I was speaking with a colleague today who complained that although he understands his customer’s needs – does surveys of every aspect of their decisions (how, when, what) so he ‘knows’ how and what they buy – and creates marketing materials positioned to address those needs and segments, the buyers still didn’t behave in a way he believes they should.

Sound familiar? You know who your buyers are. You’ve done assessments and surveys so you ‘know’ how they buy. You’ve developed marketing materials, pitches, websites, white papers, and they should be more successful. What’s going on?

Let’s look at the assumptions here, and see why they are faulty. 1. when you ask questions to gather data so YOU can understand, you are asking biased questions based on what you think is important data that will be useful in creating a selling strategy.Buyers:

• may/may not know how to answer your question,
• may not want to answer your question,
• may give you a partial answer and leave out the nuances,
• may be leaving out large aspects that they decide from unconsciously,
• may be offering the wrong data (inadvertently)
• may not relate with the material you are sending them.

Not to mention that a large, significant number are not responding at all.

2. when you have ‘data’ about another’s decision making, you assume it follows that what you are presenting is offered in the way they are ready, willing, and able to buy. It’s not working, because every purchase is a change management situation. Bring in software? How will you manage the techies, the old systems, the users? Team building? How will the people choose to work with others in the nearby department? How will folks at ‘war’ with each other choose to attend?

Until buyers are ready to do something different – i.e. change – they won’t respond to your offering even if it’s the right offering for them. That’s why you lose 90% of your prospects.

Change happens only when people’s (unconscious) criteria are met and the system they live in is willing to be disrupted. Have you tried to change your diet or cease an addictive behavior? You know there is a problem. You know what the solutions are. You are not ready to do anything different (or you would have already). Someone gathering data about your habits won’t help you do something different.

3. when you develop a pitch or solution based on the data you’ve gathered, you assume it’s appropriate for their needs AND they believe their current situation needs to change now. But it’s specious – nothing to do with the customer. How do you know what criteria someone will use to make a buying decision at that moment? That their buying decision team will agree with the data you used to create an offering with?

Rarely is solution-specific data all people need to make a purchase, and their private decision criteria may not align with the offering you developed based on demographic assumptions.

As I hope I’ve shown, when you attempt to influence a buying decision by creating a pitch or solution that should fit into their buying patterns, you are making specious assumptions. Do you know – right now – how you’re going to choose to move next time you move? Will your choices be based on kids’ school districts, or proximity to a hospital? Who will be involved in this decision this time, different from a similar decision 5 months ago? How will you choose who fits in where and when? Do you know when you’re filling out an assessment what your buying patterns might be at some point in the future?

People make decisions in idiosyncratic ways and they must, they must, handle the change management issues that the new solution will compromise. Sales only handles needs assessment and solution placement, and the surveys and questionnaires we prepare merely manage the sales end. You are left with the same assumptions and possibilities you have when you make a sales call, or place an advertisement.

To help buyers handle their private decision issues (often having nothing to do with their need or your solution) is a separate skill set from knowing they have a need or seeking a solution. It’s possible to create surveys/questionnaires that will not only give you good data but will create a customer for you at the same time, Facilitative Questions such as:

• What would you need to see from a solution to know that you would be willing to use it?
• How would we be creating this for you in a way that would make it comfortable to bring in to your family?

Managing the need isn’t enough. Help them choose how to use it without too much internal disruption. If you don’t help them, they’ll wait until they figure it out by themselves. Stop trying to understand them as you never will in the way that will help them change. But you can help them understand themselves.

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Understanding customers doesn’t help the buyer buy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

The short answer is, you don’t. At least not when you are accustomed to. Because that’s not the first thing buyers need from you. The buyer first needs assistance navigating around their off-line decision issues. See, we actually enter our buyer’s sphere far too early in their decision cycle. And we end up attempting to gather needs, understand, and place product before a buyer really knows how to have this conversation with you.

The first thing buyers do – well  before they are ready to choose a vendor or a solution  – is to figure out what needs to happen internally for them to be assured that they can achieve excellence AND keep their organization in tact.  THEN they are ready for you to understand their need and place your solution. The sales model does not help the buyer at this initial part of their decision cycle because it’s private, unconscious, idiosyncratic, and for insiders only. But they must do it – and we needlessly wait as they do. It would like finding the house or car of your dreams before you discussed a move or a purchase with your spouse or bank.

GOING INTERNAL

Where do buyers go when they say, “I’ll call you back?” They go internal, to make sure the department heads are in agreement, that the status quo can allow change without creating a mess, that the historic fight between rival teams is cleaned up, that the new software will work with the old. Until or unless they manage the interal stuff of relationships,  initiatives, rules, etc., they will not be in a position to buy anything. Regardless of their ‘need’ or ‘pain.’

Think of moving. You and your spouse find the perfect house. Are you going to buy it? Well, that depends on if you can get a loan, or if the school district is viable, or if your spouse really wants that separation, or … And these things are private and off-line and have absolutely nothing to do with the house or the realtor.

It’s possible to add a front end to what you’re already doing successfully and use a different skill set to help buyers maneuver through their internal pitfalls. But it’s not sales. And it has absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with understanding: as an outsider you’ll never understand. Can I understand if, in the example above, your spouse is thinking of separation? Or how to handle the bank if you were overdrawn for 3 months last year?

Once a buyer manages the internal issues sellers can use rapport and sales and understanding skills to make sure the solution is superb. But trying to understand the personal stuff is impossible.

GATHERING DATA AT THE WRONG TIME DOESN’T HELP BUYERS BUY

Sales is faulty (see my new book on this: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) and only manages needs assessment and solution placement where it is imperative that you understand. I’m suggesting you acquire an add-on skill set to merely act as a GPS system that says left/right/left, through the maze of the types of decisions buyers must make as they consider their internal, systemic issues that hold their status quo in place. Until they do this, they can’t buy from you anyway. But when you use Buying Facilitation™ first with them and do some neutral navigation that is system- and change-based, you will be placed on their Buying Decision Team.

I recently spoke with a potential vendor who I was referred to. She automatically assumed I was ready to buy because of the referral (I certainly was not), and she went ahead gathering data (that I found myself very reluctant to give since I didn’t know her or trust her yet) and trying to sell her services. When I told her that until I knew how I would have a good chance of getting the results I wanted I wouldn’t be able to buy, she was quite adamant: “You’ll know when I give you results.” Well, in my mind that’s kinda foolish. That means I have to buy her services, pay her a lot of money, go through internal disruption, and I won’t know until AFTER all that whether I’m going to be successful or not??? Before I’d be able to choose her, I’d need to figure out the criteria I’d use to know if her suggestions, her personality, my needs, my market, my folks who would be working with her, my company, would act together in a way that would bring me the change I’m seeking. And if it would be worth the money and disruption. She’d have been far better off to have used a Facilitative Question:

How would you know before we begin that you would have a good chance of reaching your goals? What would need to happen within your organization to make sure they are ready for the type of change you are requiring?

It’s not about my need or her solution. It’s about the issues I need to manage internally in order to allow change to take place in a way that minimizes disruption.

Until you realize there are actually two different types of decisions buyers must make – the vendor/solution decision that you handle, and the behind-the-scenes issues that they must handle first – you will be trying to understand too early and not be present to help them with the main decisions they must make first.

You can add a new set of skills to what you’re doing already, and actually become a part of your buyer’s buying decisions. And, when it’s time for you to understand, you will be there with just the skills you need to do it. But first, let’s help manage the private process that you’ve left unattended until now.

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To learn how to do this, consider buying my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it

How do we sell if we don’t understand needs? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

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