Yes. It is easy. But not with the sales model alone.

THE JOB OF THE SALES MODEL: LIMITING THE PURCHASE CHOICE AND BUYING DECISIONS

The sales model is meant to place a solution. It was designed for a simpler time in history, when there were fewer solutions, precious few ways of marketing them, no internet or FEDEx to get solutions from China delivered to your front door in two days. It was not designed:

• to bring together disparate players on a Buying Decision Team,
• to circumvent many creative solutions that can address a problem besides yours,
• for a bad global economy.

Sales places solutions. But if it were that easy you would have closed more.

You know those sales where the buyer shows up and buys almost immediately? What’s the difference between them and others who take forever? The difference is they are one of the 80% who will buy a solution within 2 years of working with a solution provider (and left behind a trail of dead sales people) and NOW is their 2 year mark: they have finally discovered and gotten agreement on a route to move forward and all of their ducks are in a row. Their need is defined; the new job descriptions are described, the users are ready, the new material will fit comfortably with the old so as to avoid disruption.

The last thing the buyer does is find a solution. Sales enters at the wrong time, offering the wrong data, to the wrong people. If you do the exact same thing you’re doing now, but after you use Buying Facilitation® to help them navigate through their behind-the-scenes decision path, then you’ll close quickly.

MUCH SHORTER SALES CYCLES USING BUYING FACILITATION® AND SALES

Here are some numbers that my clients (using Buying Facilitation® AND sales) tracked against their control groups:

• A large insurance company went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits and 25 closed sales.
• A large tech company selling a small piece of software ($10,000) went from a 6 month sales cycle to a 3 call close.
• One of the Big 3, with a $50,000,000 solution went from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle.
• One of the world’s largest banks went from closing 2% with an 11 month sales cycle , to closing 37.5% in 2 months.
• One of the well known boutique brokerage houses when from $400 Million to $1.2 Billion in revenue in 4 years.

They did this by become true Trusted Advisors; they used Buying Facilitation® to facilitate the buying decision, and then they sold.

Your sales cycle is long because buyers have to figure out how to get the right people and policies aboard before they can buy. It’s not about your solution. Do you want to sell? Or have someone  buy? They are two different activities. Which do you want to focus on? And how will you know if it’s worth adding something new to what you are doing?

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Get a hold of Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it and read it. Then contact us so we can train you.

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

Why Your Sales Cycle is So Long (Hint: It’s Not About Your Solution) is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

PROBLEMS SELLING A BANKING SOLUTION

Bankers therefore encounter a few problems when selling: if solutions seem the same, how does a prospect choose one over the other? or why should a person change banks?

Then there is the matter of the sales process bankers use: the focus is on getting an appointment – not on getting a sale. The overriding industry belief is that it is only with an appointment that a sale can be made, forgetting that a focus on getting an appointment is making a double sale, the first sale being the appointment, which is declined by over 90% of good leads before you even get to discuss needs or solutions.

The problem is that because the lead believes they are already taken care of, they don’t need to see you (whether they might need you or not).  Not only do you leave behind a huge majority of people who might buy from you, but you are wasting humongous amounts of time. You end up meeting only a fraction of the people on the Buying Decision Team, and may need further meetings (wasting a whole lotta time) IF the original group you met with are able to convince others to meet with you again.

Read some of my earlier posts on the problems involved with seeking appointments first.

Your next major hurdle is your focus on getting strangers to change bankers and banks. Given they can’t differentiate you, and don’t want an appointment, you only have a fraction of your available prospect universe to work with. When you finally get interest, you’re attempting to get someone to get rid of the person they’ve been using for X amount of time. What you are saying, effectively, is:

Hi Mr. Jones. So nice to meet you. Say, I’d love to find out what your needs are, and what your current banking relationship is like, so I can figure out where the holes in the service are so I can get you to leave them and choose me instead. Now. That’s right. I’d like you to do it now – or once I get you to like me better than the person you’ve been banking with for the past 5 years even though you think our solutions are similar and you’re happy with them.

Really?

WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE

Using Buying Facilitation™, it’s possible to start the conversations by entering as a decision facilitator rather than a Trusted Advisor or Relationship Manager or whatever nicey nicey term you’re using so a stranger will think you care and aren’t just trying to sell something.

Your conversation would begin by you helping the prospect ‘look around’ their environment and see what the difference is between where they are at, and where they need to be,  and see if they can figure out how to get to Excellence with their current resources (Yes, including their current banker. They will go to him/her first anyway.)

And, btw, give up the need to ‘understand’ your prospect at the beginning of your relationship: you will never, ever, understand what is ‘going on’ for them, in re the internal politics of changing bankers, as an outsider! Of course, when it’s time to place the proper solution you will need to understand everything. That comes later. Your first job is to lead them much like a GPS system knows how to get you to your destination without understanding the nature of your journey.

A couple of Facilitative Questions to use midway down the Buying Facilitation™ funnel might be:

• What is stopping you from achieving the full range of banking support you might need over time?
• How would you and your Buying Decision Team know when/if it were time to add new banking services to the ones you are currently using?

It is only when, or if, their current banking relationship has something missing – something they hadn’t noticed until you taught them how to look around (by facilitating a journey of discovery – read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it to understand this discovery) – and gotten buy-in from all of the people – ALL of the people – that will touch a solution, that they can consider changing providers.

Stop attempting to sell. Stop pushing solution. Your solution is viable. You first need to help buyers recognize and manage all of the back-end decisions they must address on their way to Excellence. Then you’ll be a true Trusted Advisor and Relationship Manager. It’s  not about your solution: it’s about when or how or if they buy.

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For those wishing to design a Buying Facilitation™ training for your team, please contact Sharon Drew at: sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com

Selling for the banking industry is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I believe a sale is an outcome, reached when a buyer not only recognizes a need and chooses you to fulfill it, but when they are able to successfully address their internal change management issues to get the necessary buy-in to make a change (and a purchase).

THE FALLOUT FROM HAVING AN OBJECTIVE

When you enter prospecting with a sale as an objective, you are biasing your call. Not only are you only asking questions that you believe you need answers to (and thereby foregoing other important data), but you are wasting a valuable opportunity to 1. develope a true partnership; 2. use the initial moments to offer real service and begin influencing the buy-in, decision making process that buyers must go through. Not to mention that you are containing the conversation to what you can surmise as an outsider rather than potentially exploring the entire fact pattern and selling more, selling more quickly, or realizing you don’t have a prospect. After all, having a need is not the only definition of a prospect.

When you enter your initial communication with a prospect with a sale as an objective, the prospect will immediately have trust issues with you. A trusted advisor? How could you do that when your communication centers around placing your solution – i.e. getting your own needs met? Oh, sure, it sounds like you’re working at understanding their need….with YOUR solution. Here are the assumptions built into that:

1. that their need – even if it matches your solution – is ready to be resolved;
2. that they are seeking resolution;
3. that they are seeking resolution with an external resource rather than fixing it in-house;
4. that they would engage in the sort of conversation with a stranger that would lead to a closed sale;
5. that you could be so engaging that they would want to spend time with you.

All of the above are not the sort of assumptions that will pay off with any serious rate of success. Hence your low close rate (anything under 40% from first call is low, and 2-8% is average for the sales industry).

What would you need to believe differently to enter a communication with a sale an outcome? For starters:

1. that a purchase is one item in a list of many that buyers need to consider on their way to Excellence;
2. that you can play a pivotal role in helping the prospect recognize and manage all of the internal decision issues they need to address in order to change;
3. that until or unless the buyer manages their internal, human, decision journey, they can take no action, and you can either wait while they do it, or be their GPS system.

Helping buyers manage their buy-in issues is not part of the typical sales process. But you can either be a victim to their process, and lose a large % of sales you could be closing, or you can learn a new skill set – Buying Facilitation™  – and become the GPS system for your buyer’s private buying decision process.

Buying Facilitation™ is a learnable, scalable model that takes a bit of training to learn the new skills and new thinking that sales doesn’t offer. How will you know when it’s time to add a new skill set to what you’re already doing so successfully with your sales skills?

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To learn Buying Facilitation™, see the self study Guided Study program, or the Learning Accelerators.

