We understand sales. We know how to assess need, brand/pitch/present solutions, and design sites to bring in, and follow, eyeballs. We use technology to help us sell. Now it’s time to have total sales performance – putting together all methodologies to help us find prospects and sell our solutions.

At the moment, you’ve got a lot of names, leads, and prospects. But depending on your sales model – just sales folks, or using marketing automation, lead scoring, and telesales people to choose the best prospects to hand over to sales – you are closing between 1-7% of all names/leads.

For ‘total sales performance‘, let’s add in a skill set to help buyers navigate through the back-end, behind-the-scenes decisions they must make before they can buy. Because with all of the technology in the world, with all of the prospects in the world, and with all of the Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0 capability, we are still losing a large number of prospects. And neither sales nor marketing automation address the backend issues buyers must manage offline.

Someone recently said to me: “You’re still flogging that Buying Facilitation™ stuff?” My response: “Sure. You still flogging that sales stuff?”

SALES, ALONE, ONLY MANAGES 10% OF THE BUYING DECISION

I see Buying Facilitation™ as addressing the buyer’s private and internal journey, like a 1-2 punch. First, help the buyer manage the back-end of their buying decision – those people, relationship, political, strategic, and historic issues they must manage before they can buy – then, do the sales.

Just as you wouldn’t buy a house until your family got together to figure out their criteria for moving, for a new house, and until the bank said you could borrow money and the realtor told you your house would be relatively easy to sell, so a buyer absolutely cannot purchase anything until all of the Buying Decision Team agrees and adds their two cents.

Until or unless you address the front-end of the buyer’s decision criteria and internal change issues that have nothing to do with need or solution or vendor choice a prospect will not make a purchase. I often remind people of the magic 80% number: the number of prospects who will buy a solution like yours within 2 years (and leave behind a trail of dead sales people) but from a different vendor.

Why don’t they buy it from you? Why aren’t they buying sooner? Because they cannot. Because the sales model only manages the needs assessment and solution placement and does nothing to help them manage the mystery of the buying decision journey. Because there would be too much fallout. Because people would quit, or relationships severely compromised, or companies and strategic partnerships would be harmed.

Total sales performance is not just focused on the solution placement end of the buying decision. Add Buying Facilitation™ to the front end, and change your close rate to 40%.

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To learn more about Buying Facilitation™, read sample chapters from my two most recent books (Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it) on www.buyingfacilitation.com

To read about tactical things you can do to help buyers buy more, quicker, and without objections or time delays, read Buying Facilitation™: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.

Or listen to Sharon-Drew make prospecting calls: MP3