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.
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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. 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.
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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. 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
Help Marketing Know Buyers Well Enough…
Hi Everyone: I’m sending you something quite different this week; I hope you don’t mind but I find this topic important. My good friend Ardath Albee sent me this note below, asking us to vote for her to receive a grant for something near and dear to my heart: to develop new capabilities for the field of marketing enter the buy path earlier. Please read her sweet note and see if you can get behind this by voting for her. If she wins the grant, I trust that she’ll use the funds to help us all be more successful.
Hi Sharon Drew,
I wonder if you can help. I’m seeking a grant from Chase Small Business in the area you’ve been writing about for decades: facilitating buyer’s pre sales decision making. Since you’ve been the leader in the field, and your readers have been reading your articles on the subject, for years, I thought I’d explain what I’m proposing to do with the funds and your community might find it relevant enough to cast a vote to help my company be considered for the grant.
My plan is to develop materials, consulting programs, training courses – hopefully with your collaboration – to help the marketing field enter earlier along the buying decision continuum (pre sales) and find the most effective ways to help more buyers buy. You and I have had so many lengthy discussions about the opportunities for marketers on this subject; I believe it’s time for marketers to get in front of this process.
For those in your community who don’t know me, please let them know I’ve been on a crusade for years to help marketers become more relevant with their content marketing and engagement of buyers. To help your community decide if I’m worthy of their vote, here is a link to my latest book on emarketing and my site www.
Thanks in advance for your help. If my company wins the grant, you and I can get to work on the opportunities we’ve been discussing to help marketers build better relationships with buyers. Here is the link for those who want to vote: https://www.
Ardath
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Sharon Drew Morgen is the developer of Buying Facilitation® and has written 9 books, including one NYTimes Business bestseller (Selling with Integrity) and 2 Amazon bestsellers. A sales thought leader since 1985, she trains, consults, speaks to, and designs training for sales professionals in global corporations to facilitate buyers through the pre-sales decisions and steps they must complete prior to making a purchase. She recently published a new book on how to bridge the gap between what’s said and what’s heard: Get What? Did you really say what I think I heard? . She can be reached at sharondrew@
Sharon Drew Morgen June 8th, 2015
Posted In: News
Content Marketing that Converts
“Content is king”. I’ve heard that phrase for years. But what does it mean? Does it mean that by offering thought-provoking, useful, creative information buyers will be motivated to contact you at the right time along their complete (including pre-sales) decision path? By sending out veiled advertising in the form of ‘articles’ to random email addresses you can convert readers to action? How is ‘conversion’ defined – opening the email? Making a purchase that can be directly tracked back to the email? Let’s look at the problems.
- Wrong Time: Content is useful only at the time it’s needed and won’t be opened otherwise, even if your solution is needed later. Even when offering options, research, or educational benefits, your content currently targets the activity of product/vendor selection; you miss key opportunities to enter earlier, during the buyer’s necessary pre-sales activities – assembling the correct Buying Decision Team members, sorting out change issues and responsibilities, getting consensus, etc. – to become a true trusted advisor and support partner. Imagine offering the type of content that drives buyers during every decision and pre-sales activity. Then you’ve part of the solution, every step of the way, as they approach a final purchase. And they trust you.
- Wrong People: You get a 1% (or less) conversion rate because your missive connects with only those whose email addresses you have and, even if they might eventually be part of a Buying Decision Team, who consider it spam. It’s possible to offer content that readers seek out because it’s vital to their path toward excellence.
- Wrong Focus: Content is often merely an ad vaguely concealed as an ‘article’. Buyers know this. It’s possible to use content to facilitate the non-solution-focused consensus and change issues readers must attend to as they ready themselves to make a purchase.
The way you’re doing it now
- neither attracts nor retains a specific audience,
- ignores ways to enter and influence buyers early in their pre-sales decisions,
- doesn’t drive customer action unless they are at the specific point of readiness,
- merely annoys.
You’re finding the low hanging fruit who would have found you anyway. Content marketing can help prospective buyers dispense suitable information 1. into the hands of the right people 2. at the time they need it while 3. coaching them to get their ducks in a row to move forward.
