roll out and trial everything we’re already thinking of.”

But there is another way this might have happened that would have been more successful – and cheaper.

First, from the German manufacturing folks:

BERLIN: You want a new tool? What would you want it to give you that you don’t already have now? And what has stopped you from creating one yourselves? How would you and your Buying Decision Team know that this tool would give you the results you seek?

NOTE: these few Facilitative Questions would have gotten everyone on track, and saved the guys a lotta money traveling down to Sydney — and gotten the MD on the phone to his boss before moving ahead on anything. Like other sales folks, they assumed they had a buyer. They merely had a prospect: the buyer did not know how to line up his ‘team’ around a buying decision. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with the solution, the price, the need, or the relationship.

Next, let’s look at it from the ‘client’s’ viewpoint and see how he could have mitigated the situation before spending an expensive year. Not only would he have known that it wouldn’t be possible, but he actually might have shifted the possibility.

MD: Hi Steven. I have a question: How are you and the Board currently thinking about increasing market share? I have an idea that includes a new piece of equipment and would differentiate us at very little cost. How would you all know that something like that is worth considering? What would you need to see from me? And how would you and the Board want to own the solution so it could ‘come from you’ seemlessly without the other MDs feeling I went over their heads?

There are always political problems between the ranks that are part of the system that keeps the status quo in place. Folks have to figure out how to manage these so that when they decide on solutions, the internal  political issues don’t get knocked out of shape. This exchange would have not only opened the possibility of a new solution, but managed the internal issues – and all before any trips or time or cost. And it could have taken place on the phone or on a video call.

For some reason, we always have our sales radar ON: is there a need? what is the problem that we can resolve? We listen and ask through biases, and only focus on how our solution can be used. We forget that it’s merely one part of what needs to get done. And it’s now possible to help buyers do the stuff they’ve always struggled with: get their entire buying decision team in place so they can figure out if they want to move forward to fix a problem that your solution can resolve. Until they figure out how to do this, they will do nothing. And your solution will never be bought. Would you rather sell? or have someone buy?

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It’s not about your solution, folks. That’s the last thing that happens. The system must first decide to do something different. And you can have a bit of control by using Buying Facilitation™ before sales.

The Decisions Before Selling is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com