On Wednesday, March 9th at 2:00 – 3:30 ET, I will be running a webinar with Systems Thinker called A Problem is Not an Isolated Event: how to manage change systematically, for those of you who want to learn a new way to get buy-in before beginning the actual change initiative.

ACTIVELY ACHIEVING BUY-IN PRIOR TO PUSHING CHANGE INITIATIVES

Decision Facilitation is a scalable, learnable skill set that makes it possible for the influencer or management team to lead Others to

• recognize and manage all of the decision issues necessary for change, adoption, and buy-in and ensures that the change management team addresses the most comfortable and efficient approach as fits that unique system,
• alleviate and omit any disruption or resistance,
• recognize and fix resistance issues during the course of the initiative;
• learn how to work alongside of business partners in volatile environments filled with rapid change and shifting people, rules, and relationships.

I’ve been slogging my model in the sales field for decades (When I began my journey to change the world I stupidly thought that having an 800% proven increase over the sales model alone would insure adoption, and I could swiftly move on to the change management and coaching fields. I was so wrong.), but my initial intent was to have an Institute in which people from all walks of life could learn how to work together collaboratively and help Others make their own best decisions.

I’m still ever-hopeful that that will happen. This webinar is a good start – as is the article published in the Systems Thinker called ‘Buy-in: a radical approach to change management.’

THE WEBINAR: WHO, WHAT, AND WHY

This webinar is for anyone needing buy-in in order to be successful. This includes:

• folks doing project management with disparate team players who need to get on the same page quickly;
• internal consultants and change agents;
• technology implementations (to ensure the client is ready to accept and encourage the change);
• purchasing agents and procurement officers who need to get the customers to buy-in to the same criteria for choosing vendors;
• teams forming with new members who must work together on a new initiative;
• sales folks helping buyers to get buy-in from their Buying Decision Teams.

I will be talking about how problems become problems, how to address the change issues beforehand to avoid resistance, and how to satisfy the criteria of the whole so everyone has their shoulder to the wheel with equal weight. I’ll discuss how to get agreement at the start of an initiative and how to proceed through the change implementation in a way that ensures continual buy-in and leadership and creativity.

Problems don’t occur – or get resolved – independently: the entire existent system must agree to a change, and find ways to ensure that the change, and the activity to adopt the change, fit together comfortably. And when people – especially people who haven’t worked together before, or who have a stake in maintaining the status quo – work together, many of their human, unconscious criteria are involved and have the potential to resist.

Until or unless the internal issues – those pesky idiosyncratic beliefs, values, personality issues – get managed, there can be no optimal buy-in for change regardless of the efficacy of the change being requested.

Join me next week. I know you might know me as a ‘sales leader’. But I’m an inventor of change management and decision making models. Join me as I talk about what is deepest in my heart: helping people traverse the mysterious terrain between where they are and where they want to be. Join me and take away a few thoughts on how to help others – clients, friends, family – make their own best change decisions.

And, kudos to Systems Thinker. I approached them with my ideas that were, well, radical. And Janice Malloy – editor and visionary – found the ideas exciting and ‘fresh’. It is a field I’ve not been known in, but Janice welcomed me and supported me. I’m honored and blessed. And so delighted to be doing this webinar with them.

Join us. Sign up here. It’s $129 and I bet you’ll get your money’s worth.

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To learn more about the system of how decisions get made and the strategy behind effective change management, read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To read articles, and listen to a 6 series podcast on buy-in and managing resistance, go to FacilitatingBuyin.com

To speak with Sharon Drew to help you design a training program for your team to ensure they work together well and manage the buy-in, email her at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com

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

Effective Change Management: getting buy-in for new initiatives is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Company name: Leadformix
Title: What’s the Difference between a newspaper and a sales professional? Hint: both are doomed.
Date/time: Sept. 13 at 11:00 AM PST
Ideas discussed: with sales enablement capabilities and the internet co-opting the influence seller’s have on  buying decisions; sellers must learn new skills or be out of a job.
Link: http://www.leadformix.com/webinar/aug25/webinar.html

Group Name: CustomerThink Sales Summit
Title: Start at the beginning: add new Trusted Advisor skills earlier in the buyer’s journey
Date: Oct. 5-7 with Dave Brock. Time TBA.
Ideas discussed: All sales folks attempt to be Trusted Advisors. But what do buyers really really need from us now? The stakeholders need help in making sense of all of the pertinent change management issues necessary to get buy-in to make a purchase. Hear Brock and Morgen discuss the different aspects of the buyer’s decision journey.
Link: http://www.customerthink.com/summit/sales_edge_2010

