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By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 23, 2009 Random Thoughts
I’m a buddhist, so I have no religeous affilitation or particular reason to celebrate at this time of year. But I can certainly enjoy the holiday spirit. And I can appreciate the friendliness and kindness that people are showing each other.
What makes it possible for folks to have such cheer now, rather than at other times during the year? That was the most striking thing about Australia: it seemed as if everyone was ‘doing’ Christmas – an entire country of people being friendly and kind. Kinda shocking to my system. So why can’t/don’t we do that here? Read More..
Recent Entries
By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 22, 2009 Sales Related
Somewhere around nineteen years ago, just as my first book Sales on the Line was getting ready for print, I was in Los Angeles visiting a friend, and we visited one of his colleague’s to discuss a new business idea: how to put spirituality into the workplace. Since I have considered my Buying Facilitation® method a servant-leader model (the seller becomes the servant leader to the buyer) but unwilling to use the ’s’ word – believing that my work would be denigrated unless it ’sounded’ normal - I was eager to meet the person who was so brazen as to actually broadcast the words Spirituality-In-The-Workplace.
With a group of about 15, I sat with my Martin Rutte as he played with ideas, tried out phrases, took feedback. Being my normal pushy, aggressive (and asperger’s-suffering) self, I fearlessly entered the fray with alternative ideas, bold opinions, and a continuous stream of what I thought was agreeable dissent. I thought that we should not use the ’s’ word and instead use the stealth method of putting spirituality into skill sets without announcing what we were doing. Martin disagreed. He wanted to use the word, find those people who would join the movement and start changing the business world. I thought he was naive. He thought I was obnoxious. Read More..
By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 21, 2009 Buying Facilitation®, Sales Related
Lately, I’ve noticed folks using the term buyer facilitation. While I can make a good guess that the term is a version of Buying Facilitation®, it is being used in a ’sales’ context. So maybe, the term is to be used in conjunction with Buying Facilitation®. After all, the buyer must manage both the internal decision issues and the need-related decision isuses before a purchase happens.
Here is a complete definition of Buying Facilitation®:
Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation skill that acts as an unbiased GPS tool to assist buyers in navigating through their unique, behind-the-scenes change issues to ensure they get the buy-in necessary to bring in a new solution.
I named my model Buying Facilitation® because it’s precisely what we need to be doing in addition to selling: helping buyers facilitate the internal, off-line, behind-the-scenes, personal decision process that we are not privy to. It manages that important meeting between colleagues over lunch, the fight that needs to be resolved between department heads before budgets can be used, the political issues that will get the right folks to meetings, that the right considerations and implementation concerns are on the agenda. We are indeed helping facilitate the buying decision, but it’s core is change management. It’s the stuff that often has nothing to do with need or solution. And the stuff that sales methods don’t address, yet needs to happen before buyers can go ahead with any purchase. Read More..
By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 18, 2009 Sales Related
How often have you chased a prospect for weeks/months/years and then got a ‘no?’ How much time have you wasted that you could have used for finding prospects who would become clients? And how much time have you spent waiting for prospects that either never showed up again, or who took far, far too long to close, while you sat waiting and wondering – or worse, chasing them or reducing the price to get them to buy because you thought they should have closed already??
Do I have your attention? Great. Let me tell you a story.
At a client site recently, as I was preparing to do real-time calls with the program participants, they set up a situation in which I would call a recent (failed) prospect and pretend I was a trainee. The thinking was that the team would hear me use Buying Facilitation® in a non-threatening situation since the prospect had already said ‘no’ after an eleven month sales cycle and three site visits and product trials. Read More..
By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 17, 2009 Sales Related
What is the job of a sales person? Some think it’s about providing solutions. Certainly, serving customers is part of it. I’d like to offer a different definition. I believe the job of a seller is to help a buyer be Excellent.
Until now, we’ve thought that we could help buyers achieve Excellence through a product purchase. But since we actually close such a small percentage of our sales, and spend so much time with a prospect/buyer that is not in direct service to a solution placement, I’d like to think that we have a broader role.
As sellers, we know how to sell. But, as I’ve said so many, many times, buyers have a lotta work to do before they get to the point of being ready to buy: they have to manage their entire internal system of behind-the-scenes issues – the people, policies, rules, relationships, vendors, partners – and make sure that all of the appropriate buy-in is enlisted. Without this happening, there will be no purchase. As I write about in detail in my book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it without going through a change management exercise internally, buyers can’t risk making a purchase that might upset the status quo. They would rather maintain what they’ve got rather than seek the Excellence that is possible, if the downside is a system that faces chaos or disruption. Read More..
By Sharon Drew Morgen | Dec 15, 2009 Sales Related
What, exactly, is a leader?
The definition used in Tango is my favorite: If you notice the leader, he’s not doing a very good job. The job of the leader is to get the best out of his follower and get out of the way: He opens the door, the follower goes through exhibiting her best, and then the leader follows. I believe that it’s a leader’s job to help followers - colleagues, staff, partners, teammates - make the decisions they need to make to achieve excellence.
Of course we all know many leaders who believe it’s their job to make the decisions and get their followers to do their bidding. They call that Influencing, and there are many methods and models that teach this. But doing it this way often comes back to haunt: when people are not part of the decision making process and haven’t bought in to the proposed change, they may go through their own brand of sabatoge, acting out, forgetfulness, or misinterpretation en route to following orders. Their knowledge of the environment, of the day-to-day working conditions, and their creative ideas, are ignored. We see this frequently with tech implementations. Indeed, requests made by senior people for ‘underlings’ to do their bidding are often met with failure. Read More..
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