StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 39b – An Interview with Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, part 2 of 2

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 39b – An Interview with Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, part 2 of 2 explores a new decision facilitation model that helps buyers (and those seeking change) manage the behind-the-scenes decision issues they have to handle privately before they get internal agreement to make a purchase. Sharon Drew also explains why the traditional sales model – that only handles needs assessment and solution placement – creates overly long sales cycles and loses such a high percentage of sales. During our discussion, she shares with us her insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • what sales professionals need to understand about the internal changes buyers deal with as a part of the buying decision
  • business systems and how they fit into the buyer’s decision-making process
  • how sales professionals should deal with buyer’s assertions that a lower price is needed before the sale can be closed

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights Sharon Drew shares in Dirty Little Secrets and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from her websites, www.NewSalesParadigm.com and www.BuyingFacilitation.com.   Sharon Drew’s book, Dirty Little Secrets, can be purchased by clicking here.

COMING SOON!
Look for our upcoming six-part StrategyDriven Podcast series on Making Change Work. These insightful podcasts will help you and your team understand the steps to gaining the buy-in and committed effort needed to implement change successfully. We’ll cover topics including:

  • What is change? and Why is change so hard?
  • What are systems, and how do they influence change?
  • The Problems of Change Management: bias, resistance, and push
  • If decisions are always rational, why are changees resisting?
  • Why is buy-in necessary and how to achieve it?
  • Putting it all together, a radical approach to change management: real leadership

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, is the Founder of Morgen Facilitations, a sales training, consulting, and decision facilitation firm. Sharon Drew is the visionary and thought leader behind Buying Facilitation®, the new sales paradigm that focuses on helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes, offline, buying decisions. She has served many well known companies including: KPMG, Unisys, IBM, Wachovia, and Bose. Sharon Drew is the author of The New York Times Business Bestseller, Selling with Integrity, and the new bestseller, Dirty Little Secrets, as well as five other books and hundreds of articles that explain different aspects of the decision facilitation model that teaches buyers how to buy. To read Sharon Drew’s complete biography, click here.

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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 39a – An Interview with Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, part 1 of 2

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 39a – An Interview with Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, part 1 of 2 explores a new decision facilitation model that helps buyers (and those seeking change) manage the behind-the-scenes decision issues they have to handle privately before they get internal agreement to make a purchase. Sharon Drew also explains why the traditional sales model – that only handles needs assessment and solution placement – creates overly long sales cycles and loses such a high percentage of sales. During our discussion, she shares with us her insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • why the typical sales model is broken and the problems it causes
  • why buyers don’t buy even when the offered solution is a perfect fit
  • how adding a change management model as a front end skill will help close over 400% more sales as it teaches buyers how to get the needed buy-in and agreement to make a purchase

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights Sharon Drew shares in Dirty Little Secrets and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from her websites, www.NewSalesParadigm.com and www.BuyingFacilitation.com.   Sharon Drew’s book, Dirty Little Secrets, can be purchased by clicking here.

COMING SOON!
Look for our upcoming six-part StrategyDriven Podcast series on Making Change Work. These insightful podcasts will help you and your team understand the steps to gaining the buy-in and committed effort needed to implement change successfully. We’ll cover topics including:

  • What is change? and Why is change so hard?
  • What are systems, and how do they influence change?
  • The Problems of Change Management: bias, resistance, and push
  • If decisions are always rational, why are changees resisting?
  • Why is buy-in necessary and how to achieve it?
  • Putting it all together, a radical approach to change management: real leadership

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets, is the Founder of Morgen Facilitations, a sales training, consulting, and decision facilitation firm. Sharon Drew is the visionary and thought leader behind Buying Facilitation®, the new sales paradigm that focuses on helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes, offline, buying decisions. She has served many well known companies including: KPMG, Unisys, IBM, Wachovia, and Bose. Sharon Drew is the author of The New York Times Business Bestseller, Selling with Integrity, and the new bestseller, Dirty Little Secrets, as well as five other books and hundreds of articles that explain different aspects of the decision facilitation model that teaches buyers how to buy. To read Sharon Drew’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08 — 1.6MB)

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When Does Change Happen?

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StrategyDriven Change Management ArticleRecently, a client called to ask for help: she wanted her franchisees to add Buying Facilitation® to their sales skills so they could close more sales.

I sent them a couple of blog posts to help them rethink the differences between pushing a solution and first managing the change that a new solution would require. We then had a phone conference.

With a 2% close rate, these folks defended their current skills: by any rational standard they rejected the possibility of being more successful, preferring to maintain their status quo. Were they irrational?

I don’t believe in the words ‘irrational’ or ‘rational.’ Like all decision makers these folks made the best decision they knew how to make at that moment in time: they are being totally rational – within their unique system of beliefs and values. These folks are more comfortable with their status quo than they are with the prospect of change, even at the expense of more money and more clients.

What is Change?

Change isn’t just a matter of having a new thought, or adding a solution, or asking folks to take on different tasks because if people had agreed that something was wrong and knew how to change it congruently, they would have changed already. The environment people live in is the sum total of all of decisions to date.

Change requires that we somehow integrate the new with the decisions and behaviors we’ve already created and maintain daily. Until or unless we figure out how to reconfigure our rules, roles, relationships, and ego issues, we will take no action – even if it means sticking with something that’s less than successful.

