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The Business of Kindness

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Lately, while listening to an NPR program, I heard a group of business people discussing kindness.

Kindness – not a word historically associated with corporations, those bastions of male verve – is now being equated with the bottom line. How times have changed. In the 90s when I gave keynotes titled ‘Sales as a Spiritual Practice’ I would get asked: “Yes, but how would we make money?”

Imagine embracing the desire to be helpful and considerate, compassionate and generous as part of accepted business practice. We all know what happens when it’s ignored. We know how workplace issues grind people down, and how infrequently those below the top tier get asked their opinions. We know we lose more good employees to treatment issues than to pay issues. We know that 70% of buying decisions are made by women.

And yet we continue assuming the bottom line is about minimizing costs and maximizing profit.

How Kindness Can Effect Our Bottom Line

The costs of degrading and ignoring employees and making customers conform to our money-saving practices cost us high turnover, a paucity of fresh ideas and new leaders, and the need to hire more supervisory managers to handle the fallout. I know a company here in Austin with a reputation of treating employees so punitively that only naïve out-of-towners apply for the many available jobs.

Research has shown kindness actually increases our bottom line:

  • When employees are asked their opinions, treated respectfully, given jobs that enable them to exhibit excellence regardless of their pay scale, they are more creative, responsible, and loyal. They adopt leadership roles, put in longer hours, and have fewer sick days.
  • When we treat our clients kindly we keep them longer, hear about problems (rather than lose them to competitors), are offered new ideas to monetize, and have brand ambassadors to offer free marketing to connections who may become clients.

Here are a few of my personal experiences of monetizing kindness:

1. Kindness with customers:

a. In Portland recently, I couldn’t locate my correct bus stop. I called the Transit help line and a person answered! And he stayed on the line until I got to my destination!

  • Takeaway: the random acts of kindness I found throughout Portland have led me to prepare to move there.

b. After not receiving my NYTimes for four Sundays, I made two angry calls. The first woman said I would need to speak with a supervisor on Monday; the second woman not only called my local delivery folks, she called back to tell me when the paper would be delivered, called again to make sure I got it, and then left me her cell number in case the problem occurred again.

  • Takeaway: I won’t cancel my subscription.

2. Kindness with employees:

a. In the 80s I ran a tech support company in London with 48 tech folks. Annually, I gave them $2000 to take a week off to renew themselves by attending any course they wanted (photography, cooking). I also required them to take off one day a month to do volunteer work. And at least four times I year went to their job sites (and they were not my direct reports), took them to lunch, and picked their brains on ways we could do better for them and for our clients. Their ideas were terrific. As a side note, I often ran into competitors at conferences who said they tried to hire my folks away yet couldn’t pry them from my grip. “What are you doing to those folks?” I was just respecting them.

  • Takeaway: there was no turnover in 4 years; the tech folks called us whenever they heard rumors of new business and I was in place by the time the vendor delivered the product.

b. I hired a full time ‘make nice’ guy whose job it was to visit staff and clients on site to make sure the relationships and programming worked efficiently, nipping problems in the bud. With no fires to fight I had nothing to do but grow my company.

  • Takeaway: revenue doubled annually; I had a 42% net profit.

The How of Kindness: Using Listening Skills Enhance Relationships

I believe the process of listening is one of the skills that will enable us to be kind. Not only do we need to set up client Listening Conferences and staff Listening Hours, we must hear what’s being said between the lines. My new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains whatever we listen for determines what we hear. So rather than merely listen for problems, we must listen for the patterns in the problems: Lots of turnover? What are we ignoring that can be resolved? Bottom line decreasing due to competition? What are clients telling us that we haven’t been listening for?

Through the years, with clients and staff, coachees and colleagues, I have found the biggest obstacle to authentic communication is how imperfectly we hear others. Far too often we enter conversations with a bias and miss what’s being conveyed that falls outside the range of expectation. Imagine if we approach our conversations with the bias of kindness:

  • An employee is perpetually late with work assignments: is there something going on in the department, with other employees, with her work load, that is causing the problem?
  • Customer service folks must recognize patterns in complaints and become leaders in resolving problems rather than maintaining the status quo. I recently heard a rep say: “I’ve had lots of complaints about this. But there are no plans to fix it.”

