Sales, Marketing and Social Can Be More Successful: hint – it’s not about your content
Sales, marketing, and social marketing attempt to place solutions and create relationships by supplying great content, discovering likely prospects, and creating trust. Unfortunately sellers end up closing a small fraction – less than 5% – of those they reach, and marketers and social end up closing even less. Our products are terrific. So what’s causing our failure?
PROBLEMS WITH OUR CURRENT THINKING
Here’s a bit of flawed thinking that exacerbates the problems:
- Sellers believe prospects are folks who SHOULD buy (those with a ‘need’) rather than those who WILL buy (those who achieve consensus and set up a way to manage any change a purchase involves, and are ready and able to buy regardless of urgency of need).
- Marketers believe that content is king, that offering the right content at the right time enables a buying decision. But we don’t know the role the reader plays on the Buying Decision Team, how or when our content is being used, and if it’s making a difference in the buying decision (i.e. it might be just a resource);
- Social believes that by engaging in relationships over time and developing trust, followers will come back when they are ready. But because we can’t know their decision path, or associates who need to buy-in to any change, or internal political issues, we can’t know if we are spending time wisely.
We can facilitate buying decisions by employing different thinking to avoid
1. Merely guessing at, or manipulating, our conversations or offerings without knowing where along their decision path our buyers are, and how many of their Buying Decision Team are on board;
2. Playing a numbers game to find and pitch those with a supposed ‘need’, assuming our content persuades buyers to buy or take action;
3. Neglecting possible actions
It’s time to add some new thinking to what we’re doing.
WHAT I LEARNED IN THE TRENCHES
By focusing on placing solutions, we’re missing the first 9 specific steps in a 13 step buying decision path that have nothing to do with our solution:
- People have complicated issues (personal, systemic, organizational, and all criteria-based) to handle before they can buy or change. They only buy when all issues are managed regardless of need (systems congruence trumps need);
- Buying includes change; change means disruption; consensus helps manage the disruption before it’s a problem; each person involved brings unique criteria and voice and shifts the buying criteria (i.e. until the entire Buying Decision Team is formed, weighs in, and agrees, there is no way to accurately define ‘needs’).
- Given politics, internal relationship issues, history and future, it’s challenging, but necessary, to design a route through to change (in this case a purchase) that includes the people, rules, relationships, and group outcomes to avoid resistance and fallout.
I learned this as both a sales person and an entrepreneur. When Merrill Lynch hired me a stockbroker in the 1970s, I became a million-dollar producer my first year. But I couldn’t figure out why everyone with a need (especially those I had a great relationship with) didn’t always buy what I thought they needed. Where did they go?
When I started up my tech company in London in the 80s I realized the problem: as a buyer myself, my direct needs were often superseded by the social, political, organizational, and relational considerations I had to manage. When sellers came to pitch they worked hard to understand my needs in the area their solution served, and gave fine pitches, but as outsiders had no way to handle or understand the fights I was having with the Board, or the issues the distributor was having with their sales force. Nor did anyone even try.
The sales model, I realized when faced with great pitches and lovely sales folks, was not designed facilitate the behind-the-scenes non-need-related issues I had to manage before I could buy anything. I realized that all the great content, all the lovely relationships, all the ‘needs’ I had that matched their solutions, were worthless if I couldn’t manage the off-line, ‘Pre Sales’ issues that would be involved if I purchased anything. So, “Yes” to need; “No” to Buyer Readiness. And the sales model has no skills that address this problem because it is personal, idiosyncratic, and systems-based, and lie outside of the focus of placing solutions. I’ve heard it said that 80% of buyers you’re following now will buy a similar product (not yours) within 2 years of your connection; that’s the time it took them to make decisions that wouldn’t disrupt – the time of the sales cycle.
I then developed a facilitation approach (Buying Facilitation®) for my own sales team to add to the front end of the sales model to first facilitate Buyer Readiness – the steps buyers would have to take internally anyway and without Buying Facilitation® take a helluva lot longer. My team then added a new focus, and entered conversations as change management facilitators first, then selling when/if buyers were ready (more were ready, and much, much quicker, with no chasing around and we were able to disengage very early from those who could never buy.). After all, until they were able to determine if they COULD buy (and still maintain systems congruence) they could never be buyers regardless of need (the reason folks with a real need don’t buy). I continue to pose this question: do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? They are two different activities, and the sales model only handles the sales end; the buying end is change management.
Rule: the time it takes buyers to manage their off-line, idiosyncratic change issues is the length of the sales cycle. We were then able to get onto the Buying Decision Team early, lead buyers quickly through their unique decisions, and became great relationship managers, not to mention servant leaders. Our sales tripled and the time to close was reduced by two thirds; our relationships with clients were cemented and we avoided competition and price issues.
The takeaway here for marketers and social is the recognition that we are largely ignoring the hidden, systemic issues going on within our buyers’ environments that are not available to outsiders yet fundamental for any change to happen. We keep pushing content, hoping and praying that it will reach the right people at the right time. So long as we continue to focus on solution placement, we lose sales that we needn’t. That is our Achilles Heel. And it doesn’t have to be.
WHAT’S THE ROLE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT?
Buyers and followers don’t know their journey to change when they begin and hence take longer than necessary to figure it out. But figure it out they must. And we can help them, and make our value proposition our ability to be their GPS, so long as our focus is to facilitate change, not push or manipulate to make a sale. Plus, it’s an entirely different skill set.
There are two elements of Buying Facilitation® that can be added to create a ‘pull’ that’s change- and decision-focused.
1. Enter as a change facilitator. Instead of coding, noticing, tracking details that will help us guess at who’s reading, who’s a decision maker, where they might be in their sales cycle, etc. let’s begin listening for, and designing, tools that facilitate each step of the movement along the decision path that change decisions goes through; let’s ensure they discover the right people to be involved (some not so obvious) and help them build the necessary internal consensus. Currently we now listen for what we want to hear rather than listening for issues with decision making, change or choice. I’ve developed a new way to listen (Listening for Systems) that is non-biased.
2. Guide buyers through change management at the start of the sales process. Regardless of the type or size of the solution, buyers cannot buy until they are ready internally, and sales doesn’t have tools to focus to handle systemic change management without bias. Facilitative Questions are a type of criteria-recognition tool that facilitates thinking using Servant Leader thinking. Conventional questions are biased in favor of the seller; Facilitative Questions are biased in favor of the buyer.
It’s possible to develop assessments, questionnaires, intelligent contact sheets, CRM tools that enter in the right place along the decision path, provide the capability to lead buyers and followers through the full complement of steps they must take, making it possible to send out just the appropriate data at the right point in the cycle, and facilitate the consensus and buy-in asthey quickly ready themselves for change. We can add these to the sales, marketing, and social models to truly serve our buyers and followers and close more. It will be an addition, and the results will stronger relationships and more conversions.
The problem has never been your solution; the problem is that we overlook the idiosyncratic stages of Buyer Readiness that are not involved with using our solutions – helping buyers address their unknowable change issues (independent of need, and based on people, rules, relationships, history, etc.) so they can get their ducks in a row to buy anything. By adding a facilitation tool directed at managing change before we try to sell, we can find more clients, and sell more, faster. And we can become true servant leaders.
