There has always been a divergence between how sellers sell and how buyers buy. That problem is the bane of a sales professional’s existence. For decades, I have been closing that gap by training the Buying Facilitation® model I’ve developed to sellers to help buyers facilitate their beginning-to-end buy path – from
• idea, to
• assembling the Buying Decision Team, to
• deciding to make a purchase, to
• choosing a vendor
and help them manage the change they must address before they can purchase anything. My clients have learned to close a lot more business, much faster, regardless of their industries, countries, solutions, and price points.
BUYING FACILITATION® CLOSES THE BUYER-SELLER GAP
But it has been struggle for sellers to recognize that the efficacy of their solution, the relationship with the buyer, the strength of their presentation or pitch or pricing is not enough; at the end of the day, a buying decision is a change management problem and the very last thing buyers do – when everything else is aligned – is make a purchase.
Buyers must address behind-the-scenes political, relationship, strategic, and personal issues going on in their status quo before they can return to the seller to commit. And the sales model does not handle this. It’s the length of the sales cycle. It’s why buyers disappear. It’s why sellers sit and wait and hope and keep specious pipelines.
Buying Facilitation® is becoming more accepted these days as the primary vehicle to facilitate the buying decision path as an add-on to sales. There has been an article in Forbes that mentions that the sales model has it wrong by only focusing on solution placement and ignoring the buy path that’s change management based. The Rapid Learning Institute just came out with findings that discuss a gap between buying and selling.
And at the end of the day, it’s becoming just too expensive to maintain a 90%+ failure rate – which is mitigated when Buying Facilitation® brings together the whole Buying Decision Team within 2 calls, or creates conference calls in which the seller can direct the participants to those decisions they must make if they believe change (and a purchase) would create excellence. Using Buying Facilitation® removes those prospects who won’t buy and speeds up those who will. And when Buying Facilitation® gets the right people on board to make the right decisions and gets buy-in, then sellers use their sales skills.
HOW TO LEARN ABOUT BUYING FACILITATION®
For those of you who want to hear me explain Buying Facilitation® in full, here is an interview I did last week with Willis Turner, head of SMEI, on his blogralkradio. Enjoy it. https://smei.site-ym.com/news/165524/Selling-Doesnt-Cause-Buying.htm
For those of you who want to hear me live, join me in beautiful San Juan Puerto Rico as i speak at their Out Of The Box SMEI conference on April 3/4. http://www.smepr.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=Day1ThursdayApril32014&category=Conference2014
For those of you wishing some on-line learning, I’m just completing an on-line learning program and look forward to announcing it. For those of you who wish a Guided Study program, take a look at this.
If you want to read articles about facilitating change, buying decisions, decision making, and listening, please visit www.sharondrewmorgen.com. My models on decision facilitation and consensus management are well represented there. For those of you who seek a provocative, demanding, annoying, and out-of-the-box keynote speaker, check out www.buyingfacilitation.com.You’ll find all of the books I’ve written on the topic, as well as training programs.
I’m the visionary in the sales field, given I’ve been teaching sales folks how to facilitate the behind-the-scenes buying decision path since the 1980s. I know it’s taken many in the sales field some time to recognize the necessary decisions buyers must make outside of their purview and the sales model doesn’t handle. But now it’s time. Now it’s time to add Buying Facilitation® to sales and stop waiting for prospects to be buyers; help them manage their decision path. And let me help you help them.
I look forward to connecting. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com
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