How can we monetize kindness with staff and clients? It’s possible to make money AND be kind. Let’s begin the conversation.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Steps in a Buying Decision

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There seems to be a confusion about the meaning of the terms buying decision journey, buying path, buy-cycle, helping buyers buy, and buying decisions. These terms define a specific set of sequenced actions buyers take to enable internal consensus and change – change management issues, if you will – rather than define steps that address needs or vendor/solution choice which come later and are the focus of sales.

I coined the terms in the 1980s to describe elements of a change management process I developed (Buying Facilitation®) that coaches buyers through their behind-the-scenes change issues they must handle before they can buy – a consulting process to help them get their ducks in a row. With sales folks applying the terms to the purchasing portion of a buyer’s decisions, the vital change management support element, the element that makes us real coaches and relationship managers, the element that finds and creates real prospects and halves sales cycles, is being lost.

Let’s go through a mock buying decision process to show you what has to get done by buyers before they, well, before they become buyers. And by-the-way, this is all fully flushed out in my book Dirty Little Secrets.

How Do We Buy?

Pretend you are the VP of Client Services of a $15 million company and find your current website inadequate for your growth and strategy. Indeed, you want to go around your internal tech folks and hire an external vendor with a new vision. You must:

  1. Assemble and get consensus from the appropriate people to determine if there is any agreement to making changes to your current site.
  2. Determine if it’s possible to fix what you’ve got (to save the time, money, human capital) or figure out how to work with the internal Tech folks if absolutely necessary.
  3. Find budget.
  4. Discover the criteria everyone needs to meet to agree to what success will look like.
  5. Get the buy-in from those whose work will be effected by the change.
  6. Create a path forward to enable buy-in, collaboration, win/win, and a minimum of risk/resistance/cost for everyone involved.

Here are all the steps you’ll go through to discover a solution everyone can get behind:

  1. start a conversation with some colleagues to discuss the current site. Mention your thoughts to the VPs of Sales and Marketing as you’d all need to share budget.
  2. go on line and research your competition’s site; call colleagues for vendor recommendations.
  3. talk with the internal Tech guys to discuss your displeasure and see what they’re willing to do differently, closer in line with what you’ve learned from your research.
  4. have a formal meeting with VPs of Sales and Marketing and the head of Technology (the 4 of you make up the foundation of the Buying Decision Team (BDT)) to discuss ideas to move forward and upgrade your site, including bringing in a web design vendor. Huge pushback from Tech who wants to keep it in house.
  5. contact a few local vendors to ask them to give you a presentation about web design so you can better understand what’s possible. You meet with them alone.
  6. meet with the BDT to discuss your take-aways from the vendor presentations. Everyone wants to do more research and decide they want to add branding, SEO capability, and a blog. Everyone has different needs for a new site; the Tech group wants it done in house.
  7. meet with CFO (manages the Tech department). She opposes hiring external vendors.
  8. meet with BDT. Long meeting to get consensus. Everyone has different needs: Sales wants to push solutions; Marketing arguing re the content, SEO, blog, etc.; Tech guys hostile and uncooperative and won’t discuss external vendors. All agree to bring in more folks onto BDT: HR, Project Management, Internal Consulting. Agree to get CFO’s permission to at least consider external vendors. Decision made to add ‘branding’ and SEO to the list of needs. Group decides to look at vendors again. They agree to go online to gather additional data on the newly added criteria re branding and SEO and agree to bring in additional vendors to present.
  9. same vendors come in and give same presentation to you but now Sales, Marketing, and Project Management are present. Additional vendors present branding and SEO capability. Tech folks, HR, Internal Consulting don’t attend.
  10. BDT meets to discuss presentations and possibilities. Majority decides to use vendors to do all the work rather than in house, but need buy-in from CFO. Tech guy resistant.
  11. some group members prepare a presentation to convince CFO to use outside supplier and add new capability. Head of Sales is chosen to get Tech folks on board.
  12. HR works with you to understand all levels of change necessary and who would be involved. You create a plan that highlights everyone’s needs, the problem areas, areas of overlapping responsibility, budget issues. You hand this out to the full BDT for comment and email discussion.
  13. meeting set up with the CFO and full BDT to present your findings and needs. CFO reaches a compromise: use the Tech team to do the programming; vendor to offer plans for the design, branding, and SEO. You agree to meet with the vendors to see who would be most capable of collaborating with the Tech group as they’d need to hand over, and work with, the Tech folks. You all agree that the Tech team – not you, who initiated the idea – will choose the vendor they think they can collaborate best with.
  14. vendor presentation meeting #3. New vendors call you to gather information (original vendors never called to see if there were any changes to the original criteria, or if there were a different lead internal coach). None asks about the split of the work, or the need for collaboration. The one vendor who discussed collaboration was chosen by Tech team.