It’s possible to write content on important relevant topics that readers WANT to read – i.e. the pros and cons of concrete over glass for housing, or how we can hear others without bias – and will help them go from an idea to a purchase through linking to your site, reading and saving other articles, and using them to help traverse their action route.
CASE STUDY
I get anywhere from 40-51% conversion with my content marketing. My readers take action from my articles: click on linked articles or sites; download free books/chapters; buy a product; share/RT/Like daily. Here’s what I do:
- I write well-written, provocative, 750-word articles that may have little to do with my services or books specifically but are of real interest to that population who may ultimately be buyers. (You found the title interesting enough to read this far, right?) I offer links that tie in to my books /services: I’ve written about diversity, leadership, collaboration, questions. Yet my services focus on facilitating buying decisions and bias-free communication.
- I only send articles to subscribers, and Friends, LinkedIn, and 15 ezines, such as HR.com, Sales and Service Excellence, StrategyDriven, who often publish them to vast readerships. (Sometimes 3 or more of my articles appear each week.) I have 3 blogs that often get onto best lists, such as top innovative content, top sales blog, top business blog. Net, net, I’m getting large distribution in really targeted fashion: those folks most likely to read and potentially need my services/products. Sort-of ‘hot leads.’ No spam.
- Like you, I let social media splash my content to enable interested folks to find it and start conversations. I get many new subscribers and ‘friends’ weekly. My lists grow with interested folks. Daily, I get Thank You notes that begin conversations and sell products.
Questions:
- Why would people open your content if they consider it spam?
- How can you compose true thought pieces that people want to open?
- How can you use your content to facilitate each stage of the pre-sales and buying decision path?
- Seriously: are you willing to try something different to get a higher ‘conversion’ rate? Seriously.
What you’re doing now only converts the low hanging fruit. It’s possible to enter earlier by offering valuable intelligence that will encourage curiosity; introduce, explain and target the full set of decision stages; and keep your name topmost in buyer’s minds. You’re currently taking the lazy route: throwing spaghetti on the wall hoping enough of it will stick. Do you want to write? Or enable real business opportunities?
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Sharon Drew Morgen is a writer/author of one NYTimes Business Bestseller and two Amazon best sellers, 7 books on Buying Facilitation® and how buyers buy, and 1500 articles (www.sharondrewmorgen.com). She is a trainer, speaker, coach, thought leader, and content writer. Sharon Drew is also the visionary thinker behind What? – her new book on how to avoid the gaps between what people say and what is heard. (www.didihearyou.com for the book and online assessment tools). She can be reached at www.sharondrewmorgen.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen June 1st, 2015
Posted In: News
Meetings: The Purpose, The Pain, The Possibility
As business folk, we hold meetings regularly. Yet often we don’t accomplish what we set out to achieve. Why?
The Purpose
Meetings are held to accomplish a specific, beneficial outcome requiring the attendance of the right people with the right agenda.
The Problem/Pain
Often we end up with miscommunication, wasted time, incomplete outcomes, misunderstanding, lack of ownership and ongoing personnel issues – sometimes an indication of internal power and faulty communications issues.
The Possibility
With greater success we can: stimulate thinking; achieve team building, innovation, and clear communication; and efficiently complete target issues. Here are some problem areas and solutions:
People. When outcomes aren’t being met effectively it’s a people- and management problem including: fall-out, sabotage, and resistance; long execution times; exclusion of peripheral people; restricted creativity and communication; exacerbated power and status issues. Are the most appropriate people (users, decision makers, influencers) invited? All who have good data or necessary questions?
- Rule: unless all – all – relevant people show up for the meeting, cancel it. It’s impossible to catch people up or have them collaborate, add creative thoughts, or discuss annoyances. Once it’s known that meetings aren’t held unless all are present, the frequency, responsibility, and motives shift.
- Rule: unless all – all – of the people who will touch the outcome from the meeting’s goals are in some way represented, the outcome will not reflect the needs of all causing fallout later, with resistance, sabotage or a diminished outcome.
Agenda. No hidden agendas! Recipients of potential outcomes must be allowed to add agenda items prior to the meeting.
