Since I’m the Queen Contrarian, I’d like to say that the ‘need’ we think that buyers have is not a real need.
First of all, we often meet them at the wrong end of their buying decision – when they are just starting their search for a possible solution. Not only have they not committed to [...]

Recently, a CEO of a smallish company – a man familiar with my books - called me to do some work. Given the difficult market, he wanted to use Buying Facilitation™ to differentiate from his competition, and have his existing customers buy more product.
As with everyone, I led him down the buying decision funnel and he figured out 1. how he needed to go about [...]

Buyers live in a system. It includes people, policies, relationships, company or family politics, personality issues, initiatives, historic vendor relationships, personal biases, fears. And any Identified Problem, or need, that our product can resolve, sits inside that system. And make no mistake: this Identified Problem sits comfortably in the buyer’s culture (their ‘system’).
When they go to resolve [...]

When it comes to ‘change’, few people know how to get it right. Indeed, so many very smart people and consulting groups work with the change first, the assumption being that if you give people good, rational data as to why they need to change, how and what they need to change, and a route [...]

We all know that sales is a failed model; we’re good sellers and offer great customer service, our products are good, and our buyers have a need that we can fulfill. But we fail to close at least 90% of the time.
If it’s not us, not our product, and the need is obvious, what’s going [...]

I recently discovered the site of Good Practice, an Edinburgh-based company that specializes in creating very easy to use material for middle managers. When the CEO Peter Casebow gave me access to the management section of the site, I found it quite easy to use, and with several options to make the material accessible in [...]