This very simplistic and very normal decision path took a year in which the lead contact changed, the BDT members changed, the needs changed, the buying criteria changed. Happens all the time. And the sales model doesn’t manage this end of the buying decision path. We just come in at the end when all of the rest has been completed, or come in too early before the complete data set is agreed to or understood. Do you know what stage your buyers are at when you speak with them?

Sales Focuses on Needs and Solution Placement

Using just the sales model in the above situation, the potential vendors would enter too early to ‘understand needs’ or ‘get into the buyer’s shoes’, gather incomplete data (it wasn’t complete until Step 8) rather than facilitating discovery towards collaboration skills AND web design AND branding, plus addressing the CFO and Tech issues. And, the assumption would be that the entire Buying Decision Team – not fully formed until near the end – is already on board.

In this instance, sales is involved in steps 5, 9, & 14. As a seller, you’d give a great presentation, recognize a need, get along well with your contact, and assume you were ‘in.’ When you did your second presentation, you’d assume you were ‘in.’ And the rest is history.

If you used Buying Facilitation® this time waste could have been avoided for both you and your prospect. You would have begun your connection as a consultant, and on the first call helped the buyer

  1. recognize and manage the problems with the CFO and tech guy;
  2. design the make-up of the full Buying Decision Team assemble all of the appropriate people, and facilitate the discovery of the full set of needs at the very beginning;
  3. recognize all of the solution and change criteria the BDT wanted to meet as well as the change issues they would have to contend with;
  4. determine how to bring in a new solution and manage any change/budget/timing issues

and done a presentation only when everyone was there, in agreement, and a full understanding of what any work would involve. It all would have taken a month or two. And then you know what they will buy, when they will buy it, who to sell it to, and how to present it.

First facilitate the entire buying decision as a Buying Facilitator/consultant, then sell. Your sales will increase by an enormous percent and you will dramatically decrease your sales cycle. Remember: buyers have to do these things anyway, with you or without you. It might as well be with you. So add some new goals and thinking, and strap on some facilitation skills to add to what you’re doing with your sales model now.

This article is a minor examination of how to facilitate the buy cycle, buying process, and of how to help buyers buy along the full route of their decision path. For a more complete examination read Dirty Little Secrets or call me with questions at 512-457-0246.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Training vs. Learning: Do you want to train? Or have someone learn?

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Training successfully educates only those who are predisposed to the new material. Others may endeavor to learn during class but may not permanently adopt it. The problem isn’t the value of information or the eagerness of the learner: It’s a problem with both the training model itself and the way learners learn. It’s a systems/change problem.

How We Learn

We all operate out of unique, internal systems comprised of mental models (rules, beliefs, history etc.) that form the foundation of who we are and determine our choices, behaviors and habits. Our behaviors are the vehicles that represent these internal systems – our beliefs in action, if you will. So as a Buddhist I wouldn’t learn to shoot a gun, but if someone were to try to kill my family I’d shift the hierarchy of my beliefs to put ‘family’ above ‘Buddhist’ and ‘shooting a gun’ might be within the realm of possibility.