If you haven’t read any of my books yet, take a look at Dirty Little Secrets (my favorite book) or www.buyingfacilitation.com

A sale: objective or outcome? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume – and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry – that when we notice a ‘need’ that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.’ Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption.

A NEED DOESN’T MEAN A PURCHASE

What we forget is that the ‘need’ has been sitting in a buyer’s environment (I call it their system) for some time. Sitting somewhat comfortably, or it would have been fixed already. Not only that, but the environment has created work-arounds – jobs, rules, relationships – that keep the ‘need’ in place daily. It’s most likely not sitting there waiting for you to come along and fix it. And unfortunately, sales treats the identified problem as if it were an isolated event.

But we show up, assuming because there is some sort of lack that our solution can resolve, that we have a prospect. We do everything we can to get in, find ‘the decision makers,’ understand, promote, pitch, and promise. But it doesn’t work, because the prospect may not be a prospect.

1. This need may be sitting comfortably-enough and not causing any conscious problem. Do you have any extra weight on you? Why haven’t you gotten a gym membership? What about your anger management issues, or your fights with your spouse or kids? Done anything about those?

2. The need may have been there so long that it’s determined just one part of the givens. Oh – we’ve always used our own tech team to design our sites. Yes, our in-house trainers do a good job.

3. The need may be in one area but needs buy-in from adjacent groups who don’t care about changing. So what if the L&D team wants new software if the HR person thinks everything is fine.

In order for a prospect to make a purchase, they would have to change something – most probably a string of somethings. They would need to get buy-in to do something different. They would need to be willing to change a few things around, and have the ‘things’ be ready,willing, and able to change (For example before you got a gym membership you’d have to be willing to get up earlier, eat healthier, get your wife to walk the dog, take lunch to work, etc. It’s a system that behaves like a house of cards.).

How can you determine if a seeming prospect – a person or group with a lack that your solution fulfills – is really a prospect? S/he may not know either, and may tell you there is no need when with just some decision facilitation they can recognize the need. But to do that, they’d have to consider the internal change issues first. After all, this is the very first thing a prospect considers well before they actually consider buying anything. And sales doesn’t manage it.

Use Buying Facilitation™ to help your prospects determine how they’d move forward toward change. Show them how to determine how to get buy-in

Prospects Aren’t Really Prospects is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

There is so much marketing going on – so so much noise – that buyers have no way of knowing who to respond to, who to believe, or what to read. Frankly, when your sales effort focuses on placing a solution, it all seems to be the same to a buyer.

The problem is not a marketing problem: it’s a BEing problem. All the marketing in the world will not convince a prospect that you can take care of them better than another vendor. They have to experience it.

And, what does it mean anyway? What would a firm need to BE in order to be recognized as a true Trusted Advisor? Placing a solution, having a good solution, or understanding need is not good enough – all good sales people do that…it’s their job.

Here are some of my criteria:

1. show clients and prospects that you are there for them – not just to place a solution, but help them (I mean HELP THEM) manage all of their internal variables that need to be addressed so they can get the buy-in they need to resolve their problems collaboratively;
2. get onto their Buying Decision Team so that they can have another voice. Careful here: your voice must be unbiased. You must not be ‘placing solution’ or ‘understanding need’ to do this. You must just be leading the buyer through their off-line decision variables so they will figure out how to resolve problems (not necessarily need-related) from the inside out;
3. help them figure out how to use known providers, such as their own internal resources or familiar vendors. They are going to do this anyway – with you or without you – so it might as well be with you. Then you’ll have a bit of control. Note: if their known providers could have resolved the problem they would have done so already.

Being a Trusted Advisor does not mean having a good solution…anyone can do that, frankly. Use your skills as a professional to lead buyers through all of the internal issues they need to manage and actually teach them how to bring all of the people and policies, rules and relationships, into line. They need to do this, and the time it takes them is the length of the sales cycle.

BE a Trusted Advisor by helping them manage their buying decision. They will fold your solution in with their decisions. Have a look at Buying Facilitation™ as it offers the tools to help.

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Being A Trusted Advisor is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com