- Rule: unless all – all – of the items of ultimate concern are on the agenda, the meeting will be restricted to meet the needs of a few with unknown consequence (resistance and sabotage).
Action. Too often, action items don’t get completed effectively. How do action items get assigned or followed up? What happens if stuff’s not done when agreed? How can additional meetings be avoided?
- Rule: put a specific, consensual, and supervised method in place to ensure action items get accomplished as promised.
- Rule: as meeting begins, get consensus on what must be accomplished for a successful outcome. This initial discussion may change agenda items or prioritize them, detect problems, assumptions, resistance before action items are assigned.
Discussion. How long do people speak? How do conversations progress? How do the proceedings get recorded? What is the format for discussions? How is bias avoided?
- Rule: record (audio) each meeting so everyone who attends can have it available later. Folks who didn’t attend are not privy to this audio. (See People above).
- Rule: design a time limit for speaking, and rules for topics, presentations, discussions, cross talk.
- Rule: include periods of silence for thought, notes, reflection.
Understanding. Does everyone take away the same interpretation of what happened? How do you know when there have been miscommunications or misunderstandings?
- Rule: unless everyone has the same perception of what happened for each topic, there is a tendency for biased interpretation that will influence a successful outcome.
- Rule: one person (on rotation) should take notes, and repeat the understanding of what was said to get agreement for each item before the next item is tackled. This is vital, as people listen with biased filters and make flawed assumptions of what’s been said/agreed.
Transparency. Agendas should be placed online, to be read, signed-off, and added to.
- Rule: whomever is coming to the meeting must know the full agenda.
- Rule: everyone responsible for an action item must be listed with time lines, names of those assisting, and outcomes.
Accomplishments. Are items accomplished in a suitable time frame? What happens when they aren’t?
- Rule: for each action item, participants must sign off on an agreeable execution. A list of the tasks, time frames, and people responsible must accompany each item, and each completed task must be checked off online so progress is accountable.
- Rule: a senior manager must be responsible for each agenda item. If items are not completed in a timely way, the manager must write a note on the online communication explaining the problem, the resolution, and new time frame.
Meetings can be an important activity for collaboration and creativity if they are managed properly and taken as a serious utilization of time and output. Ask yourself: Do you want to meet? Or get work accomplished collaboratively?
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Sharon Drew Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? and NYTimes Business Bestsellers in the area of sales, decision facilitation, change management, and helping buyers buy. She is developer of Buying Facilitation® and a recognized thought leader in communication and decision making. She is a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant. For those in sales, coaching or leadership want to communicate better Sharon Drew Morgen has the tools to help make improvements with online learning, group coaching, or on-site training. Sharon Drew can coach and train your sales teams or license trainers to prospect and get more appointments by finding real buyers on the first call. She can be reached at: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen May 25th, 2015
Posted In: News
Questions: The Problems and the Possibilities
I recently accepted a cold call from an insurance guy because I was thinking of switching providers. Instead of facilitating my buying decision, the bias in his questions terminated our connection:
TODD: Hello Ms. Morgen. I’m Todd with XYZ. Are you interested in new car insurance?
SDM: I am.
TODD: Is your main concern lowering your costs?
SDM: No.
TODD: You don’t care about saving money?
SDM: Of course I do.
TODD: So your main concern IS lowering your costs?
SDM: No.
TODD: So what is it?
SDM: I’m interested in a personal connection, in knowing that if I have an accident I will be handled by someone who will take care of me.
TODD: I can promise you I’ll take care of you. My clients love me. Do you want to discuss how much you’ll save?
And, we were done.
Good sellers and coaches pose better questions than Todd’s, of course. But the conversation exemplifies how a Questioner’s biased questions can significantly influence outcomes.
THE BIAS INHERENT IN QUESTIONS
Questions restrict answers to the assumptions and biases of the Questioner; Responders respond within the limits set by the question. Asking someone “What did you have for breakfast?” won’t elicit the answer “I bought a lamp.” Even questions that attempt to open a dialogue, like “What can you tell me about the problem?” or gather data, like “Who’s in charge of decision making?” merely elicit top-of-mind responses that my not effectively represent – and indeed might cloud – the issue. Biased question; biased answer.