Because anything new is a threat to our habitual and carefully (unconsciously) organized internal system (part of our limbic brain), we instinctively defend ourselves against anything ‘foreign’ that might seek to enter. For real change (like learning something new) to occur, our system must buy-in to the new or it will be automatically resisted. It similarly effects selling/buying, coaching/clients, doctors/patients, leaders/followers.

A training program potentially generates obstacles, such as when

  • learners are happy with their habitual behaviors and don’t seek anything new,
  • fear they might lose their historic competency,
  • the new material unconsciously opposes long-held beliefs.

We are programmed to maintain our status quo and resist anything new unless our beliefs/mental models recognize that the new material will align with our status quo regardless of the efficacy of the required change.

How We Train

The training model assumes that if new material

  • is recognized as important, rational, and useful,
  • is offered in a logical, informative, interesting way,
  • allows time for experience and practice,

it will become accepted and habituated. But these assumptions are faulty. At an unconscious level, this model attempts to push something foreign into a closed system (our status quo): it might be adopted briefly, but if it opposes our habituated norm, it will show up as a threat and be resisted. This is the same problem faced when sellers attempt to place a new solution, or doctors attempt to change the habits of ill patients. It has little to do with the new, and everything to do with change management.

Truly experiential learning has a higher probability of being adopted because it uses the experience – like walking on coals, doing trust-falls with team members – to shift the underlying beliefs where the change takes place. Until or unless there is a belief change, and the underlying system is ready, willing, and able to adopt the new material into the accepted status quo, the change will not be permanent.

One of the unfortunate assumptions of the training field is that the teach/experience/practice model is effective and if learning doesn’t take place it’s the fault of the learner (much like sellers think the buyer is the problem, coaches thinks clients are the problem, and Listeners think Speakers are the problem). Effective training must change beliefs first.

Learning Facilitation

To avoid resistance and support adoption, training must enable

  1. buy-in from the belief/system status;
  2. the system to discover its own areas of lack and create an acceptable opening for change

before the new material is offered.

I had a problem to resolve when designing my first Buying Facilitation® training program in 1983. Because my content ran counter to an industry norm (sales), I had to help learners overcome a set of standardized beliefs and accepted processes endemic to the field. Learners would have to first recognize that their habitual skills were insufficient and higher success ratios were possible by adding (not necessarily subtracting) new ones. I called my training design Learning Facilitation and have used this model successfully for decades. (See my paper in The 2003 Annual: Volume 1 Training [Jossey-Bass/Pfieffer]: “Designing Curricula for Learning Environments Using a Facilitative Teaching Approach to Empower Learners” pp 263-272).

Briefly: Day 1 helps learners recognize the components of their unconscious status quo while identifying skills necessary for greater excellence: specifically, what they do that works and what they do that doesn’t work, and how their current skills match up with their unique definition of excellence within the course parameters. Day 2 enables learners to identify skills that would supplement their current skills to choose excellence at will, and tests for, and manages, acceptance and resistance. Only then do new behaviors get introduced and practiced.

Course material is designed with ‘learning’ in mind (rather than content sharing/behavior change), and looks quite different from conventional training. For example Day 1 uses no desks, no notes, and no lectures. I teach learners how to enlist their unconscious to facilitate buy-in for new material.

Whether it’s my training model or your own, just ask yourself: Do you want to train? Or have someone learn? They are two different activities.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

The Heart of Sales

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Sales could easily become a spiritual practice, bring in far more revenue, and make sellers Servant Leaders.

For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. In my work life, I have focused on the sales profession, as I believe (as the very foundation of business), it offers the capability of making each person, each interaction, and each company, based on true service.

Unfortunately, with the focus on profit, solution placement, timelines, and commissions, the potential for true servant-leadership has been overlooked. Indeed, it’s possible to make money AND make nice.

Selling and Serving

The sales job focuses on needs assessment and solution placement. Of course this is necessary – but only as the final stage of issues buyers have to address. Sales overlooks the off-line, behind-the-scenes decision issues that buyers must face privately before they get the buy-in to make a purchase.

