If you sell a product or a service, and you are doing any type of consultative selling, your sales skills are not matching your values.
What is Sales?
Sales is based on placing product. It is an outside-in approach that assumes that with proper care, a seller will be able to understand a buyer’s need and resolve the problem with their solution. Yet no matter how gentle or professional the seller is, or how specifically the solution might fit the Identified Problem, sales is an outside-in approach.
Let’s look at the facts: A buyer’s Identified Problem has been there for quite some time. Indeed, it would have been resolved already if the buyer knew how to do that. But there are hidden issues going on that keep the buyer’s Identified Problem in place daily, and until these issues are resolved, no change will happen. And, similar to an iceberg that only shows a small bit at the top, the meat of the system that holds the Problem in place is hidden and won’t accept change until there is buy-in from the Whole.
When sellers gather information about, start a dialogue around, and offer details of a solution to resolve an Identified Problem, the basis of the conversation is fraught with bias. The real issues going on within the buyer’s environment are systemic, hidden, unique, and idiosyncratic, and the skills of sales do not manage these elements. Indeed, because sales is focused on the seller’s solution, the activity becomes a form of manipulation.
Sales has no capability to actually assist a buyer in recognizing and managing all of the internal elements that would have to be managed and address so that any change, or purchase if you will, will not create internal disruption. And the time it takes them to figure this out is the length of the sales cycle.
There is a different way to place product AND be a servant leader to the buyer.
What is Buying Facilitation®?
Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation model based on leading buyers through the unconscious decision points they need to attend to before they can make a purchase. Just as you couldn’t add two new beds to your bedroom unless you rearranged the room, the lighting, the tables – not to mention that getting the necessary buy-in from your spouse would be at least as important as having your spouse choose the model of bed – so you can’t add something new to any existent system unless the status quo rearranges itself. Buying Facilitation® facilitates the ordering and managing of these sometimes unconscious (and hidden, unique) decisions buyers need to make around people, policies, rules, vendor issues, relationship issues, etc. – that would need to be reconfigured when something new is brought in. The length of the sales cycle is based on the reconfiguration of the internal system to accept change and avoid disruption. But sales hasn’t addressed this until now.
Ask yourself these Facilitative Questions:
How would you know when you and your sales team would be ready/willing to add a new skill set to what they are already doing successfully?
What would you need to see from us to know if Buying Facilitation® would be successful in your situation?
Based on a systems-based collaborative decision making model that Sharon-Drew Morgen developed as a way to line up all internal systems criteria necessary before any change happens, Buying Facilitation® does not work with product sale, but instead gives sellers a new set of tools that influence the entire buying decision process as a neutral navigator, and from the outside – without pushing product, manipulating, or exhibiting any self-serving behaviors. No presentations, no objections, no closing, no money issues, and no competition issues. Plus, the dreaded lengthened sales cycle is reduced by at least half.
Now, you can use the same thinking you incorporate into your CSR initiatives – integrity, ethics, leadership, creativity, true respect for each other and the world – into your sales skills. By using Buying Facilitation® you will to work from a collaborative, servant-leader mind set, as you will move from product placement, to true servant leadership.
Not only will you experience proven results that are staggering in comparison to conventional consultative sales methods (IBM had a 250% increase, Kaiser a 600% increase, KPMG a 400% increase, etc.), but you will be creating a congruent model of servant-leadership and true customer support and care throughout your company.
It is a wholly different model, operating from a different basis, from sales, and has been used by visionaries in companies such as IBM, Unisys, Coors, KPMG, Kaiser, California Closets, Wachovia Bank, Mellon-Dreyfus, Morgan Stanley, etc.
Contact us to discuss your situation and let’s see if between us we can figure out a way to serve your clients as they deserve.