Group Name: Focus.com
Title: The Focus Interactive Summit: Evolving your sales game plan
Date: Oct. 21
Ideas: Sales thought leaders getting together to discuss various aspects of the new world of sales. Jill Konrath and I will be discussing some Sales 2.0 ideas. Learn about the latest processes and technologies to help you create a top-performing revenue-generating sales force.
Link: http://www.focus.com/interactive-summits/

Also, if you missed these that I recently completed, check out the recordings below.

• Pastor Rick McDaniel (Richmond Community Church) & Sharon Drew – Two spiritual thinkers interviewing each other (also listen at the bottom of the page – just before comments)
• CustomerThink Webinar: Mark Sellers & Sharon Drew - Enabling The Buyer’s Journey
• StrategyDriven Podcast Series - Making Change Work – Sharon Drew interviewed by Nathan Ives of Deloitte & Touche: #4: What is Resistance? For the rest of the series, go to FacilitatingBuyin.com
• Podcast Series – Keeping Sellers Relevant: What is the new job of sales when the Internet takes over the sales function?

In Boston, on September 23rd, I will be speaking at the Aloft Hotel at 6-8 pm, with the SMEI group. I will have a registration link shortly.

And here’s a bit of fun: watch my silly video on the stupid seller (below). It’s quite tongue-in-cheek, of course. Ably abetted by my friend Stone Payton playing the ‘stupid buyer’, I drive a shiv into the recognized problems in sales – all of which can be alleviated by using Buying Facilitation™. Enjoy.

Thanks for your interest, folks. This blog is ranked #7 of the top 100 sales and marketing blogs. Thanks for your interest and support! And send on to friend – I am to be #1!

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Wanting to add some Buying Facilitation™ skills to your current sales skills? Want to learn it on your own? Designed with self discovery and homework, these Accelerators will get you up and running with new skills in a few hours.

Webinars Galore is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Join me and Lorman Education Services for an exciting event: Working from my Buying Facilitation™ model, I am going to teach you

• how to get over your bias and consider interesting, effective phone options for connecting professionally with buyers and prospects;
• how to have the prospects love the phone as a way to get the support they need;
• how to recognize tire kickers on the first call, and convert folks who hadn’t realized a need;
• how to help the buyer put together the Buying Decision Team on the first call so the right decision makers show up when you visit.

You might be surprised at how starting off with a change management mind set (before you start your needs analysis and solution placement)  changes your interactions, gets you far greater success and well-into the buying decision cycle. Even on the telephone, and even on the first call.

Join us, and let’s spend an hour together so I can offer you some new skills. All for $49 (make sure you use the discount code below).

I am so pleased to be partnering with the wonderful group at Lorman (Keeping You Current. Helping You Succeed® )  a very professional group with lots of good, timely data to share. While you are at it, look around their site and see what else interests you.

This is the first webinar I’ve done on this topic, and hopefully you’ll walk away happy. Imagine using the phone to do much of the groundwork of your sales effort – and truly help the buyer get ready to buy.

Here is the link for the webinar (priority code: 16899; discount code: Z7745121). I look forward to answering your questions, and offering some helpful ideas.

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Articles of Interest

• Make the Phone your Best Friend
• Get onto the Buying Decision Team on the First Call
• Phones Are An Underutilized Business Tool
• Cold Calling Works – and it’s fun!

Make the phone your friend and business secret: Webinar with Lorman is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

At different times in my life I taught Cha Cha (!) and became the dance partner of a pro during the Disco/Hustle era. I studied Argentine Tango for 5 years and even spent some weeks studying with a professional in Buenos Aires. I can follow just about any lead in any dance category, and I also like to dance in the middle of the room when my favorite Keb Mo is playing. Dancing fills and soothes my soul.  There: you now have all of my secrets.

Since dancing is such an integral part of my life, I dance even as I travel so such places as Perth (THE place in the world for ballroom dancing) or Oslo (where I once did an inadvertent exhibition dance in a very darkly lit nightclub with an apparently famous investigative journalist) or Lubbock (this upcoming Wednesday at Last Chance). But my very very favorite dancing experience is with my local ‘Dancing Together’ group that meets several times a week.