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Let’s connect. I can help you develop content, tools, training or questions that will enable a buyer’s buying decision process, as well as speak at your next conference. Or I can train or license Buying Facilitation® for your team to add to their sales skills.
Sharon Drew Morgen is the developer of the generic change management/decision facilitation model that teaches Others how to buy, change, collaborate, negotiate, and implement with no resistance, with full systemic buy in. She has trained 100,000 people worldwide, in global corporations (IBM, FEDEx, Morgan Stanley) and consulting firms (KPMG, Unisys). She adds this model to the front end of sales, change, decision analysis, leadership, and influencing. Read more articles on:www.sharondrewmorgen.com
Read two free chapters of her book What? on how to hear others without bias:www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at 512 771 1117 or sharondrew@
Sharon Drew Morgen August 22nd, 2016
Posted In: Communication, News, Sales
DOing vs. BEing: creating rules that put customers first
I recently purchased dysfunctional products/services from three vendors who were unwilling to go outside company rules to fix the problems they caused. How can we take part in the Trust Economy if our corporate rules preclude us from taking care of customers? Too often there’s a divergence between company rules and customer needs.
I’ll use my vendor issues as a starting point:
- Wheaton International Movers. After researching a big cross-country move, I picked Wheaton. But it was a nightmare: their driver was drunk on both ends of the move; boxes were lost; an expensive sculpture was broken by their packer. Getting reimbursed was a 4-month nightmare: I was ignored, lied to, and finally only paid a fraction of what I deserved even though they accepted responsibility. I was regularly told: “Well, unfortunately Ms. Morgen, that would go against our rules.” No one ever apologized; I’m still missing a favorite painting and important office paperwork; my sculpture is gone.
- CVS online pharmacy. These folks sent a bottle with crushed pills. I fought for weeks to get the pills replaced but I was told I should send them the offending bottle first (the post office is in a different town). “I understand your concern, but we must operate according to company rules.” Rules before my health?
- Fitbit. I purchased a broken Fitbit from an online vendor. Fitbit said they’d send a replacement I never received; the replacement from the online vendor was also broken. Reps at Fitbit actually said they received hundreds of calls a day about the problem but weren’t allowed to do anything about it until their ‘fix’ was ready. What?
As a consumer, I trust I’ll receive what I pay for, and be cared for if there’s a problem. Yet each company above took care of their rules before taking care of me. They put the DOing before the BEing.
RULES
When companies construct internal rules that are juxtaposed with customer needs they ignore the consequences
- Without customers, there’s no need for rules.
- Customer’s complaints go viral.
- Hurting, cheating, disregarding, and ignoring customers always, always loses business.
- For each customer who doesn’t feel fairly treated, companies lose unknown-hundreds of prospective clients for an uncertain time moving forward.
Too often companies confuse their rules [the DOing – regulations, results, performance] with a customer’s needs [the BEing – values, feelings, requirements]. Too many companies make it binary – company rules OR customer criteria – rather than Both/And. How do we design customer service scripts and training, how do we instill a primary focus on serving customers, to achieve Both/And and win/win?
The difference between DOing and BEing is Heart – heart, being one of those ‘soft’ ‘feminine’ words that assumes it’s not possible to make money and make nice (While training Buying Facilitation® at Morgan Stanley I heard they were conducting ‘closing’ training the following week. What? Why do you need both training programs? “Because BF is ‘soft’ and we need ‘hard’ skills to close.”). Isn’t it time to meld heart and head and DO-BE-DO-BE-DO? To make money AND make nice? All research shows the BEing is more profitable.
HOW TO PUT CUSTOMERS FIRST
There’s a way to put customers first AND take care of corporate rules. A few examples:
- Use an impossible customer request as a means to create a life-long partner.
“I hear you’d prefer if we were able to X. Unfortunately we aren’t able to do that, but we want you to be happy. Is there anything else I can do to get you what you deserve? Let’s see if we can get creative.”
Years ago while working with Bethlehem Steel during a trucker’s strike, I had my clients actually purchase steel retail from Pittsburg Steel to make sure Mazda wouldn’t have expensive downtime. We took the hit on cost to keep the customer happy. Well – to keep the customer!
- Use customer’s feelings to exhibit your dedication to them. During month 4 of my Wheaton ordeal, someone said “If you don’t stop shouting I’ll hang up on you!” Seriously? The rep should have been taught to grow a pair and not take it personally:
“Wow. Sounds like you’re really upset. I can imagine how annoyed you must be. I’m so sorry.”
- Make sure each Rep owns the problem. Nothing makes customers more angry than having to call back again and again (and be on hold forever) to find someone to help them, or having to repeat repeat repeat the same complaint to each new Rep. Assign the first Rep to own the problem to resolution.
MAKING MONEY AND MAKING NICE
To operate effectively in this new world of connection, workarounds, visibility and competition, your main differentiator may be how you take care of employees and customers.
- Design company rules that put customers first. So, instead of ‘Send us the damaged pills first [so we can fix any internal problems here]’ it would be, “That prescription is important to your health. I’ll send you an entirely new bottle and include a return mailer so you can send the bad ones back at your convenience. I’m sorry.”
- Trust that customers aren’t your enemies: they pay your bills.
- If you broke it, it’s yours. If you send a bad bottle of pills, a bad Fitbit (twice), or break a sculpture, fix it easily. Don’t take your costs out on the customer.
- Make sure that every customer is happy by the end of each interaction. An unhappy, screaming customer cannot be passed on.
- Create a vision statement that includes the words ‘Customer Service’. So: We are a Customer Service company that designs CRM software.
- Employees are customers. Happy employees take care of customers. I’ve never heard of a company that’s loving, kind, and respectful to their employees and mean to their customers. It’s that BEing thing again. I want to share a story that embodies the Truth of this.
Years ago a client sent a new employee to one of my Buying Facilitation® public training programs to get him caught up with the team I already trained in-house. This man, call him Glen, was angry, rude, mean, and dismissive of everyone around him. I called my client: Who is this mean person? He’s making everyone cry. Why did you hire him? “Do whatever you have to do to break him. I hired him because he’s got potential.” So I went into action on Day 2 and facilitated Glen through the outcomes he was causing. On Day 3 he came to class like a saint – supportive of others, kind, gentle, fun. What happened? Here’s what he said:
Every day, I’ve had to leave my house for work and put my ‘mean’ suit on. I was told I had to convince prospects, push closes, bias discussions about our products to promote a sale. I hated it: I had to shift my personality to ‘Do’ this manipulative, insensitive person. I told myself I had to become a shark. I’ve been miserable and my family has suffered; I didn’t know any other way to keep my job except to follow their rules and be miserable. Now I’m learning it’s possible to make money AND make nice; now I can be my real self and do my job successfully.
As a testament to his change, he got a huge – huge – tattoo of a shark on his back the evening he had his realization. He came to class the next day with the tattoo stating “I’ve put the shark behind me.”
