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It’s The Consensus, Stupid*

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Buying decisions happen well before buyers consider your solution regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution, marketing, or content. In fact, a purchase is the very last thing that occurs in a string of events buyers must handle as they seek to solve a business problem.

One of the first things they must do is assemble the complete Buying Decision Team to garner the consensus necessary for change. Studies from the CEB show that a Buying Decision Team includes approximately 6 decision makers and untold influencers who must achieve consensus before considering how to resolve their problem, whether it’s a purchase or another fix. Let’s look at this from 3 angles:

  1. Buyers don’t initially know who belongs on the Buying Decision Team. The time it takes them to assemble the right people and hear their voices around fixing a business problem is part of the buying decision path. These issues are political, systemic, relational – not focused on need. We are not facilitating the assembly of the team.
  2. An external solution is considered only when there is consensus that an internal problem can’t be resolved with familiar resources. We are not facilitating the systemic discovery process that has little to do with our solution.
  3. An external fix causes disruption. It’s necessary to have consensus as to when, if, or how to bring in a new solution so disruption can be either avoided or planned for. We are not facilitating consensus as it’s unique and systemic.
  4. Any solution – internal change or an external purchase – must address the change management issues that result from anything new entering the status quo. We are not facilitating change but merely offering content on what might be a solution.

Content Is Not King

Content is merely one way the decision makers and influencers can learn about possible solutions when they are ready to begin thinking about options. Other solutions being considered include internal workarounds that will manage the problems more simply. A purchase is merely the very last thing buyers consider. We are limiting our success to a small segment of opportunity and should be facilitating decisions point before pushing solutions.

We can facilitate a buyer’s consensus from sales, marketing, and social, but not with the current sales or marketing models. Add Buying Facilitation® to your sales and marketing and enter earlier by first helping facilitate consensus. It’s not sales, nor is it solution driven – it’s a change facilitation model. But buyers have to do it with you or without you. It might as well be with you. And THEN you can sell your solution.

*Thanks to Bill Clinton: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”

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 Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

Contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] and add her Buying Facilitation® model to your sales or marketing solutions. Then you can influence the entire decision path, not just the back end.

Standards and Expectations Best Practice 1 – Provide Examples

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StrategyDriven Standards and Expectations Best Practice ArticleWhat is clear to one person may not be so readily understood by another. Unlike quantifiably defined procedures, standards and expectations documents frequently rely on qualitatively defined concepts. Reliance on qualitatively conveyed performance guidelines, in turn, invites interpretation latitude and a higher probability of misinterpretation. Therefore, leaders should employ addition mechanisms to bolster standards interpretation consistency among individuals with varying backgrounds, knowledge, skills, and experiences.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

The Advisor’s Corner – How do I deal with those who support me in public and sabotage me in private?

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How do I deal with those who support me in public and sabotage me in private?Question:

What can I do about people who tell me they support my vision but I’ve heard through the grapevine that they are sabotaging me?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

These people are most likely, what I call ‘Termites.’ The term fits them well because they manage to smile and slide their way into the accepted norms and culture, and then wreck havoc just underneath the surface. Highly skilled Termites can be hard to spot until they’ve done so much damage the ‘walls’ begin to shake or fall down. The damage is often not discovered right after a Termite has moved on to fresh territory. So… what can you do?

Prevention

The best way to prevent Termite damage is to have a very strong set of organizational values that include integrity or truth or a similar concept around honesty. When these are firmly in place AND people are measured objectively and regularly against those values, Termites find fewer and fewer places to hide.

Cultural and operational values function exactly like a strong foundation for your ‘house,’ and are made even stronger when there are supports in the walls. That means values with accountability. Checks and balances also need to be in place, so that no single person has unfettered power and influence within their workgroup. If they have too much power, Termites will use it to disguise their damage and isolate their people from others to create a protective cover for and big lies about their dirty deeds.

Detection

You should suspect Termite activity in your midst by noticing things that don’t quite add up for feel “fishy” to you. Watching, observe carefully how people behave, and walk around your workplace frequently. Termites can’t fool everyone all the time. Pick up on conversations, patterns, and become a deep listener, truly hearing ALL of what people are trying to tell you.

Eradication

Assume nothing. Once you’ve discovered a Termite in your midst, ask a lot of questions and require good answers. Get multiple sources to verify and provide you clean data about what you need to know. Another support for your ‘house’ is having a true ‘safety net’ within your organization where people can go to express their concerns without fear, and with anonymity. Look for repetition and for patterns of the Termite’s behavior. If you get anonymous pain mail under your door – I call them POW notes – don’t ignore them. They are usually ‘smoke signals’ sending you a message you need to hear.

Trust your instincts. Trust what you see and hear with all the subtle and not so subtle body language people are telegraphing to you. Finally, pay attention to ‘those who protest too much!’

