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Don’t You Realize Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying?
Guest articles > Don’t You Realize Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying?
by: Sharon Drew Morgen
Until relatively recently, the United States Post Office (USPO) was a universal communication hub. It delivered birthday greetings and Dear John letters (For you youngsters, those were break-up notes – like you use text these days, only nicer.). It transported legal letters, work agendas, and Christmas gifts. It was how we moved information and communication between people and places. Now we use the internet and social media for most of our communication. And the USPO? It became a relic of a time never to return, used now to send commercial ads and fliers, inundating us, invading us, with the originator’s needs to push data, separate from our need to utilize it. Superfluous to our lives, we discard these, even if the products they’re introducing are respectable. SALES NO LONGER NEEDED FOR BUYERS TO BUYThe sales model is drifting down the same route. Until relatively recently, sales was universally accepted as a support and service model, representing expertise buyers needed. Sellers used their skill and product knowledge to help resolve problems; prospects actually sought meetings to get help figuring out how to improve their environments. And certainly, sellers knew their competition well and positioned themselves accordingly. Those standards no longer apply. People can now choose our solutions without any involvement from us: much of the information buyers need is immediately accessible online - our websites, content marketing, and outreach efforts thoroughly explain our offerings, making a seller’s product knowledge expendable. Outside agencies – Google, social media - rate us independently, without our input, enabling customers to share their experiences of our products, accuracy aside. Our global competitors are at our door, at the touch of a button and shipped in days, often with lower prices. Buying decisions get made amongst large groups of stakeholders, some residing in other countries, often with no direct involvement with day to day operations and certainly well outside our scrutiny or touch points. The sales model as we’ve known it has gone the way of the USPO – largely irrelevant; buyers now have a more extensive buying decision path that defies our standard practices, guaranteeing much is out of a seller’s control. And yet we continue using the same prism to sell through, the same techniques we used in earlier times, even though our closing rates, now less than 5% for face-to-face and 0.0059% of tech-based sales, consistently decline. Our decades-long focus of placing solutions merely finds the low hanging fruit. Here are some sales techniques we use that are problematic to the buying experience:
Everything about the selling effort is skewered to finding ways to place our solutions. But we miss the bigger opportunity: we can use our time, our skill, to facilitate Buyer Readiness. That means, leading people through the confusing stages they must – must – manage before they are buyers, before they have needs, before they know if, when, what they’ll buy. We wait on the sidelines while they go through this process; the sales model is not set up to influence this. I have watched, over the past 35 years, as sales has drifted closer to my beliefs as it attempts to take into account the buying decision and the buyer. But because sales continues to consider buyers ONLY in relation to placing solutions, sales only reaches the low hanging fruit: people in the process of considering how to manage disruption will not have interest (yet) in our content. We haven’t accounted for the entire fact pattern of what goes into a buying decision (i.e. need, problem resolution, and product choice are the final considerations) and overlook the largest portion of buyers: those who will buy but aren’t ready yet. People really don’t want to buy anything, they merely want to resolve a problem. And the problem is so much bigger than purchasing something. It involves
People issues. User issues. Tech issues. Human issues. Culture issues. All unique. As outsiders we can never understand the totality of what’s going on. And yet until all internal factors are managed to assure the least disruption, they are not even buyers. It’s only when they are out of options AND get buy in AND manage potential fallout, do they become buyers. Making our solutions the focus relegates us to being noticed by those at the end of their change process - order takers - and robs us of our ability to enter at a stage that helps them become buyers. Indeed, buying is the last thing people and groups do, and only then when there is agreement that an outside fix is their only option and have figured out how to manage fallout from bringing in something new in a way that avoids disruption. You can’t buy a house without family agreement, regardless of how wonderful the house or how big the need. You can’t bring in a new CRM system unless the users are on board and are willing to use it, unless the tech folks know how to incorporate it into what they’re already using, until they’ve tried to fix what they’ve got, until a user training is developed and scheduled. It’s not about the house. It’s not about the CRM system. It’s about the change process. So long as we focus on solution placement, we will only find those who have figured it all out. We could be helping them by shifting our focus to first connect via managing their change. Instead, buyers do all this change stuff without us as we wait and call and hope and call and send and hope and wait. The sales industry has finally figured out that success has at least as much to do with ‘buying’ as it does selling. But it continues to use the prism of placing solutions even here: it has not gone so far as using new skill sets that help buyers manage the change (which is a necessary precursor to buying and has nothing to do with our solutions, or needs, at all - i.e. no info gathering, no understanding of needs, no information pitch, presentation AND no attempt to influence or strategize the final elements (i.e. money) perceived as reasons for buying. We begin contact by facilitating the REAL buying decision factors.). SALES HAS A VERY LIMITED SCOPEFor goodness sakes, it’s time to stop focusing first on placing solutions. Why not help those who WILL buy be ready! And believe it or not, once we take off our 'selling' blinders and use a prism of facilitating the steps to change, it's quite easy to use a different skill set to recognize people who WILL buy on the first call. For this we enter with a different type of question (Facilitative Question) and a different goal: to recognize those who seek change in the area we can support them in. Buying is a change management issue, not a solution choice issue - a process, part of systemic change, not an event. People become buyers only at Step 10 of a 13 step decision process that addresses the elements of recognizing and managing change. Until this is complete, buyers can’t buy and we are wasting a valuable opportunity to facilitate them, of entering earlier where we are now ignored. Let’s recognize that due to the complexity of change, selling doesn’t cause buying:
We have chosen to sit back and wait while they go through their non-solution/buying-related steps. But we can enable Buyer Readiness. The sales model as we’ve known it is insufficient as a stand-alone model. It's a Tier 2 model. Think about this:
The sales model was designed to place solutions. That’s it. By entering early with a different mindset and skills, we can be closing 40% more sales. A WHOLLY DIFFERENT SKILL SETI have written extensively, and trained large numbers of global sellers, around this issue. In Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell I introduce a new model (Buying Facilitation®) that explains the 13 steps all people and groups take (even for small individual purchases) on route to becoming buyers. Since the first 9 of them have nothing to do with buying anything but with managing change, it involves a different set of skills – facilitating the right people through their change to buy sooner. No longer do we begin trying to ‘understand’ buyers, or make appointments, push our solutions, we first find folks who will become buyers and lead them efficiently through their change, and then – only then – offer solution details. We can’t know anything about the person we’re speaking to. By knowing each step of change, we can hear where they are along their decision path. Have they collected the full set of stakeholders or are they just beginning? Do they recognize the downside to their environment of a purchase? Are they still trying to fix the problem themselves? Change is complex. People don’t even understand themselves. Here is where we can help. We can facilitate people through the steps of change and convert more people into buyers now. To shift the focus from selling to facilitating change and the buying decision process, Buying Facilitation® employs different skills: since our normal questions are biased by our needs, I developed Facilitative Questions to help Others figure out their own change process; Presumptive Summaries that help them recognize what they’re missing in their thinking; Listening for Systems as a way to truly hear what’s being said outside of our own biases; and the 13 steps of change, to lead them through each of the steps they must, must address en route to change. The entire process is laid out in Dirty Little Secrets. It’s not a sales process, but works as the front end of selling to help people recognize the elements in their own process that precedes seeking an external solution. Because we seek out folks who CAN change rather than seek those who SHOULD buy, we enter their buying decision path and lead them through each step of change - helping them help themselves. It’s a Servant Leader model that facilitates change, not a sales model that influences solution placement. It’s a very different mindset. I often ask: Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? They’re two different activities. And sales ignores one of them. THE COST OF NO CHANGEThe sales industry is like one of those buyers we disparage for not understanding they need us. Since 1987 when I ran my first Buying Facilitation® program at KLM (titled Helping Buyers Buy), I’ve trained about 100,000 sales folks, beginning with pilot programs that always ran alongside a control group selling the same product. Here’s a calculation of the typical results, regardless of industry or price:
Kaiser Permanente: went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits, 25 closed sales. KPMG: selling a $50,000,000 solution, went from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle. Boston Scientific: had a 53% increase in close rates and a one call close rather than months of follow up. IBM: I personally sold $6,400,000 worth of business as I spoke directly with existing clients during the coaching portion of my onsite Buying Facilitation® training. Sales professionals have told me my results aren’t possible. And I agree: using the sales model, the beliefs and skills of selling, it’s not possible. SALES CAN MAKE A BIG CONTRIBUTION – BUT NOT THE WAY IT’S BEING USED NOWWith the skills they possess, sellers and marketers can have a vital role in facilitating people through their steps of change to becoming buyers. First they must understand the differences between selling and buying. Here’s what buying entails: A buyer is someone (or group) who has tried to resolve a problem using their own known resources (People never, ever, start out to buy something first!), has gotten buy in from everyone who will touch the solution, and knows and manages any fallout that the new will cause. A buying decision is a change management problem first, a solution choice issue second. Instead of assuming a buying decision is a solution choice issue and continuing as it has for millennia to push content, instead of assuming our job is still persuade folks to take action on our content, or place solutions (It’s not. It’s to facilitate buying.), sellers can facilitate the folks who CAN/WILL buy through the steps of change they must manage – and that we sit and wait for them to accomplish. I have written extensively on this. Sharon Drew Morgen is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation® - a change management model that includes learning how to Listen for Systems, formulating Facilitative Questions, and understanding the steps of systemic change. For those of you wishing to learn more, take a look at the program syllabus. Please visit www.dirtylittlesecrets.com and read the two free chapters. Consider reading it with the companion ebook Buying Facilitation®
Sharon Drew is the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling With Integrity, as well as 6 other books on helping buyers buy. She is also the author of the Amazon bestseller What? Did you really say what I think I heard? Sharon Drew keynotes, trains and coaches sales teams to help them unlock situations that are stalled, and teaches teams how to present and prospect by facilitating the complete buying decision process. She delivers keynotes at annual sales conferences globally. Sharon Drew can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com 512 771 1117 Contributor: Sharon Drew Morgen Published here on: 03-Nov-19 Classification: Sales Websites: www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com
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Main sections: | Disciplines | Techniques | Principles | Explanations | Theories | |
Other sections: | Blog! | Quotes | Guest articles | Analysis | Books | Help | |
More pages: | Contact | Caveat | About | Students | Webmasters | Awards | Guestbook | Feedback | Sitemap | Changes | |
Settings: | Computer layout | Mobile layout | Small font | Medium font | Large font | Translate | |
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