To determine if you need to rethink your rules, to be part of the Trust Economy, consider these questions:
How will you know that the rules you have in place are customer-centric? If you need several layers of customer service to handle angry customers, or you regularly read negative Tweets or Yelp comments about you, there’s a problem.
How can you tell if you’re putting employees first? High turnover might be an indication.
How often do customer problems get escalated? Have you trained every level of staff to seek win/win results?
If you put people first, how would your rules change? And what beliefs would you need to reconsider?
What skills do employees have to achieve win/win when a problem occurs? Remember the mythical customer service rule Nordstrom was famous for? “Use your best judgment.” Of course that changes your hiring criteria. So be it.
I realize regulations are necessary to run a company. But so are customers. It’s possible to do the DOing and the BEing in a way that promotes income and care. What’s stopping you?
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Sharon Drew Morgen is an original thinker and visionary who designs communication/choice models for sales, coaching, customer service, and leadership. She is a keynote speaker, trainer, coach, and consultant. Sharon Drew is the developer of Buying Facilitation® and author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the Amazon Bestseller What? Did you really say what I think I heard?as well as one of the top 10 bloggers in sales/marketing (www.sharondrewmorgen.com).
Contact Sharon Drew to help you review your regs and design people-centric rules that support customers. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
Sharon Drew Morgen June 27th, 2016
Posted In: Communication, News
Using Follow Up Effectively
Do you attempt to follow up with prospective buyers because they haven’t contacted you when you thought they should? Do you know what is stopping them from contacting you? Or where they are along their decision path – their steps from idea to consensus, from change to choice, that buyers must address – while we sit and wait, hoping they’ll close?
With a focus on understanding need and placing solutions, you may have no idea what stage they are at: did you originally connect when they were first considering possibly fixing something? Or when they were comparing your solution to an internal workaround or their favorite vendor? Were they just seeking information to share at a planning session? I bet you don’t have all the data on this.
BUYERS DON’T WANT US EVEN WHEN THEY NEED OUR SOLUTION
We tend to think buyers need our solution, but that’s only a part of the issue. They don’t really want to buy anything, merely to solve a problem. And they always start out by trying to find a way to fix the problem themselves (When we think they are stalling, this is what’s going on that we don’t see.); it’s only when they realize that a workaround isn’t sufficient, or their internal folks can’t resolve the problem, or their regular vendors aren’t around, or or or… are they willing to buy.
But they have work to do before they are ready – and cannot not buy, regardless of how great a fit your solution is with their need, until these steps are completed (and all sizes/types of solutions require some form of these):
1.They must assemble anyone who will touch the final solution, (not obvious)
2. get buy in and consensus from both decision makers and influencers, (not easy)
3. manage any change a solution will bring. (complicated, even with a small sale).
Price is not the issue. Competition with other providers is not the problem. The problem is how they will manage the internal change your solution incurs (separate from the benefits of your solution). Read my article on the complete list of steps buyers must take before they can buy.
If you want to facilitate their decision making, and your prospect is aware they need your solution and they seem to be stalling, call with these questions:
- What would you and your decision team need to address to manage the types of change that would be required by purchasing our solution?
- How will you and the decision team know that an external solution might be more effective and efficient than an internal workaround?
I’ve developed Buying Facilitation® to use in conjunction with the sales model to give you the tools to help buyers manage the necessary steps to be ready to buy your solution. Use your follow up contact to help them figure out how to resolve any of these issues that might cause them to be stuck. Your solution is perfect for them; they just need help getting their ducks in a row so they can give you the order.
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See my new Entrepreneur Programs: Getting Funded; Creating a Selling Machine; Marketing to Buying Decisions
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Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.
More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com
Sharon Drew Morgen June 3rd, 2016
Anatomy of a Lost Sale: Case Study
I’ve been writing a lot lately about how we lose sales and forego success because we enter and conduct conversations through our biases and assumptions. Here is recent dialogue with a potential partner that gives a terrific example of possibility lost.
The representative of a sales/marketing blog called to discuss republishing my articles. Sounds great, right? But the hidden agendas, assumptions, and lack of collaboration ruined what might have been possible.
Here’s the story – and I’ll call my Communication Partner Bill.
DIALOGUE
Bill: Hey Sharon Drew. We love your content and would love to make it available to our 100,000 readers. Are you interested?
SDM: Sure. But I notice you’re a ‘sales’ blog, and my stuff is not exactly sales. Do you know the difference between Buying Facilitation® and sales?
Bill: I’d like to say yes, but I probably don’t.
SDM: Should I explain it? And if you still like what I’m doing we could see if your readers would like it too.
I then proceeded to explain my change facilitation model.
Bill: I hadn’t known all that. Good stuff. So we can repurpose your articles, and then you can use social media to link back to us?
SDM: What do you mean, Repurpose?
Bill: I just sent you links to 5 articles we’ve already repurposed so you can see. We reserve the right to change 25% of our contributor’s articles to enhance Search capability. Take a look. We haven’t published them yet and are awaiting your approval.
SDM: Wait. You want to rewrite one quarter of what I’ve written, possibly without fully understanding what I’m saying, and then use my name as the author? How do you know what you’ve changed imparts the same message?
Bill: Well, we hope we get it right.
SDM: You hope? So you rewrote some of my article to suit your needs, didn’t ask me to do it myself so it would line up with my intended message, didn’t understand Buying Facilitation® before you changed it, and spent hours rewriting my stuff before getting my approval – and still want me to have my name on stuff I didn’t write so your site can align with my brand?
Bill: Well, yes. But we have 100,000 readers that you’d then have access to.
SDM: Do you know how long those articles take me to write?
Bill: No idea. A couple of hours?
SDM: 10-20 hours. I’m a writer! Each word is carefully chosen to mean exactly what I want it to mean; a specific flow that I carefully create. No one – no one – touches my articles! Even my editor just writes me notes, like ‘Too wordy’ or ‘This is in the wrong place.’ And you want to rewrite 25% of my articles? And you were so sure that I’d be ok with this that you already rewrote 5 articles? That’s quite an assumption, not to mention time waste.
Bill: We didn’t mean to annoy you. Other bloggers are happy to have 100,000 eyeballs reading their stuff.
SDM: My blogs have plenty of eyeballs. But that’s not the point: why would I put my name on something I didn’t write and may not represent my thinking accurately? I find your assumptions infuriating and arrogant.
Bill: How ‘bout if instead you just share links to some of our articles with your social media connections?
SDM: The mainstream reader isn’t my audience. Did you know that? Did you ask who my readers were?
Bill: Oh. I didn’t know that. How ‘bout if you wrote an article just for us?
SDM: Sure. Any thoughts on how you might compensate me for my time and ideas?
Bill: We can’t pay you.
SDM: If you think of any way to compensate me, let me know.
Bill entered the call with biased expectations and assumptions based on his needs – access to my readers and the use of my name and content. His assumptions absolutely infuriated me, stepped on my beliefs, my ego, my professionalism, my time/hard work/ideas. I felt disrespected, abused, and annoyed that he merely wanted to meet his own goals, hadn’t done his homework, and assumed that his ‘product’ (100,000 eyeballs) met my criteria of a ‘win’ (It didn’t.). Unethical and out of integrity. If he had entered by assuming that between us we’d find a ‘win’ we could have found a way to serve us both.