But this is where the true servant-leader connection is: imagine having the capability to serve folks by first helping them discover all of the internal, values-based decision issues they must address, and being a support for them in the process. And once this is done (and it makes the sales process about 600% more efficient), then we can sell.

But we can’t continue to use our positions merely to influence others. Let’s look at what we’ve been doing until now.

Sellers, unfortunately, have a belief that if by offering the right data, in the right way, to the right demographic, or use the right incentives/push/pitch/influence, that people will buy, or acquiesce, or agree. Yup: I’ve got the important data that you need – now let me tell you about it and explain to you why you need it.

But that premise is false: sales only closes 5% of prospects. And that’s an average. What makes the sales model so unsuccessful? Because it’s based on information push, the needs of the seller to make a sale, and biased conversations meant to convert buyers it ignores the buyer’s underlying values and internal systems issues – the people and policy issues that comprise the status quo and have been in place for some time – that people must manage before they are willing or able to make a purchase.

People don’t require data to make decisions until their internal values/criteria/beliefs have been considered and there is a willingness to buy-in to change. There is no such thing as an emotional decision, even if it looks that way to an outsider. We do not choose to do something that goes against our values, so all behavior is a rendition of our beliefs in action, even thought it might be unconscious. And the sales model ignores this primary piece of the puzzle.

When we create data-driven vehicles for marketing and sales, we have no idea if the mode, the message, the presentation, or the verbiage might go against a buyer’s internal criteria – regardless of whether or not they need our solution. We also have no idea where along the change management/decision path they are in their buy cycle. As a result, we have no idea how our message will be received. That means, we’re either lucky or we’re unlucky. Bad odds: with the best solution in the world, we are dependent on luck for our results. Not to mention that we are missing opportunities to connect with, and serve, another person.

There is a Way to Influence with Integrity

But there is a way to help buyers discover how to make the decisions and manage the change (and every purchase – indeed every decision – is a change management issue) by using their own values.

It’s possible to help buyers:

  1. assemble the appropriate Buying Decision Team members.
  2. define the criteria they must ultimately meet.
  3. explore every opportunity to resolve their issues with familiar resources (like current vendors or by fixing current.
  4. get necessary buy-in from whoever, whatever touches the final solution.
  5. operate with the new solution without facing major disruption.

Buyers need to accomplish all of these things anyway, with us or without us. Sellers sit and wait while they do them. We can continue to wait to make a sale, or become a true Servant Leader and lead our buyers through these decision points. It’s not sales – it’s change management – but it will afford an opportunity to serve, and buyers will fold the seller in to the decision, with no objections.

I’ve developed a new type of question (Facilitative Question) to help people uncover their unconscious criteria to make new decisions, address the necessary systemic change and fallout that a new solution would entail, or re-weight old beliefs. It works alongside my Buying Facilitation® model as a decision facilitation tool to manage change. Questions like:

  • How would you know when it was time to add a new skill set to the ones you’re already using successfully?
  • What would you need to trust to recognize that by facilitating buying decisions and entering the buying journey earlier that you can close more deals and make more money?
  • How would you know that adding a change management skill set would be good for business, and enable a true collaboration of trust and respect?

Until or unless people choose to reconsider all of the elements within their status quo, and can find a way forward that doesn’t disrupt their status quo irreparably, they will do nothing.
Start the buyer/seller relationship by helping buyers manage the idiosyncratic Pre-Sales decision issues they must address internally. Then, once they’ve determined their route, you can sell. It’s a good way to help people get to the very core, the very heart of the matter and create real change. And it gives us the opportunity to truly serve by leading the change.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Finding A Prospect vs. Creating A Prospect

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You place a call to get through to the decision maker.
You call to find someone who needs your product or service.
You try to get an appointment.
You analyze names to prospect based on demographics, company size, job title.