Sometimes questions are so biased and restricted that the real answer might get overlooked. ‘Do you prefer the red ball or the blue ball?’ excludes not only the green ball, but a preference for a bat, or a discussion about the Responder’s color blindness. But a question such as: ‘What sort of a game implement could be easily carried and engage all employees?” might elicit a response of a ball or marbles or Monopoly and include more team members.
Most questions pull or push the data sought by the Questioner, making it difficult to know if
- the communication partners make the same assumptions;
- the wording of the question is ideal;
- a better answer exists outside the limits of the question;
- the question encompasses the full set of possible responses.
What if the best answer is outside of the framework of the question? Or the question isn’t translated accurately by the Responder? Or there is an historic bias between the Questioner and Responder that makes communication difficult?
FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS
Questions can be used to facilitate choice, to lead Responders to new options within their own (often unconscious) value system, rather than as set ups to the Questioner’s self-serving objectives. Using a Facilitative Question, the above dialogue would sound like this:
TODD: Hi Ms. Morgen. I’m Todd, an insurance agent with XYZ Corp. I’m selling car insurance. Is this a good time to speak?
SDM: Sure.
TODD: I’m wondering: If you are considering changing your insurance provider, what would you need to know about another provider to be certain you’d end up getting the coverage and service you deserve?
The question – carefully worded to match a Responder’s criteria for change – shifts the bias from Todd’s self-serving objectives to enabling me in a true discovery process; from his selling patterns to my buying patterns. How different our interaction would have been if his goal was to facilitate my buying decision path rather than using his misguided persuasion tactics to sell.
I developed Facilitative Questions decades ago to enable any Questioner to facilitate someone’s route to congruent change. With no manipulation or bias, they require a different form of listening, wording, and objectives, thereby avoiding resistance and encouraging trust between sellers, coaches, consultants and their clients.
Take a look at your own questioning strategy to see if they might work for you:
*How are your questions perceived by your Responders? How do you know? What’s your risk?
*How do your questions address a unique Responder’s decision criteria?
*How do your questions bias, restrict, enhance, or ignore possibilities?
*What criteria to you use to choose the words to formulate questions?
*To ensure any new skills would work effectively with your successful skills, what would you need to know or consider before adopting additional question formulation skills?
Remember: your innate curiosity or intuition may not be sufficient to facilitate another’s unconscious route to change – or buy – congruently. You can always gather data once the route to change is established and you’re both on the same page. Change the goals of your questions from discovering situations you can provide answers for, to facilitating real core change. Before buyers or clients will work with you, they have to do this for themselves anyway. You might as well do it with them and create a trusting relationship.
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Facilitative Questions follow a specific path and wording. I’ve trained sellers to use them for lead generation, to make appointments with the right decision makers (often helped by gatekeepers) and teach prospects to assemble Buying Decision Teams and reach consensus; to help coaches find – and keep – ideal clients, and facilitate their change efficiently. They are great for small and complex sales, for prospecting and lead gen, for team building, for coaching clients seeking change, for change implementations. And for doctors, lawyers, communication professionals, therapists, school administrators, and leaders.
If you’d like to learn how to formulate Facilitative Questions, either get this Learning Accelerator, or contact me to discuss team training or coaching: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. You can read about the use of Facilitative Questions and the full path of change in Dirty Little Secrets: www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen March 30th, 2015
Using Buyer Personas During Pre-Sales Stages
Buyer Personas do a great job targeting marketing and sales campaigns to reach the most probable buying audience. But it’s possible to make them even more efficient.
Here’s a question: Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? The belief is that if you can sell/market appropriately – the right campaign to the right buyer with the right solution at the right time – buyers will buy. If that were true, you’d be closing a helluva lot more than you’re closing. Sure, Buyer Personas make a difference in your close rate. But it could be higher.
Currently, your targeted campaigns blanket probable audiences and find buyers at the exact moment they are considering buying, merely closing the low hanging fruit. It’s possible to enter earlier and facilitate (and influence) the complete buying journey.