A DIALOGUE USING BUYING FACILITATION®
Sellers lose sales when entering with biased, self-serving assumptions that limit possibility. Conversations that might have proved fruitful end up inadvertently annoying buyers, miss real prospects, and only connect with those having the same assumptions and biases. Here is what the conversation, and a partnership, could have been using Buying Facilitation® (and a bit of homework).
Bill: Hey Sharon Drew. I’m calling from X blog, and we love your stuff. I wonder if there is a way we could share your ideas with our readers in a way that would enable Google search for us both? From reading some of your articles, it seems that your target audience are early adopters and we might have some in our database.
SDM: Cool beans. Thanks for the call. How do you generally enhance search capabilities in your author’s articles?
Bill: We change about 25% of the content to use the most productive search terms. We might have to discuss if the same terms work for you also. How would you know, before we begin, that it’s possible to add search terms that could maintain the integrity of your message while effectively reaching the right audience?
SDM: As a professional writer, I don’t allow anyone to touch my writing. But I’d be happy to discuss search terms that would work for us both, and add them into the article. Does that work?
Bill: I’m sure between us we could find the right words. Worth a try. Another thought: maybe you could write an article for us? Since we couldn’t pay you money, do you have some ideas about something we could do together to make it a win for both our readerships?
By entering with the goal of win/win, by entering without self-serving assumptions that biased the entire conversation, we could have found a creative win for both of our readerships.
I don’t know what might have been. Maybe we could have created the largest sales blog in the world together. Or co-authored a book on the arc of the past and future of sales. Maybe we could have started a podcast series and invited disparate professionals to speak. Maybe. But we’ll never know. And that, my friends, is how you lose sale.
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Sharon Drew Morgen is the author most recently of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? as well as self-learning tools and an on-line team learning program – designed to both assess listening impediments and encourage the appropriate skills to accurately hear what others convey.
Sharon Drew is also the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller ‘Selling with Integrity’ and 7 other books on how decisions get made, how change happens in systems, and how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a facilitation tool for sellers, coaches, and managers to help others determine their best decisions and enable excellence. Her award winning blog
sharondrewmorgen.com has 1500 articles that help sellers hep buyers buy. Sharon Drew recently developed 3 new programs for start ups.
She can be reached at sharondrew@
Sharon Drew Morgen May 2nd, 2016
Posted In: Communication, News
Buying Decisions, Buying Decision Path, Buy Cycles, and Pre-Sales by Sharon Drew Morgen
I’d like to set the record straight. In 1985 I coined terms that I’ve written extensively about in best selling books, magazines, and hundreds of articles. Unfortunately, when finally adopting them, the sales field defined them differently than originally intended, causing important concepts to be lost. This article presents the intended definitions and explains how I came to coin the terms.
In 1979 I became Rookie (stockbroker) of the Year at Merrill Lynch with 210 accounts (the market was 777). I couldn’t understand why prospects who ‘should have’ bought didn’t buy. When I started up a tech company in London in 1983 and became a ‘buyer’ I realized the problem and developed a new skill set to migrate it. Here’s how I figured it out.
HOW SALES IGNORES BEHIND-THE-SCENES BUYER’S REAL ISSUES
As an entrepreneur with needs, I invited sellers in to pitch me. But regardless of their professional skills or my potential need, I couldn’t decide what or if to buy before
- the people involved shared their thoughts and concerns, and bought-in to any changes a new solution would involve,
- we discerned any fallout to the company, relationships, people, policies etc. that change would incur and figure out ways to minimize it
- we tried workarounds and determined we couldn’t fix the problems with known resources.
Even though we were only a $5,000,000 company, I had a closely knit team and flourishing business to consider before bringing in anything that might rock the boat with my employees, investors, clients, company strategy, bottom line, brand, daily routines and systems. With a focus on placing solutions and ‘understanding’ needs (impossible to answer accurately until we all comprehended the scope of the givens) the sellers pitched solution data I didn’t know how to consider responsibly and potentially lost me as a buyer. That’s when I realized the problem I had had with buyers not closing:
The sales model focuses on placing solutions (seeking folks with a ‘need’ who ‘should’ buy) and ignores the confounding human-, policy-, and system-specific issues buyers must handle before a purchase could even be considered (folks who ‘will’ buy). By entering only during the final element of choice (vendor, solution), sellers squander the ability to influence the major portion of a buyer’s decision process which has little to do with needs or purchase.
Indeed, the sales model promotes the cart before prospects even know if they have a horse or have mapped out a destination, ensuring only those who have their cart ready to go (knew the obstructions, route alternatives, and danger signs) would buy. Promoting solutions, and asking questions in service of a sale, merely captures the low hanging fruit – those ready, willing, and able to buy – and ignores the possibility of influencing, enabling, and serving the early, Pre-Sales components in the decision-making path (whether selling/marketing online or through customer contact) – not to mention loses untold amount of business.
I realized all buyers must do this; and as I seller I had been sitting and waiting while buyers did this on their own, without me. Indeed, the time it took them to complete this was the length of the sales cycle. I figured if I could facilitate the buyer’s decision path, I could accelerate their decisions to ‘buy’ or ‘not buy’, stop wasting time, close more sales (quickly) and really serve. So I coded the entire change/decision arc (13 Steps, 9 of which [70% of the decision process] are outside the scope of how/what we sell), learned how systems make decisions to change, coined some new terms and developed some new models for questioning and listening without bias, and built this into a front end to sales so I could enter, facilitate/serve, and influence, earlier. I named this process Buying Facilitation® to denote the difference in focus between ‘selling’ and ‘buying’ and help buyers do the initial stuff they had to do anyway, but without sellers:
- assemble all appropriate stakeholders ((Buying Decision Team) to get their input;
- get consensus for types and levels of change manageable;
- research options;
- discover easy, economical workarounds where possible;
- decide how to identify handle any disruption a new addition would cause;
- weight risks with stakeholders to discern the efficacy of buying anything (Buy Cycle);
- choose solutions and vendors.
To be fair, the sales job has never been about facilitating change, using a restrictive ‘solution-placement’ model since its inception without recognizing the low close and enormous time wastage is anything more than a problem finding buyers. This singular focus has been so endemic that sales hasn’t accounted for either the idiosyncratic issues buyers must address prior to buying anything (even for inexpensive items) or the opportunity to influence and serve buyers much earlier than the final point they might reach to buy, believing that if they find creative ways to offer content earlier it will mitigate the problem. But it doesn’t.
The industry close rate of 4% has always been an indication of a problem: the centuries-old bias toward placing solutions (How can we accept a 96% failure rate [from first contact] as standard?) ensures all sales models, including Challenger, create resistance, potentially turn off real buyers who need your solution (80% of prospects buy a similar product within 2 years of your interaction), and ignore the ability to influence 70% of the Buying Decision Path.