You’re Playing A Numbers Game

You’re trying to find those 10 leads out of 100 that will even consider a conversation in which you can possibly place your solution – and then you’ll close 5 of them if you’re lucky. But a prospect is someone who WILL buy, not someone who SHOULD buy. Unless a buyer is

  • sitting and waiting for your call,
  • seeking an external provider AND need one at that exact moment,
  • already convinced that none of their vendors or colleagues can manage the problem for them,

they will ignore or reject your outreach. You’re seeking a prospect who needs YOUR solution NOW. But what if they are buyers? What if you merely need to help them take the right steps that enable them to buy?

When you’re just calling to ‘get your foot in the door’ or get someone to talk so you can ‘ask a few questions’, or just to ‘educate’ or make an appointment, the only people who will respond are those already seeking a different solution than the one they’ve got in place now – the low hanging fruit. And off you go, merrily trying to convince, manipulate, or influence, finding the best way to get your solution sold. Yet by the time they’ve taken your call, you’re already in a competitive situation.

Those Who Won’t Speak To You Need You

But what about all of the others – the 90%+ who won’t speak to you? Do they not need your solution? Of course they do. But your approach precludes them buying anything. Those who are not speaking with you

  1. don’t want an appointment, or see the need for an appointment, or see the need to do anything different (regardless of whether they have a need or not);
  2. may have a recognized need but are getting push back from other stakeholders and don’t know how to manage whatever issues would face change once a different solution is brought in;
  3. may have a need but have not yet decided to use an external resource rather than a known vendor;
  4. have buying patterns different from your selling patterns and don’t like your approach even though they like/need your solution.

By focusing on finding a prospect who will hear you discuss your solution, willing to spend time to see you, or is willing to offer you data about their status quo, you are eliminating over 90% of those folks who could buy from you (regardless of whether you are selling a service or a product). And keeping yourself in a competitive situation.

People buy something when they cannot resolve a business problem AND they have gotten appropriate buy-in from those folks and departments who will be involved with a new solution (stakeholders – usually unknown to sellers) AND whose buying patterns match a seller’s selling patterns (Remember telemarketing? Their solutions were fine – it was their selling patterns that were problematic.).

People do not buy because you’ve got a great solution or a shining personality. The last thing buyers need is a new solution. They merely want a well-functioning system (culture, company, group). Buyers must have answers to these questions before they can consider bringing in a new solution (regardless of their need, the efficacy of your solution, or your delightful approach):

  • How will folks know that bringing in something new could add to what they are already doing and offer minimal disruption?
  • How can buyers be assured that a new solution will work with their current solution in a way that will cause minimal change management issues?
  • What sort of change issues would come up when your solution is implemented, and how does that effect the group, the company, the stability of the company policies and relationships?
  • How do buyers go about ensuring that everyone who must be on the Buying Decision Team (everyone – even those not obvious) is on board and able to add their 2cents to the discussion?

Needs Aren’t Defined Until All Stakeholders Define Them

Buyers must know the answers to these questions. Their decision to purchase goes well beyond what you might consider a ‘need:’ They need to manage these Pre-Sales problems with you or without you, and the sales model – a solution placement model – does not offer the real consulting expertise that addresses this. And the time it takes them to accomplish this is the length of the sales cycle.

When you first speak with a receptionist or a manager, they have no idea what the full extent of, or how to manage, these internal change and buy-in issues. Nor can they understand the parameters of their need: a the need can’t be defined until all relevant stakeholders define it.

To get in earlier, to become a real Trusted Advisor, to help buyers facilitate all of their necessary Pre Sales buy-in/change management issues and help them down the path that leads to purchasing your solution, add a new job to your sales activity: help buyers recognize and manage all of the internal issues they must address. Because until or unless they do, they will take no action to do anything different.

I’ve developed a model called Buying Facilitation® that works with the sales model to first find the exact right prospects and facilitate their Pre-Sales activities on your first call. Instead of seeking the low-hanging fruit – trying to find prospects at the moment they are ready or think they have defined their need – start off by helping prospects determine what excellence will look like and how to get their entire Buying Decision Team assembled. Remember: they won’t even understand the full extent of their needs until they do. So help them. It’s not about needs. It’s not about your solution. It’s about finding the prospects who WILL buy, rather than those you think SHOULD buy.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]