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What’s Stopping You From Closing More Sales? Let me say something you’re not going to like: If a buyer truly needed your solution they would have either bought it already or resolved their problem already. Here is something else you’re not going to like: no matter what you are selling, no matter how great the fit between your solution and a buyer’s need, they will not purchase your solution until or unless they have garnered the necessary buy-in from the people or policy or strategic issues that must be managed behind-the-scenes to ensure they won’t face disruption when bringing in a new solution. In other words, just because you have a great product and they have the need doesn’t mean they are going to buy. You know that already, otherwise you’d close a lot more sales. Let’s take a brief look at what you are doing, and see why it’s not working, and then look at what will. David Sandler called the buyer’s need ‘Pain.’ But think about it: If you broke your arm, would you wait weeks/months/years to get it fixed? Of course not. So how can buyers wait to resolve their need when it’s so obvious (to us, of course) that using our solution would create a state of excellence that they are not experiencing? Because of their system. The system that has created the ‘need’ is the same system that is holding it in place. Think about any extra weight you might have, or your inability to stop smoking, or your reluctance to work out as much as you know you should, or eat healthier. You’ve been talking about managing those issues for...for how long?? SOOO why aren’t you? You have the need, right? You have the "pain," right? What’s the deal? You will change - just like your buyer - when the system you live in (your work hours, your family issues, your identity and ego issues) is willing to be or do something different. Having a great gym near-by, having great clothes a size smaller, having a doc tell you you must shape up - none of those things are enough to get you to change (or you would have). And buyers aren’t just buying a solution, they are managing change. Everything in a buyer’s environment touches everything else in mysterious ways. Until or unless they are able to understand and recognize all of the internal, behind-the-scenes issues they must address (long-standing personnel issues, tech problems, old vendor issues) to ensure they won’t face chaos if they try to resolve something, they will do nothing. Do your prospects need you? Of course. But can they afford to change? Can they afford to upset or disrupt their standard operating procedure? What do they need to understand or do differently to change without disruption? A purchase is a change management issue, not a solution purchase issue. And sales only manages the needs-assessment, solution-placement end of the buying decision.
SALES DOES NOT HANDLE INTERNAL, PRIVATE DECISIONS Unfortunately, sales only manages the need/solution part of a buyer’s buying decision, and has no tool kit to help the buyer recognize and manage the off-line, behind the-scenes issues that must be addressed before the system is willing to make a change. Is the other department ready to bring in a new X? What about the old vendor? How will the team know how to choose between resolving This problem or That? Sales doesn’t manage those issues. In fact, sales acts as if the ‘problem’ were an isolated event. Ah - a need my solution can resolve! I have a prospect! - but of course that’s not true or we’d be closing a lot more than 7% of our prospects. In our excitement of finding a prospect with a need that could be resolved with our product, we forget that there are a whole lotta other things that buyers must address internally before they can make a purchasing decision. And we forget that just becauseWE perceive the ‘need’ doesn’t mean the prospects perceive a ‘need.’ Indeed: noticing a need that our solution can resolve, and assuming that we have a prospect, is a specious assumption. Buyers will buy only when the system the buyers live in - entire grouping of people and policies and relationships and history - buys-in to adding something new and getting rid of the old, when it’s clear the regular vendor can’t do the fix, when the other departments know how they are going to work alongside of the new solution. Sales doesn’t handle these issues, causing us to wait forever for buyers to decide, or to lose really good prospects that seemed a good fit. The most interesting thing here is that sales folks know this: they have to deal with it daily. But instead of changing the model, the field has developed work-arounds to maintain the broken model and continue (just like buyer’s do, btw). Work-arounds include: managing objections, price management, opening and closing techniques. The biggest work-around is blame: obviously the buyer is stupid, so it’s not the seller’s fault.
SALES ISA SOLUTIONPLACEMENT MODEL Helping buyers manage these internal, private decision issues has nothing to do with placing a solution or managing a need. Even if we were to understand what all of the decision issues are (which we can never do as outsiders, much like we can never understand our best friend’s marriage or why our cousin doesn’t lose weight), we cannot be involved in the decisions that must go on for any change to happen. I also find it rather interesting that sellers are now asking what the decision making process is, or who the decision makers are... as if sellers could do anything about it, or as if the buyer knows until just at the end of the process who, exactly, needs to be involved. Sales is a solution placement model. It enters the buyer’s decision making too early. It does not, and cannot, manage the decision issues that buyers must address off-line. It has no capacity to help buyers navigate through relationships or to change necessary rules. Buyers don’t start figuring out their behind-the-scenes issues until after we’ve met them, except in cases when buyers call us and buy... in which case they’ve made all of the behind-the-scenes buying decisions before they contacted us and we are just lucky. We come in at the wrong time, pitching a solution to a small portion of the ultimate Buying Decision Team, and have no tools to help buyers do what they must do first: manage all of the off-line buying decisions that need to happen for them to get buy-in for change. The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. Before they can buy anything they first look into their current teams, partners groups, rules, historic decisions for a simple resolution to a business problem. They come to us by default, and even then end up going back inside (to their old vendors, or the other department heads, or the tech team) to do an internal check on resources before placing an order. DECISION FACILITATION In order to truly be a GPS system that is more like a navigation system than a product placement system, se need a wholly different skill set, or just be content to sit and wait while buyers do it, as they must get internal buy-in before getting agreement to make a purchase. I’ll say it one more time: they need to do this anyway, and the time it takes them to do it is the length of the sales cycle. They’ve been doing it without you for centuries. But there is a way you can be part of the process. I’ve developed a model - Buying Facilitation® - that offers a wholly different skill set. It’s a change management, decision facilitation model that is NOT SALES but is a model sellers can use to help buyers recognize and manage their internal issues in order to insure buy-in for change. Just like you won’t lose weight, or work out more, or eat healthier unless you have internal buy-in (we don’t make decisions to change based on good data, or someone else’s opinion), so buyers won’t buy until they know that their system will remain intact and healthy after the addition of the new solution. Buying is a systems/change management issue. Selling is a needsdiscovery, solution-placement model. Add decision facilitation skills to the front end of your selling skills and you can actually teach buyers how to buy, and close sales in 1/8 the time, find 3x more prospects, and stop wasting time on folks who won’t buy.
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