Indeed, buyers don’t want to buy anything, they just want to resolve a problem congruently, without major disruption to that which works well. Indeed a purchase happens only when there is no alternate resolution; and we haven’t had a skill set that blends with the sales model to help: except for visionary areas within the global companies I’ve trained over the last 30 years, the sales field found my ideas and newly coined terms pointless. But sellers who added Buying Facilitation® to their sales activities experience upward of a 6x increase in sales as they truly facilitate buying decisions. My dream has always been that Buying Facilitation® be taught as part of sales training for all sales professionals.
BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES 70% OF BUYER’S DECISIONS
I taught my sales team how to add Buying Facilitation® to their current sales skills; we quickly experienced a 40% increase in sales (from first call) and I only needed half the sales staff. My tech team used the material to involve all the right people immediately and extract the most vital information quickly, making programming and implementing more efficient, and insuring early project completion and no ‘user errors’. I began teaching the material to clients, coaches, and managers.
Approximately five years ago my terms began entering the sales field. But, as happens when a new idea enters mainstream, the terms were not defined as I defined them, but re-defined to be a part of the very concepts I was fighting against.
TERMS DEFINED
I have no illusions that the mis-definitions will continue and some mainstream sellers will think they ‘do this’ already. Hopefully some folks will seek to learn the material (and training is required as the model employs entirely different thinking and skills). But just for my own piece of mind, I’m offering the definitions of the terms I coined in 1985. They include some form of the word ‘buy’ to denote the disparity between the act of buying and the process of selling. And the underlying belief is that as sellers we should be using our unique positions as corporate representatives and knowledge experts to be servant leaders and truly serve buyers to discover their own path to excellence, hopefully, ultimately, with our solution (But if not, we end quickly and gently. Otherwise, we close in half the time.).
Buying Facilitation®. A generic change management model for coaches, sellers, managers, etc.) that enables efficient, congruent change, that employs a specific type of listening (Listening for Systems), and new form of question (Facilitative Questions – not information gathering), used in a specific, coded sequence, for facilitators to enable excellence through congruent change. It manages all of the unconscious, upfront, endemic change issues that would have to accede for change to happen. Until buyers (or anyone) know how to manage this, they cannot agree to change/buy, hence the length of the current sales cycle.
Helping Buyers Buy. The term comes from the first Buying Facilitation® training I delivered in 1988 to KLM. By ‘helping buyers buy’ we facilitate the full Pre-Sales Buying Decision Path.
Buying Decisions/Process. The outcome of resolving all of the change/decision issues into an action: consensus of all stakeholders who will touch the new solution; the route forward to change without disruption or resistance; deciding to move beyond their workaround; AND THEN the solution/vendor choice issues. The term is being misdefined by sales to merely include vendor/solution choice issues.
Buying Decision Path. 13 steps that traverse the elements of change management: starting with an idea (Step 1) through to a purchase (Step 13). It includes people, systems, implementation, resistance, workarounds, relationships – and comes well before any decision is made to buy anything, and quite separate from any ‘need’. The sales field uses this term erroneously to denote how buyers choose one vendor/solution over another, line up the funds, etc. – a usage dynamically opposite to the original definition.
Buy Cycle. The entire set of givens necessary for buyers to end up with excellence (either internally or with a purchase). Again, it’s not only the solution/vendor choice issues.
Buying Decision Team. The full set of stakeholders – some not obvious, some not ‘decision makers’ – who will touch the final solution and need to add their ideas, concerns, knowledge, and feelings to the discussion. Usually sellers (or change agents) aren’t privy to the internal machinations necessary before a purchase (or any change) can happen. Hence the 4% close rate.
Buying Patterns. The way the buyer has traditionally bought/changed in the past. Do they always use known vendors? Will they never take cold calls or meetings with sellers? Sellers traditionally use their comfortable selling patterns and cannot connect with buyers with divergent buying patterns.
Marketers currently use the term Buyer Persona to denote ‘influencers’ who will enable a sale. This ignores most of the early decisions buyers make and keeps marketing from entering effectively much earlier. Using different types of content it’s quite possible to influence different points along the Buying Decision Path.
TIME FOR CHANGE
Think about it. Are you happy with your low close rate? Your horrific waste of time and resource running around after people who will never buy (and who you could know on the first call weren’t buyers) or responding to RFPs that fail? The time waste seeking prospects who will take an appointment only to have one person on a data gathering mission show up – and then you never hear from them again (not to mention the hours planning for the meeting!)? Have you never wondered where buyers go when YOU think they have a need?
The current sales model closes a fraction of people who need your solution, and costs much more than necessary on wasted resources (large sales forces, presentations, proposals). The problem isn’t finding the buyers; the problem is facilitating those who can buy. As an example, using Buying Facilitation® at Kaiser, sellers went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales in a month, to 27 visits and 25 closed sales, an increase of 600%, not to mention the time saving.
I go back to the original question I posed decades ago: Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? They are two different activities. And I’ve developed terms that help sellers think through the steps that help buyers buy. Maybe it’s time to begin learning the ‘how’ of helping buyers buy, the ‘what’ of the buying decision path, and the ‘who’ of the buying decision team. Let’s begin using the terms properly and stop ignoring such a large piece of the puzzle.
____________
Sharon Drew Morgen is the creator of Buying Facilitation®. She’s written 7 books on the topic including one NYTimes Business Bestseller. Sharon Drew has trained and coached in companies such as Unisys, IBM, KPMG, Kaiser Permanente, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, HP, GE, Bose, etc. To find out more about how buyers buy, go to www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com
www.buyingfacilitationtraining.com
or 512-
Sharon Drew Morgen March 14th, 2016
On Becoming 70
As a kid I had fantasies of what the rest of my life would be. I was going to be (in no particular order): a New York Times Bestselling author (check); a world change agent (check); a singer (Nope!); recognized for my beauty and talent (Um…); a wife to a nice man and mother to 3 kids (In the ballpark.); live happily ever after (Jury is still out.). Some of that came true. But not much. And certainly not like I fantasized.
As I’ve lived my life, each decision, each turn of events, seemed to be both dynamic and challenging. Was I supposed to keep my dreams in mind or create new ones? It took decades to realize that whatever decisions I made were the right ones at the time.
My life turned out quite differently than I imagined, with my personal life taking a back seat to the work I somehow knew I was meant to convey. Personally, I took two very brief trips through marriage and motherhood (one son), with some movies, dancing, and travel to 63 countries. Professionally, I’ve written books; developed, scaled, and trained my original thinking in training, decision making, and change; coded how people hear each other (or don’t); and founded a non-profit. I always felt secure in the creativity and brain stuff, and horribly inadequate in the personal.
TRAPPED IN A BRAIN
As a child of domestic violence with Borderline Personality Disorder, Asperger’s and PTSD, I recognized I was trapped in a pretty cool brain with little ability to relate or socialize according to conventional norms. I mistakenly thought that if I got married and had kids, and worked in a corporate job, I’d be normal. But ‘normal’ wasn’t in the cards: I eventually had to give up a personal life in order to have the clarity, simplicity, and space to daydream, think and write.