GABRIELLE ROTH

Originally part of Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms and a local arm of the Wave dance we called Body Choir, we are a group of around 100 or so people who dance together several times a week. We range in age from around 2 (sometimes tiny babies come also) to 89. Our professions range from folks on food stamps to politicians and doctors, massage therapists and restauranteurs, house painters and artists.

We make up all ethnic groups. Our common love is dancing.  We dance in silence and barefoot for 2 hours, individually, in couples, in groups (whatever flows) to world music that someone creates as per Roth’s Waves – Flowing, Stoccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. The music may be Latin, or Jitterbug, or Tibetan Drums, or ABBA. It doesn’t matter. We just gotta dance.

Sometimes some of us might end up doing something called Contact Imrpov where our bodies fall against each other’s like cards or dominoes, holding the other up (or, individually, we’d collapse), or rolling around the floor (giggling and playing like puppies).

It opens my heart. Touching and supporting another through music and trust.

My dance this past Sunday morning (and each dance is unique) was quite profound. For some reason, several times I ended up with one or two others doing Contact Improv. To do this requires a sensitivity to offer and receive equal weight (or someone will fall) and a certain level of a meditation so one can integrate into this flowing ‘entity.’

No one leads, yet the dance seems to change from within somehow. Everyone follows, so any domination of one of the members is cause to follow. And then the next person becomes the leader. Or not. It is such a sweet flow. Sortof like a Quaker meeting in which things just happen.

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

Sunday, as I danced in these pods, I began wondering how one person decided to take the lead for a moment and the others knew, instantly it seemed, to follow, to become receptors, how there seemed to be internal, millisecond agreement to follow each person who imperceptibly took the lead, and how there was no competition: it seemed that there was an equal dominance/receptor equation – each person seemed to take the lead in proportion to the others (men and women taking equal turns leading and following).

How did that flow, that acceptance, that agreement happen – especially with no words spoken? What had to be true for there to be trust in fairness and respect and leadership? Was the non-verbal quality of the experience, or the fact we were all responding to the same music, the difference that makes the difference?

I was thinking about how well-run businesses are similar, or should be anyway. Each person being aware of the greater identity, being fully themselves and offering their talent, while becoming a follower to another’s lead.  An  environment where folks simply trust and respect that everyone will have their own voice and can be nourished and respected, even when another is in charge.

With my upcoming webinar on decision making and influencing with integrity, I’ve begun thinking of leadership, respect, flow, and what influencing is. I keep coming up with new thoughts. Am reading some books on it. It’s certainly a moveable feast at the moment. And I invite you all to join me in thinking about this:

How is dance similar to leadership? Group dynamics? Influencing? And how is trust and respect created and maintained? How do people flow together for the greater good, and know how to serve and respond to each other without competition or roles?

I look forward to having us think about these questions and discuss them together. Who wants to lead?

sd

Dancing Together is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Check out their site. It’s a very fun, useful site with lots of ideas and cogent articles, tips, and tools.

Hopefully, they will be so impressed with my webinar, about helping influence teams so they buy-in to leadership initiatives, that they will add some Buying Facilitation™ or decision facilitation skills to their roster. Using my unique decision making models, my session will offer new ways to make better decisions and inspire others through change, while helping team members eagerly choose to be a creative part of the change. Here is the sign up data http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/glp/29796/index.html?promocode=189WL

This is a welcome foray for me outside of the ‘sales’ arena where my models have been historically slotted: it’s becoming understood how necessary decision facilitation skills are in leadership and change management. In this webinar, I have a great forum to use my material in the way it was initially intended: to serve others.

Imagine if every human being had the skills to help each other (in business or personal life) make their own best decisions based on their own values and internal criteria. Imagine what a world we’d live in if we could all do that. That’s the world I’m working hard (with many others in the Spirit in the Workplace and Corporate Social Responsibility fields) to help create.

Join me at this seminar, pick up some new skills to be great leaders and decision makers, and let’s do it, together. I promise you a lot of information and a really fun time. And if you need help deciding whether or not this is the right seminar for you, call me and I’ll help you decide :)

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Business Management Daily makes leadership easy is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I hate to be a contrarian (Oh. Ok. I love it. Why change the habits of a lifetime?) but… it’s not the end-all and be-all that it’s being touted as.