STAGES IN THE BUYING DECISION PATH
Sales and marketing address activities surrounding solution placement: solution pitch details, solution features, etc., vendor details, gathering needs. But neither facilitate the entire decision path which constitutes issues beyond choosing a solution. Some might call these ‘Pre-Sales’ events. I call it the Buying Decision Path, along which sales is merely one of the entry points needed to close a sale.
Briefly, here are the stages buyers go through prior to purchasing a solution ((Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it fully details each stage www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com
1. Idea stage.
2. Brainstorming stage. Idea discussed with colleagues.
3. Initial discussion stage. Colleagues discuss the problem, posit who to include on Buying Decision Team, consider possible fixes and fallout. Action groups formed. Research begins. New Team members invited.
4. Contemplation stage. Group discusses
* how to fix the problem with known resources,
*whether to create a workaround using internal fixes or seek an external solution, and acceptable type/amount of fallout from each,
*people who would need to buy-in.
5. Organization stage.
6. Change management stage. Group determines
*if more research is necessary (and who will do it),
*if all appropriate people are involved (and who to invite),
*a review of all elements of the problem and solution,
*the level of disruption and change management as per type of solution chosen,
*the pros/cons/possibilities of external solution vs current vendor vs workaround.
7. Coordination stage. Review needs, ideas, issues of any new members invited aboard and how they affect choices and goals; incorporate change considerations for each solution; delineate everyone’s thoughts re goals and change capacity; appropriate research responsibilities.
8. Research stage. Specific research for each possible solution; seek answers to how fallout or change would be managed with each solution.
9. Consensus stage. Buying Decision Team members meet to share research and determine the type of solution, fallout, possibilities, problems, considerations in re management, policies, job descriptions, HR issues, etc. General decisions made. Buy-in and consensus necessary.
10. Action stage. Responsibilities apportioned to manage specifics of Stage 9. Owners of tasks do thorough research and make calls to several vendors for interviews and data gathering.
11. Second brainstorming stage. Discussion on results of data gathering including fallout/ benefits of each. Favored vendors pitched by Team members.
12. Choice stage. New solution agreed on. Change management issues delineated and leadership initiatives prepared to avoid disruption. Vendor contacted.
13. Implementation stage.
Buyers have to manage these stages (most of which are not solution- or problem-specific) with you or without you. Without being directly involved with behind-the-scenes politics or processes you’re left waiting, pushing product data, and hoping to be there when they’re ready. And knowing the details of your Buyer Persona is insufficient.
Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? Right now your efforts to sell and market are bringing in no more than 5% close rate (net). To become the vendor who truly helps buyers buy, to get an early leg-up on the competition and become part of the Buying Decision Team during the Pre-Sales process, sales (entering at stage 1) and marketing (entering at stage 3) can add another layer of skills, tools, goals, and touch points.
Buying Facilitation® is a Pre-sales Management model that I’ve developed and taught for 30 years with profoundly different results from using sales and marketing alone. It uses neither sales nor marketing thinking: it employs a new form of question, a different type of listening, and a systems-thinking role consistent with true consulting to facilitate the issues that bias the buying decision. And then you can sell earlier and faster, to the right people, on the solution placement end.
I can teach your sales team how to become facilitators, or show your marketing team ways to design the right questions to help buyers traverse each stage of their unique buying journey. See more articles on www.sharondrewmorgen.com. Or call me: Sharon Drew 512 457 0246.
Learn how to hear buyers effectively with Sharon Drew’s new book What?
Sharon Drew Morgen March 2nd, 2015
On Becoming 69 by Sharon Drew Morgen
Today I turn 69. As I look back over my life I feel quite gratified that I have used what I was given to make this world a better place. But I was merely following directions. Let me explain.
By any objective standard, there was no path from where I started to being an authentic person and well-respected visionary/thought leader. I had one of those childhoods that would make a terrific movie (Friends say I was either going to be a saint or a serial killer). I had to get through unimaginable violence, Borderline Personality Disorder, and PTSD. The Asperger’s diagnosis didn’t come until I was 60.