Looking back, I cannot imagine how, as a damaged 11 year old, I understood I needed an enhanced skill set to face the challenge to the status quo that my ideas caused – a journey that took me 30 years with the help of gifted, kind, and demanding therapists. I had to learn appropriate communication, unbiased listening, patience, self-acceptance, authenticity, humility, trust, clarity, and boundaries. I had to make sure my mind/body/spirit was healthy. I had to learn to take the risks necessary to proclaim ideas that flew in the face of mainstream. I had to dig deeply into spirituality, values, meditation and find the courage to change, even in the face of abject terror and confusion. And always, I had to learn how to bring my heart into everything I did because my models blend heart and mind.
Luckily I found clients interested in my ideas. Over the decades, I learned to show up as socially appropraite most of the time, albeit ‘eccentric’ and occasionally obnoxious. Once, following a two year stint teaching Buying Facilitation® and my Facilitative Questioning technique to national sales team at Bethlehem Steel, my client was handing me over to a different department. “Is she always like this?” he whispered? “Yes,” my client whispered back. “And you’ll learn to love her.”
TENACITY AND TRANQUILITY
What I find curious is that regardless of how scared or isolated I was, I always – even as a child – knew with utter clarity that my ability to code systemic change was important enough to devote my life to and needed a global audience. I accomplished what I was meant to accomplish. The fields I’ve been challenging (sales, coaching, decision making) are even starting to catch up with the models I developed many decades ago.
I passionately hope next lifetime will be simpler. The struggle to encourage change in mainstream has been wearisome; the lack of a personal life has been sad. I’ve shed millions of tears and spent hundreds of sleepless nights. But I turn 70 knowing I’ve made a difference, and can rest in the knowledge that the world is a better place for having had me in it. And that knowledge is its own reward.
I face aging with contentment, curiosity, a bit of fear (I’m not afraid to die, just of losing my ability to think and be curious. My father died of Alzheimer’s.), and an excitement to learn my next lessons. I have no more idea of what the rest of my life will be like than I knew as a teenager.
But I do know this birthday is confusing me. I cannot imagine me as my mental picture of what an old woman should look or act like. I appear to be the same in the mirror, at the gym, dancing, writing, creating. When will something get different? Can I keep daydreaming and discovering? It’s quite confusing. No answers. Will let you know what happened next year. But I do know I seem to be settling in.
Sometimes, these days, I feel drawn to stillness. I just moved to a floating home on the Columbia River. Am spending vast amounts of time sitting quietly, watching the water go by. Peaceful. Sweet. Kind and soft in my heart. And so nice to not feel driven.
But sometimes I’m drawn to learning and thinking. I’m finally reading David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. And books on Bio-Hackers, predictions, New York garbage collection, and food. So much to learn.
I can’t stop having fun either. I finally found a replacement to the Broken Spoke here in Portland for my life-long Western Swing dancing hobby. And I’ve started a Non-Fiction Book Club.
New ideas aren’t slowing down one bit. But now, although I’m available to folks who need me, I write my ideas in notebooks instead of seeking to have ‘the world’ hear them. My job now is merely to be the person I’ve become over the last seven decades. I even seem to have a personal life emerging!
I feel complete. I can just be. And wherever my life now takes me is fine. I’ve lived my life fully and purposefully. I’m deeply happy. I’ve made a difference. And it’s been a privilege.
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Sharon Drew Morgen teaches the ‘how’ of decision making, change facilitation, and collaboration for sellers/buyers, leaders/followers, change agents/groups to corporations such as Kaiser, KPMG, IBM, Wachovia, etc. Her most recent book What? breaks down the gap between what’s said and what’s heard and teaches communication in corporations. She’s written 7 books on her unique model Buying Facilitation® which teaches sellers how to facilitate change and consensus for buyers. www.sharondrewmorgen.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen February 15th, 2016
Posted In: News
Two Cold Call Case Studies: Why Your Cold Calls Aren’t Working
I believe that cold calls are quite important as part of an overall sales strategy. How they are done, however, determines their success. If the goal of the call is to gather data, share product information, start a conversation, or make an appointment, the odds are that the outcomes will be less than successful: sellers claim over 90% failure on their attempts.
If, however, a seller can enter the call with a goal to create the means for buyers to discover their path to excellence in the area of the seller’s solution, to figure out who they should assemble to begin a change process that leads them to excellence (and possibly a purchase), and create a win/win collaboration with the seller that engages buyers and prospects to continue communicating, then it’s a win.
Using current cold calling techniques, cold callers don’t recognize that the call is meant for them to get their own needs met. Sellers enter the call as if the buyer:
- were sitting and waiting to hear from them with nothing else to do,
- needs the solution regardless of their status quo,
- should respond fully and honestly to a stranger asking probing, rude questions.
And worse of all, there are a large percentage of real buyers who won’t take the call because they either don’t want to speak to a stranger who wants to take their time, don’t like the prying questions or the information push, or aren’t at the stage in their decision path that would enlist a solution or sales person. Using other means of cold calling, these folks could easily be brought on board for appointments with all of the decision makers, or for continued calls of discovery and collaboration.
Here are two lousy cold calls I got recently. I took one of them and created a ‘good call’ using my Buying Facilitation® model to show you the difference between playing a numbers game, and serving buyers to facilitate excellence. Read them all, and decide which is better.
#1
C: Hello, Sharon? Joe from Mimeo calling. How you doin’ today? [I assume he was attempting to be intimate, not knowing that anyone intimate with me would never call me ‘Sharon.’]
SDM: Do you know if that’s my correct name?
C: I do know. It’s your name.
SDM: Really? Are you absolutely certain?
C: I am.
SDM: How can you be so certain?
C: Wait. Aren’t you Sharon? Is Sharon there?
Seriously. That call happened. Word for word.
#2
E: Hi. I’m calling from Ecsell. Is this Sharon?
SDM: Is this a cold call?
E: No. It might be a partnership call and I might be able to hire you as a speaker.
SDM: Cool. You should know, then, that my first name is Sharon Drew.
E: OK. I didn’t know that. But I know you’re a sales company and want to tell you about our coaching products. [And the reason she doesn’t want to collaboratively figure out if our solutions would blend is….? And the reason she tried to trick me into speaking by lying to me is…?]
SDM: Do you know who I am and what I do?
E: You’re the President of Morgen Facilitations. What else should I know? (She’s asking ME?)
SDM: So you didn’t do your homework. I’m a sales visionary, and for decades have been teaching a buy-in model I invented and teach to sales folks and coaches to give them the tools to help buyers make the change management decisions necessary to be ready to buy.
E: That’s no reason you wouldn’t be able to use our products also, or tell your clients to use our products.
SDM: Wow. You’re still pushing without listening to what I said.
E: Oh yeah?? I’m not pushing. Just educating .(So she’s assuming that I need education, that what she has to say is more important and better than who I am, what I do, what I might need, and – worse of all – she’s missing a potential win/win collaboration by lying to ‘get in’ just to educate me.’) After I hung up on her, she called me back three times to leave me messages!
These calls really happened. You can see the lose/lose here, the disrespect, and the lost opportunity. Do you know how your sales folks are making their cold calls? Have you ever considered adding new skills that would facilitate a real collaboration?
This is what a sales call would look like if I use Buying Facilitation® in call #2.
E: Hello. My name is Ellen from Ecsell, and I’m selling coaching products. This is a cold call. Is this a good time to speak?