There are Termites and then there are people who exaggerate, even might gossip a bit, or use hyperbole. The latter are not Termites. These people can usually be guided down a better path with good coaching.

You can’t ‘fix’ a Termite. Once a workplace liar, always a liar – it’s just the size of the lies and the target that will vary. You cannot coach a liar into honesty. Lying is okay for them; it’s part of their value system and their end does justify their means.

The only solution to a workplace Termite is to call in pest control and rid yourself of the pain and damage as soon as you can.

About the Author

Roxi HewertsonLeadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

Why Our Employees Asked Us To Stop Giving Away Cars

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Easy-to-implement ideas to improve your corporate culture and drive employee engagement

 
We gave a new car away to our employees every other month, six cars in total, to keep the motivation and excitement up among our best performing sales agents. We were really impressed with ourselves and wanted to know what else we could do to improve the happiness factor. We sent out a survey (which we still do today) to ask our employees about the cleanliness, the temperature in the building, the security, the lighting, the management, the pay, the incentives, the likelihood that they’d leave if another company offered them more money, all-in-all we had about twenty five questions. Two months later the same survey showed that the work space was cleaner, the building temperature more comfortable, the security better, the lights brighter, the managers more helpful, the pay was better, our incentive plan produced better results, and less of our employees would leave for more money.

How did we manage to change our employees’ perception and why did they want us to stop giving away cars?

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About the Author

Craig Handley is a networking monster with an unstoppable combination of hard work, ingenuity, and creativity that has sparked the vision and growth that drives the success of Listen Up Español. Craig’s expertise in maximizing the sales process – and Listen Up Español’s impressive track record of higher conversion rates and higher average order value than any other Spanish language call center – was achieved from the ground up, having started his professional career in door-to-door sales and rising through the ranks in many call centers. He is well known for being an entrepreneur who lives and breathes the Maverick motto: “Make More Money, Have More Fun, and Give More Back.”

The Advisor’s Corner – How do I deal with so much on my plate?

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How do I deal with so much on my plate?Question:

There is SO much on my plate – how do I sort out priorities, recognize the blocks, and keep an open mind for possibilities?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

You might find that you are so focused on the ‘tasks’ at hand that the most important work is getting the short end of the stick. Let’s identify some ‘buckets’ to help you navigate your way to success.

Perhaps you have just been given a challenge to solve by your leader. Your job is to identify the relevant factors, create priorities, and then execute on your own or with others on your team. My advice: start by identifying which items fall into each of four buckets: Fat Rabbits, Quick Wins, Rocks, and Who Cares.

You know what a Fat Rabbit looks like, and it probably makes you smile! These are those parts of the challenge that are foundational, have the highest/fattest impact, and must be in place to succeed at executing your assignment. These are the big fat chunks of your challenge that need to be addressed or nothing else will work matter.

Quick Wins are those parts of your challenge that require minimal effort with maximum payoff. They demonstrate tangible, visible progress. Getting them done and making them known to the appropriate stakeholders, significantly boosts momentum. Too many people think they have to get the Fat Rabbits well underway or completed before going for any Quick Wins. Ignoring Quick Wins often results in Slow Wins or No Wins.

Then there are the Rocks. These are tough blocks in the road to completion of a successful challenge. These Rocks need to be identified without denial or wishful thinking. Pretending they aren’t there won’t make them go away. Sometimes Rocks are pebble like, and sometimes they are more like Mt. Rushmore. Solutions may not be known immediately, and that’s ok. You won’t move forward without moving the Rocks out of the way one way or another, or finding a way around them. If the Rocks are too formidable, reconsider the challenge – is it the right challenge at the right time? Moving Rocks requires a lot of effort and energy, so you need it to pay off.

Finally, we have the Who Cares bucket. These might be interesting, but they are a distraction. Identify the Who Cares items so your valuable time and energy are not waste and that no one really cares about.

Let’s take one challenge, Succession Planning and dip into the four buckets for a look. This sample is by no means complete, but it will give you the idea to apply to your own work.

Fat Rabbits

  • Define the workforce realities with indisputable facts, and create the ‘burning platform’ of urgency
  • Identify current competencies and compare with necessary next generation competencies
  • Align all HR/OD functions: to meet forecasted job content and design

Quick Wins

  • Learn why people come to work at ABC Company, why they stay, and why they leave
  • Identify key positions and key people to target for succession planning
  • Analyze internal/external labor demographics/pipelines

Rocks

  • Decentralization reality vs. having one ABC Company strategy, are in conflict
  • IT Systems, as they are today, and aggregate data reporting are insufficient to collect enough accurate data

Who Cares

  • Offices need to be rennovated when people leave, thus impacting the budget (lots of things impact the budget – it’s off topic or very low priority)

When you focus on the things that really matter, you make progress. When you don’t, you don’t make progress. Make sure your Rocks are not show stoppers, then go for a few visible and happy Quick Wins as you work on your Fat Rabbits!

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].