Your solution is the last thing a buyer needs. Literally…

Sales has been around since the Serpent convinced Eve to eat the apple. And, unfortunately, the goals have remained pretty much the same ever since.

You’re a smart entrepreneur with a savvy team. Your widget will make millions. You started up with a few bucks your friends gave you but now you need funding. Do you know how an investor will choose to fund you over others?

The answer is you don’t know.

Instead of relying on a great presentation and hoping it will inspire investors, why not add targeted questions to the end of your presentation to make sure you both know what you should do to meet success their criteria. Do they want to be repaid within 5 years? Do they want to sell you off for $3,000,000 in two years? Do they want you to compete with the larger brands and grow virally while becoming a hot brand they can stand behind?

You have a choice: you can follow buyers around until they decide they need your solution – about 90% of them won’t – or facilitate their decision path. I developed a change facilitation model. Read more…….

Currently we’re merely listening for what we want to hear, thereby restricting the full potential of social listening. As more than merely a tool for monitoring, text mining, analyzing, or customer experience management and intelligence, social listening can determine when and how to actively facilitate buyers, users, and followers through to the desired outcome.

There are 13 steps all buyers or followers – consumers of products as well as services, B2B as well as B2C – take before they finally choose to buy a new solution. The first 10 of these steps include hidden, change management, and buy-in issues that are essential, but not directly related to, a purchase.

A buying decision is not a whim. Whether you’re making a small personal purchase with one Buying Decision Team member or a…