SDM: Yes, I have a few moments, but I’m not in the market for coaching products. I sell some myself, and use a unique coaching model I developed that probably wouldn’t work with a more mainstream coaching solution.
E: Interesting. I wonder if you ever partner with other companies for those times you find groups with other innovative solutions.
SDM: I would be very interested. What do I need to do to find out if there is a partnership possibility here? It goes beyond whether or not I like your solution, as there are generally criteria on both sides that need to be met. What do you suggest?
E: Well, we could start with introducing each other to our solutions on this call, and if we both like what the other has, then I would set up a conference call with one of our principles. And a good question for us both to answer might be: What would we each need to see from the other to know if we have the content and the integrity to consider a partnership of some kind? If it makes sense, we can go from there. Does that work for you?
See how easy? Collaboration. Win/win. Trust. Respect. And we expanded what might be possible, added in a bit of integrity, and everyone brought their beset game – all on a cold call.
If you ever want your cold calls
- to enable a collaborative dialogue that’s win-win,
- to facilitate decision making change, buying and integrity,
- to make appointments that include the necessary decision makers,
- to teach your buyers how to consider working with you on the first call,
consider adding Buying Facilitation® to your sales model (it works with all sales models). It uses unique questions and listening that opens discussions that enable change, collaboration, and potentially buying. And you wouldn’t sound like these idiots who called me. sharondrew@
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Sharon Drew Morgen is an original thinker, inventor, trainer, and consultant. She is the author of 9 books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the Amazon bestseller What? Did you really say what I think I heard? She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a generic change management/decision facilitation model that give leaders, decision analysists, coaches, and sellers the tools to help other make their own best decisions based on their own values and beliefs. She works with global clients to enable them to listen without bias, pose Facilitative Questions that enable Others to recognize and act on their own best answers, and help buyers buy. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
Sharon Drew Morgen October 13th, 2015
Posted In: News
How Techies Can Gather Good Data And Help Users Implement
In order for any change to occur – whether it’s a decision to purchase a product, or an implementation to add new technology – whatever touches the ultimate solution must buy-in to the change.
Often our focus is on getting the end-result we think we want. We forget that without buy-in from the necessary people and policies that maintain the status quo, we face the high cost of the resistance emanating from pushing change into a system that believes that it’s fine, thanks.
I’d like to share a story about how I helped my own tech guys shift their project work and our revenue as a result of having decision facilitation skills. At the end of the day, unless there is a decision – one person at a time – to adopt to, know how to, and be willing to change, there will be resistance and possibly failure.
FIRST SIGNS OF TROUBLE
I owned a body shop/recruitment company to support new technology. We had 43 tech folks going out to client sites as programmers, systems analysts/designers, project managers/leaders.
Within the first months, I began hearing murmurs of annoyance from the folks: “Stupid users.” “We have to spend twice as long redoing what they told us to do!” “Why don’t they get it right when we first talk to them?”
As a test to see what was going on that was creating so much failure and cost (time/money), I called in my head tech guy to design a requirement I’d been complaining about.
Julian’s first question was: “What do you want?” I didn’t know how to respond because 1. I wasn’t a techie and didn’t know how to explain to him in his language; 2. I didn’t have the right description, as it was mostly a picture in my mind. So I responded “I don’t know.” Julian smirked. “This is what I hear from clients. But I know what you want. I’ll take care of it and show you some screens next week.” We were already in the middle of the problem.
What he created was from his own vantage point, using his own beliefs and limiting assumptions. “This is all wrong,” I said.
Julian’s eyes glazed over. In the UK you don’t tell the MD that she’s a Stupid User. I continued: “Imagine where we’d be now if you had started our conversation with ‘ What would you have if you had all of your wishes and dreams, and a computer could do everything that your brain would like to do?’ With that, I could have I would have ‘designed’ screens and offered colors and made up functionality. That would have been a far better start.
NEW SKILLS FOR INTERNAL CONSULTANTS
I realized that all of our tech guys needed decision facilitation skills to enable them to
- recognize how to bring together the appropriate elements to be included in a way that would serve both the strategic AND tactical elements,
- elicit the right data at the right time so the clients could get their projects completed efficiently,
- eliminate resistance.
I taught the 43 tech guys my ‘Buying Facilitation® model (a decision facilitation model that is a change management model, independent of buying or selling). The results were instant, and dramatic.
- The systems designers were able to elicit the right data and develop the exact right design the first time with no redos.
- The systems analysts not only understood the tech issues, but were able to understand and address all of the personal/human issues and manage the change and potential resistance issues upfront, before they became a problem.
- The programmers got the proper information to code the first iteration, with a minimum of changes.
- The client didn’t need the work to be redone.
- The clients got to hear/see/feel their vision of success and agree to it before anyone moved ahead with technology.
- The projects were completed well before time – sometimes 25% sooner – and since we were being paid on a project basis, we made more money and the team was freed up for the next project.
- The clients trusted us so much that they handed over much of their own programmer’s work to us and were able to take on additional creative projects that they hadn’t planned.
- With 26 competitors, we captured 11% of the market (even with prices well over 40% higher than everyone…. my nickname was Sharon Drew Blood), and my clients signed sole supplier contracts.
- Everyone was happy, and I kept all of my employees for 4 years.
In fact, my competition tried to steal my employees; no one budged, regardless of the money that was thrown at them. I made sure they had plenty of personal time off, I took them for darts/beer at the local pub once a month, and I made sure they were happy. Plus I kept them doing what they loved, rather than having to deal with any ‘issues.’
I hired a ‘Make Nice Guy’ (who I also trained) to go make sure everything chugged happily along: if any sort of problem – client concern, project glitch, personality issue, tech malfunction – occured, it was his regardless of time of day. Or he could take the day off.
As a result, I had nothing to do but grow my company. And I was able to exit after under 4 years, with 3 branches in two countries (offices in London, Stuttgart, Hamburg), $5,000,000 revenue (remember this was a start up in 1983, in a huge depression) and a 43% net profit.
Your tech folks and internal consultants need decision facilitation skills in addition to technology skills. Because at the base of it all are humans who resist change, get confused, hang on to turf, and don’t always communicate properly. Let me know if I can help you design a program for your tech folks or internal consultants: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.
Start the journey to help sellers get the skills they need to manage both ends of the buying decision journey – the off-line political and relational buy-in as well as the solution choice. Read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.
Listen to insights and illustrative examples regarding: what change is and why its fundamentally the same regardless of industry or organization type, what systems are and their role in the change management process.
__________
Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.
More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
www.didihearyou.com ; www.sharondrewmorgen.com
Sharon Drew Morgen August 24th, 2015
Posted In: Communication, News
Sales is a Flawed Model
Do you know why you don’t close all the sales you deserve to close?
Do you know, on your first prospecting call, who will buy?
Do you know where buyers go when they say ‘I’ll call you back?”
Do you know what takes buyers so long to buy when it seems so obvious to everyone – including them?
You don’t know the answers to these questions. Because the sales model is geared for solution placement. Of course you give good service, ask all the right questions, understand the need and how it fits with your solution.