GETTING FROM THERE TO HERE
I have always been aware that managing the hand I was dealt would shape who I became. I remember the moment I was given my marching orders. When I was 11, and slowly becoming conscious following an incident, I heard a voice in my head clearly say: “GET UP! You’ve got work to do! You need to get healthy! The world needs your ideas!” At that age I somehow knew enough to get up and start ‘getting healthy’ (whatever that meant), that failure was not an option.
I began running away to a friend’s house to get counselling from his mom. Over the next 40 years I had decades of psychotherapy to work through my rage, fear, safety and mistrust issues; mentoring and decades of training with Stan Grof (Holotropic Breathwork) to integrate my heart, mind and body (which had become dissociated); years of NLP certifications to code my systemic thinking; and still-continuing Vipassana silent retreats to open my heart.
I was scared and confused almost all the time – for decades. That never stopped me, even when it became clear that the way I think was so very different than the norm. Eventually I realized that I could code what I was learning to help others produce internal change and make congruent decisions: we could all serve each other if we could communicate authentically.
Looking back, I marvel at the risks I took, the relentless dedication I had to not letting anything stop me:
• With no funds or ability to get a scholarship, the Dean of Students got me work cleaning houses and a place to live as a nanny so I could attend Syracuse School of Journalism.
• With no knowledge of Wall Street I became a Stock Broker in 1979: I barged in to the CEO of Merrill Lynch (seriously – past the secretaries!) and told him to hire me. He did. “If you could do what you just did I’ll teach you the rest,” he said. I was rookie of the year, and one of the first women Brokers on Wall Street.
• I founded a non-profit for kids with my son’s rare neurological disease to fund wheelchairs and eating implements and get meds shared between countries. The foundation now helps kids all over Europe.
• In 1983 I started up a tech company in London. By 1987 we had a $4,000,000 revenue in three countries, and a 42% net profit – in a depression and before the internet, email, search engines or social media. With no knowledge of how to run a business, I had everyone (except the techies) pay themselves as profit centers (including the receptionist!). We doubled revenue every year.
• I ran my first “Helping Buyers Buy” program to KLM in 1985 after I developed Buying Facilitation® for my sales staff. Using the model, I went on to write 7 books (one NYTimes Bestseller Selling with Integrity), train 25,000 sales people globally, and language the thinking about the behind-the-scenes buying decision path (buy cycle, the buying patterns, etc.).
• A major publisher accepted my out-of-the-box book What? that codes how our brains cause us to mishear, bias and misunderstand, and how to rewire our listening to hear each other accurately. I pulled the book and self-published it as a free digital book so there would be no barriers to learning the material. 10,000 books were acquired the first 2 months.
• I am currently developing an advanced program for coaches to hear clients without bias and make appropriate interventions.
I cannot imagine how I had the courage to do what it took to get healthy, work through my myriad mistakes and keep going, gain the skills I needed to work in so many different industries, figure out how to code my unique ideas and get folks to use/buy them, or have the moxie to push so many conventional envelopes. I guess I always had that voice in my ear telling me to GET UP. And thankfully there have always been people to buy my original models.
OLD AGE
So now I am officially an ‘old woman’ although I often grab my passport to travel somewhere intriguing (I’ve been to 63 countries) and date men decades younger. Life is easier now that I have found Me. I recognize problems before they happen or retreat immediately; know what I want and don’t want. I know to apologize and not let my ego get in the way. Gone is the confusion, the fear, the search for safety. I have more empathy and acceptance of human nature, fewer questions, more answers, more flexibility, and more curiosity. I acquire less and enjoy more. I am clearly a demanding pain in the ass. I carefully choose who I share my time with. And my clarity has given me the freedom to create and innovate: without drama, conflict, confusion, or difficult people, there is an ever-increasing slow burn of original ideas pouring out of my brain. That’s my life’s work. Different from most, I know. But I feel honored to have made a difference.
So what next? Who knows? A mystery. I’m healthy, authentic, deeply spiritual, have a voice and an audience, and have fulfilled my legacy. I’m now 69. And it’s exhilarating.
Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. While written in the ‘sales’ genre, the material is generic, and systemically codes how to facilitate all decision making/change processes. www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com
What? Did you really say what I think I heard?. This funny, practical book filled with original thinking and breaks down how our brains cause a gap between what’s said and what’s heard, and then offers a model to hear each other without bias. www.didihearyou.com Take a look at learning tools also.