Broken Change Models

No current change management or sales models handle this problem. Before you decide to change, answer the following:

  • What would you need to know or believe differently to know when it would be time to make a change?
  • What rules and roles and relationships in your current environment would need to be maintained in order to adopt change without disrupting the integrity of your system?
  • What is it about your status quo that would need to be addressed prior to planning change in order to ensure that anything new wouldn’t destroy what you already do successfully?

Because until or unless you can be assured that you can make a change that is integrous with who you are, and get the appropriate buy-in for change, you will do nothing.

The big question is: what sort of buy-in would you need? And how could you go about getting it in a way that would be acceptable and welcomed by the system.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the new book Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. She lives in Austin, Texas.

StrategyDriven Change Management Forum

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“The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18 months.”

Gordon Moore
co-Founder , Intel
Originally published in Electronics Magazine, April 19, 1965

When Gordon Moore made this famous comment, there were approximately 60 devices on an Intel chip. Four decades later, Intel placed 1.7 billion transistors on its Itanium chip; proving Moore’s Law to be fairly accurate.

Only a few things occur with certainty and one of those is change. Technology changes flattened the world and gave us access to individuals living thousands of miles away. And it did so in less than two decades. As business leaders, we no longer compete with local, regional, or domestic providers; we are challenged by rivals from Europe, India, China, and Japan.

Advances in technology altered the social fabric of the workplace too. While cell phones, email, and social networking connect us almost instantaneously from almost anywhere on the planet, medical breakthroughs enable us to live longer, more productive lives; bringing together four generations of employees in our workforce – each with differing values, goals, and needs.

Change is indeed occurring. Leaders who can motivate and inspire their employees to embrace change give their organization a significant competitive advantage. Those who do not place their organization at significant risk of becoming irrelevant.

Focus of the Change Management Forum

Materials contained within the Change Management Forum provide insight to the principles of change management as well as the best practices of those leaders recognized as top performers in this area. Each article is tailored to help readers improve their organization’s change management policies and practices so to achieve superior results and move ahead of the competition.

Articles

Principles

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor Articles

StrategyDriven Podcasts

StrategyDriven Podcast

StrategyDriven Podcast – Special Edition

Resources

Books

Be a GPS System for Change

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As change agents, we find ourselves regularly challenged to get the buy-in and follow-through we need. We often start with a great premise and desired outcome, but few tools to enlist the necessary buy-in.

Two things must happen before change will occur:

  • the people in a system must recognize, manage, and buy-in to all the elements of the suggested change,
  • the system must comprehend that a solution will maintain the integrity of the whole.
Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it
by Sharon Drew Morgen

 

Every day, business people face critical buying decisions – from new software to revamped website design to employee training programs. But all too often, the long lag time between recognizing the need for a new solution and actually purchasing and implementing it leads to lost sales, lost opportunities, and lost productivity. Thought leader Sharon Drew Morgen has uncovered what keeps organizations from moving forward and in her new book, Dirty Little Secrets, she reveals what potential buyers need to know to expedite the process of bringing positive change to their companies.

Dirty Little Secrets offers dozens of examples to clarify precisely how buying decisions can be facilitated through the right kind of questions, including an in-depth case study of a marketing manager who recognizes the need for a better website and wants to bring in an external design team. Sharon Drew explores what happens when he stumbles in the dark trying to bring his fellow managers, the internal tech team (which is responsible for the current site), and the CFO (to whom the tech team reports) on board. She then presents the same situation using Buying Facilitation®. The result? “Decision facilitation” enables a smoother, faster process that leads to a better outcome for both the marketing manager and the design firm.

Unfortunately, we’ve never been taught how to help manage the behind-the-scenes – and often unconscious – issues necessary to create and maintain systemic change. We’ve operated on the assumption that with a rational initiative and good communication folks will know how and why to adopt the change – and if they don’t, we handle their resistance.

I suggest there is a more effective way to be successful: become a GPS system and lead the change from the inside out.

Be the GPS System, Not the Consultant

During change initiatives, we often don’t manage the unconscious issues that underlie the status quo and will shift during change. People will take no action – or will resist any request for change – until they address these in a way that maintains internal congruence. But because they are often hidden, we tend to ignore them until it’s too late.

Before designing a change initiative, we need to:

  1. understand the details, associations, and historic import of the internal systems issues that created the problem that will be changed,
  2. figure out how it has been maintained and held in place daily,
  3. recognize the new rules, roles, and relationships that will emerge post-change,
  4. help folks manage the differential in their beliefs between who they are now and who they will be, to help them accept change on a personal level first.

When we attempt to use negotiation skills or OD skills at the wrong time in the change cycle – and almost all change agents attempt to get folks to agree to change well before they have figured out their personal routes through their change issues – we are delaying the change and opening up the possibilities for rejection and sabotage.

Current strategic change models only manage the ‘push/information’ half of the change process. Let’s add a ‘pull/buy-in’ skill set.

To ensure buy-in to change, become a neutral GPS system to navigate followers through the old and new systems issues that will shift, and help them create their own new rules, roles, and relationship patterns.

Help them develop the sort of environment that will both match the change and manage the personal, idiosyncratic elements that have made the folks successful in their pre-change situation.

As part of your new GPS skill set, become a decision facilitator and lead change where it begins: within the system that created the need for change to begin with, and through the people who will be leading the charge.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and the new book Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. She lives in Austin, Texas.