But the sales model is not set up to manage the personal, human, political, strategic, and hidden systemic issues that buyers must handle internally to get the buy-in and develop the pathway to bring in a new solution. In fact, buyers have a change management problem, not a solution choice problem.
See, the buyer’s environment is kinda a system, with people, and policies, initiatives and relationships, all working together, fighting to maintain themselves (as systems are wont to do). And when they consider fixing something, they have to manage everything that touches it or face chaos. Just as you can’t just purchase a new house on the way home and announce to your family that you’re moving tomorrow, so a buyer cannot just choose a solution to add to the well-functioning mix of givens within the status quo. It’s not about the house.
To continue with the analogy, the sales model merely understands the family needs for a house and finds the house. It does not handle the fight between the parents and teenagers who don’t want to move from their friends, or the decision to move closer to in-laws, or the discussion around a possible divorce. To sell the house, these details are unnecessary. To buy the house, it’s imperative to resolve first before they know what or if to buy. And everyone must buy-in somehow before a choice is made.
BUYING FACILITATION®
I’ve developed a new skill set that works alongside of sales. It’s not sales, but it’s a change management mode that can be used in any change situation (management, negotiation, coaching) to help others reorganize and reconsider their status quo so something new can enter. The material is original, and based on a servant-leader goal, to truly help others make their best decisions.
Here’s an example. The head of Consumer Banking of Barclays Bank called to ask if Buying Facilitation® could be used with a program they were developing. Here’s the dialogue. Note that I am not doing a sales job here (that will come later – buyers need solution data only when their other decisions and internal change issues have been handled) but helping him figure out how to bring change and get buy-in… all of which would include my help at some point, but not specifically about my solution.
BANK: Can Buying Facilitation® be added to the software we are developing so customers will be able to choose the best product?
SDM: Yes. But what’s stopping your tech guys from trying to do that for you?
BANK: Nothing. They’ve already bought a few of your books and are trying to put your ideas into their software design.
SDM: So I’m hearing they’d rather do it all themselves. How would you and the rest of the Buying Decision Team know if you’d prefer the capability you’d get working with me directly or with the outcome they’d get from the tech guys using my books?
BANK: They won’t know the difference, but I’ve read some of your booksand I know that you keep some of the How To out of the books. So I know you’d provide more, but they won’t.
SDM: What should you and I do to help them decide what will be their best solution?
BANK: Let’s set up a conference call.
At that point, he named 2 department heads that needed to be involved – technology and training. I suggested he might add the heads of HR (to train 4000 people), internal consulting/project management, sales, and retail banking. He set up a conference call. On the call, the CEO of Barclays joined the call. We all worked together a month (I’m on the Buying Decision Team at this point) to figure it out. And I ended up with my piece of the pie – with no proposal, no visit to UK, no price discussion, no competition. My solution was irrelevant until they understood how they needed to bring in something new and fit it in, and until all of the right people were on board to fully define the need.
Sales is great. But if you add the change management piece to the front end – before you sell, or understand needs, or make a presentation – you can easily know: who will close, approximately when, and how to help them discover, prepare, and facilitate buy-in for the buyer…and, get onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call. And halve the sales cycle.
Until or unless buyers have all of the change management issues covered, they will not buy, regardless of the match between your solution and their need: they are doing ‘well-enough’, and if they could have resolved the issue, they would have already. Add Buying Facilitation® to your tool kit, and increase your productivity.
___________
Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.
More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
Sharon Drew Morgen June 26th, 2015
Can Collaboration Work?
We enter into collaborations assuming we’ll succeed as teamwork partners. Yet we rarely achieve true partnership:
- Because we listen uniquely and through biased filters we sometimes mistakenly presume intent or misconstrue what’s been said and agreed upon. Problem: Flawed assumptions, wasted time and relationship capital, and restricted scope.
- There is often not enough diversity to enable maximum creativity and unrestricted solution options. Problem: Similar ideas and options constrain possibility and maintain the status quo.
- Agendas and goals are often established with less than the full set of essential participants. Problem: Hidden agendas and inadequate preparation.
- Not all vital collaboration partners are present. Problem: Incomplete input and limited output.
- Collaborators often enter with specific (albeit unconscious) goals and limited tolerance for risk. Problem: Restricted possibility and inspiration.
As a result, we end up with little real change, spend time waiting for takeaways that don’t occur, expend considerable relationship capital, or overlook the full range of possibilities.
- Biased communication. After spending 3 years researching and writing a book on the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I now appreciate it’s nearly impossible for collaboration partners to all walk away with the same understanding. Therefore, 1. Tape each session. 2. Get group agreement on what’s been said and action items before moving on to the next topic.
- Gender, age, and ethnic diversity are necessary. Consider your goal. Think about who you might invite to offer different perspectives. Invite Troublemakers.
- Make sure everyone has access to the agenda well before the meeting. There can be no hidden agendas; too much is lost that ends up being problematic later on.
- Everyone must attend meetings. If anyone can’t come to the meeting, cancel it or there will be a voice, an idea, an annoyance missing that would counteract the reasons underlying the collaboration. Anyone who will touch the final solution must be present to move forward or there will be fallout, sabotage, and resistance: there is no way to compensate (as per creativity or consensus) once a meeting is held with folks missing.
- No restrictions. Collaborators must enter with no assumptions. Collaboration means you either meld disparate ideas, or cultivate something new among you that’s never existed.
We all bring our natural biases and assumptions to the collaboration table, thereby restricting possibilities. Yet until we confront, challenge, and defy the status quo with new thinking, there can’t be change. And that’s the problem: Our results are in direct proportion to our ability to override our biases and assumptions.
BIAS RESTRICTS COLLABORATION
Since researching and writing my new book ( What? Did you really say what I think I heard?) I have realized it’s pretty impossible to accurately comprehend what others mean to convey. Here’s a summary of what I learned:
Not only do our eyes merely take in light that our brains then translate (through our filters uniquely developed since birth) into what we think we see, our ears merely take in sound that our brains then translate (through our filters) into what we think others mean – hence we each experience the world uniquely, through our personal translations. To make it truly pernicious, our brains only offer us the translation itself: we never know how far from the Truth we are, potentially causing misplaced resistance and misinterpretation.
For effective collaborations, we must move beyond our filters to hear others without bias during meetings:
- Notice resistance, feelings, annoyances, or immediate negativity the moment it happens and ask yourself: How can I hear what’s just been said in a different way?
- Since you don’t actually know if what you think you’ve heard is accurate, tell your collaboration partners what you think you heard and ask them if they heard the same thing.
- Make sure there are no strong feelings left unsaid after each discussion topic.
- At the start of a session, everyone must agree to goals/outcomes for each topic; as each topic is completed, everyone must agree on action items that will match the original goals. Everyone.
- At the end of the session, agree to all action items and take-aways. Do a review of what’s been accomplished according to original goals. Ask if anyone else needs to be included for the next session.
By minimizing biases, by including a full range of thought-partners, and by checking in with the other collaborators as to what’s been said and heard, it’s possible to form effective collaborations. Otherwise, we’re merely doing more of the same.
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More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.
Sharon Drew Morgen June 22nd, 2015