Read any of 1300 articles about how buyers buy, Buying Facilitation®, how to ‘close’, and where/how/why sales fails. www.sharondrewmorgen.com. To see how to learn the material through products, go to www.buyingfacilitation.com.
Sharon Drew Morgen February 16th, 2015
Posted In: News
Consensus: From Biases to Buy-in
When groups seek change – when considering purchasing a new solution, shifting strategies, reorganizing, for example – they need consensus. When families discuss putting a family member in a home, or start-ups decide to seek funding, they need consensus. How do groups achieve an outcome acceptable to all when their beliefs, goals, or convictions may be disparate?
While every group is different and each goal unique, the consensus meta-process is the same: the right people must
- be convened,
- approve the elements of the issue to be decided upon,
- find their way to agreement.
There are problems lurking at each stage:
- Gather the right people. Not as easy as it sounds. If there is no existing group, say a Board or a City Council, what mix of people would successfully represent the community? How can the right team be chosen to carry the voice of a new decision? In my experience, sometimes choosing the ‘right’ people is a political decision and too often excludes folks with an important voice.
- Include the appropriate elements to be decided upon. This is the biggest area of struggle: the correct criteria for agreement ends up being defined by folks with potentially divergent outlooks. Who gets to designate the acceptable criteria – and what is the cost of overlooking those unheard? Again, too often this decision is front-loaded, with the loudest voices carrying the most votes, and some important elements are ignored.
- Reach agreement. Members of the decision team may have unique – and potentially opposing – criteria. How will the group ensure the final outcome is an accurate indicator of the population and good-enough to be acceptable, while addressing each member’s values during the process? Until the outcomes and representative values of the group members – often hidden – are addressed, the search for agreement is a struggle.
BIASES ALTER REALITY
Unless it’s a small, homogeneous group, an outcome fully agreeable to all is pretty rare. Each member perceives problems and solutions according to their unique biases – individual beliefs and maps of the world – driving them to compete to be the arbiters of the group’s reality. And once members begin arguing about who’s ‘right’, some with softer voices may get overlooked.
From the studies I’ve read, group members are more willing to buy-in to an idea they are not fond of if they have had a chance to express their beliefs, ideas, and disagreements, and feel heard. How do we hear the full range of possibilities if we are each listening through our own biases? We don’t. So we need to listen differently.
In my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? I illustrate at length (from several expert sources) how close to impossible it is for anyone to accurately hear what another person means to convey. Sure we ‘hear’ the words. But we regularly misconstrue the intended meaning because our biases, assumptions, triggers, memory patterns, and habits, automatically filter out words or ideas that offend our status quo, leaving us with the residue that we mistakenly believe is what was said – some percentage of what the speaker meant to convey. Makes it hard to find a path acceptable to all.
One way to help achieve that is to listen differently: it’s more likely to hear accurately by listening for more generic, acceptable themes, ridding the conversation of the bulk of the biases. So if an HOA seeks consensus on mandating guards at the resident’s doors during parties, for example, a general theme might be Building Safety. Once Building Safety is agreed on as necessary, then ways of being safe and responsibility for safety, might be discussion topics. Similarly if a group of hospital administrators seek upgrades to their technology amidst great contention, the ‘chunk up’ might be the need to capture patient data accurately and work backwards from there.
To accurately hear what our colleagues mean, we might shift our focus from
- promoting an idea, to encouraging win-win,
- getting agreement through compromise, to discovering how all voices can be heard,
- seeking a specific change, to collaborating around a more generic concept.
Then we have a better shot at achieving solutions that include creative ideas and acceptance from everyone. And everyone gets heard.
If you’d like to learn how to help teammates hear each other better, and add some skills to your approaches to consensus. go to www.didihearyou.com and get my book called What? Did you really say what I think I heard? Then, consider getting the Assessment Tools so everyone understands each other’s biases. Or, consider an online team learning with me. Contact me: Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 457 0246.
Sharon Drew Morgen February 9th, 2015