Here’s the good news: Sales 2.0 is good for driving people to you. By simply offering a webinar, a free e-book, a White Paper, or some incentive, you can get folks to your site. If your material is good enough, they will Twitter about you, put a TinyUrl about you, link to your site, write you up on their blog. You can gather their data, have some sort of passive or active follow up, use the names on an opt-in list, and get hundreds or thousands of new names on your database.

If you want new names and a large database, Sales 2.0 is for you. I know many, many marketers pouring their hearts out to develop wonderful content to send out as bait to attract attention. And it works: after your event, you can follow people up with an email, or hire a telephone sales group to follow up with a phone call. Allegedly, SalesGenius has a dedicated phone sales crew that will call up a new contact within minutes of them signing up on their contact form.

And, what does that give you? An opt-in list (a different question – did the people opt-in for you to contact them after the event?) to send marketing material to. If you don’t actively follow up, you potentially have a new group of people who have been introduced to you and your material, and will hopefully go to your site and learn more or buy something. Hopefully is the operative word here.

And here’s the bad news: how do these folks decide to convert? How do they choose to make a purchase once you’ve captured their name? After you’ve sent them emails (and emails and emails)? Because this is still a one-way pitch: they are basically unknown addresses, who will  interact meaningfully only if they choose to, and only make a purchase if they need exactly what you are offering at the exact moment you are offering it.

Solution data is the last thing buyers need when making a decision to purchase.

People only use data to make decisions with at the point they need the data – usually as the last act in a purchasing decision. Not before. Primary decisions are made on values. With lots of buy-in necessary.

Let me say that a different way. Sales 2.0 suffers from the same problem that all sales suffers from: the assumption that because there is a need, or a problem, the only thing that must occur is some sort of hook-up between the need and the ‘right solution’ and, miraculously, a purchase will occur.

We all know that, sadly, there is a less than 10% conversion rate in sales. And yet the myth persists: great product, trusted partner, perfect solution, good prospecting, great closing techniques, getting past gatekeepers, getting to the decision makers, understanding who the decision makers are, having a great price or a special deal – yup. Sales keeps coming up with ways to persuade, manipulate, position. But still, after centuries of lots of new, new things, there is still a <10% closing rate.

Why, you ask? Ah. I’m going to tell you why. Because (obviously) that’s not how people buy.  Because the sales model only manages the solution-decision end of the buyer’s buying decision. Because a buyer – whether an individual or a group – has a bunch of internal, subjective, hidden, mysterious, unconscious (Are you getting the point? There is no way an outsider can influence this using the sales model.) factors and criteria they need to  address internally in some way, before a purchasing decision can be made.

And many of these factors are deep within the buyer’s culture, and have nothing directly to do with the Identified Problem. It’s the lunch meeting with the boss’s boss that was canceled; the fight your prospect is having with the next department. It’s the relationship and rules and people stuff we can’t control with the sales model. But has to get done.

Your buyer needs a new piece of software? or a team building course? But they have been doing what they doing for quite a while and haven’t changed anything. Obviously, the status quo will continue until it gets enough buy-in to agree to a change.

Indeed, making a purchase is a change management issue – a systems issue, if you will, that can be influenced by Buying Facilitation™. It’s not so simple as problem/need + solution = purchase or we’d be closing a lot more than we close.

Like sales, Sales 2.0 is a push modality, even though it professes to be a pull model. Because it doesn’t help buyers maneuver through their unique and idiosyncratic hidden dynamics that need to buy-in to making a change at this time – independent of the need.

So Sales 2.0 is basically a great tool for sales using a numbers game: have enough names, throw enough spaghetti on the wall, and some of it will stick.

So: don’t expect:

1. people who aren’t ready to buy to buy you because they opted in to a free webinar;
2. people who signed a contact sheet to read your emails;
3. people to know how to buy you because you’ve got their name from a cookie;
4. your sales to increase if you don’t find a way to help the buyer facilitate the unique change decisions (NOT buying decisions) they need to make that will ensure their system will be intact after purchasing your product;
5. to automatically convert an email address to a buyer.

Ask yourself this: why do you assume that the webinar, or the White Paper, or the Podcast you are offering is a precursor to a buying decision?

Just some food for thought. And because I like being a contrarian.
sd

Sales 2.0: 5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com