Countless books have been written on optimizing sales. But the principal optimization factor continues to be overlooked: facilitating the buyer’s pre-sales decision process – the buy side.
With a unique skill set different from placing solutions – the sell side – it’s possible to not only accelerate a buying decision but find high probability prospects on the first call.
As a seller-turned-entrepreneur, I’m here to tell you how intricate a purchasing decision is. Sellers don’t realize the risks involved to a prospect’s environment when bringing in something new:
- All relevant people must be assembled (They always forget Joe in accounting!) to understand the scope of the problem.
- They must try workarounds to minimize unnecessary resource expenditure.
- They must understand the risk of change and get buy-in for a purchase.
- It’s a confusing process as the risks of change are initially unknowable.
- Will employees’ jobs change? Will new skills require time to learn?
- Will the new meld with the existing – or what will it take to do so?
- What if some users don’t want to change?
- What if the new would replace some existing people?
- What are the specific downsides? And are the upsides worth it?
These decisions are unique and idiosyncratic, and outsiders (sellers) can have no understanding or control using conventional methods. People won’t even self-identify as buyers until they fully understand their risks. Unfortunately, we’re so involved with selling we haven’t yet admitted that selling doesn’t cause buying.
Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying
Since the days of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936), sales has focused on “need” and “solution placement,” with tools for content description, optimization, qualifying/prospecting and needs analysis processes. But it doesn’t address what folks must figure out before they can buy. And the time it takes them to do so is the length of the sales cycle.
As workplaces have gotten more complex, as team members are no longer sitting in the same room (or country!), the buyer’s decision process must now include a broader range of internal decision-makers, address the greater complexity of the work culture, and discover the types of risks they’d face if bringing in a new solution.
Indeed, if the risk of bringing in a new solution is greater than the risk of staying the same, they will not – cannot – buy regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution.
In other words:
- Whether or not they have a need…
- Whether or not your solution is a perfect fit…
- Regardless of your selling skills and real desire to serve…
Until the risk of change is agreeable, selling practices (and marketing and search optimization, etc.) will not prompt buying. Hence, the 5% close rate.
If you have ever waited (and waited and waited) for a sale to close, you know that folks must do this with or without us. And without a different skillset to facilitate their risk/change management, sellers have no tools to help them. They will continue plodding along this confusing process without us.
Buying Facilitation
To be welcomed as an outsider – to become a true consultant and lead people efficiently through their steps of change – sales must add a new approach to help prospects do their necessary pre-sales tasks.
As a new entrepreneur, I quickly realized the intricacy of a buying decision and developed Buying Facilitation to accelerate and simplify the buy side buying process. But it requires different thinking and skills than sales:
- Facilitative Questions lead the unconscious decision factors systemically.
- Meta listening ensures accurate hearing.
- The 13 steps of change/decision-making make the confounding process simple.
- The goal of risk/change management focuses on the prospect’s discovery.
- The true facilitation process ensures people’s true needs are respected.
Nothing to do with selling at the start. As a stage one activity, Buying Facilitation complements sales by first finding folks in the process of problem solving, then leading them efficiently through the steps of change.
Once folks self-identify as buyers, stage two – sales – kicks in. The result: a 600% increase over using sales alone (prospects are qualified on the first call) and a 75% decrease in the time to close.
Here are a few opening questions to begin the process:
- How are you currently helping your employees?
- What has stopped you until now from expanding your (fill in the blank)?
- How will you know if it’s time to add new tools/skills to what you’re already doing successfully?
Buying Facilitation leads them down specific steps to the tasks they must complete, the people they must assemble and their risk factors. No bias. No sales orientation.
The point is to make the buying decision process more efficient and make sellers true servant leaders. After all, do you want to sell or have someone buy?
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