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Sharon Drew Morgen Articles

Written by: Sharon Drew Morgen

An Intelligent Contact Sheet - Click To Read Article
The field of marketing automation would like to get the right data, at the right time, to prospects who sign up on contact sheets. But with the available technology, it’s not possible.

First Contact: What to Do, Why, and How to Get Better Results - Click To Read Article
Depending on the selling approach you're using, you are closing between .6% - 7% , regardless of size of solution or industry. These numbers are far lower than they need to be: so long as your primary focus is on making a sale and you focus on needs assessment and solution choice (factors which are the buyer's final considerations), and ignore the change management issues buyers must handle before they choose a solution, you are delaying a close by a factor of 8.

9 Sales Steps That Influence a Buying Decision - Click To Read Article
The steps of a buying decision differ from the steps of a sale. The sales model has no way to influence the private decisions and buy-in issues that buyers must address before they can buy.

Why Your Sales Cycle is So Long (Hint: It’s Not About Your Solution) - Click To Read Article
Do you know why it takes so long for a buyer to buy? If the buyer knows they have a need, and they like you and your solution, shouldn’t it be easy?

The Differences Between the Solution Sale and the Buying Decision: Let’s Go to a Wedding - Click To Read Article
Let’s say you were going to a wedding. You had the gift, decided on the outfit, picked a time to leave to get there on time, decided to use your car rather than you’re spouse’s, because it was more comfortable. Then you had to plug in the directions to your trusty GPS system.

How Much Time Do Sales People Waste? - Click To Read Article
As sellers, we waste over 90% of our time. We need to find prospects, get them bought-in to the possibility of using our solution, get them what they need to understand our solution and how it might fit, get past gatekeepers, manage objections, get to the right people who will know how to buy us, and wait. And then, we only close a small fraction.

How does social networking help make the sale? - Click To Read Article
With automatic ‘trust' built in - we're sort of family once we are connected - our conversations seem to flow smoothly: we've used Facebook, the net, and Twitter to discover who the other is, have determined whether and how we want to connect, what we can offer each other, and how to prepare. An off-handed comment about the person's upcoming wedding, or a congratulatory mention of their new business venture compounds the trust.

You think know your buyer. You don’t. - Click To Read Article
Sales folks are taught to have a certain amount of curiosity. But what, exactly, are you curious about?

Wait until the Buying Decision Team is in place to visit or pitch - Click To Read Article
If you attempt to get meetings just to ‘get in front of’ a prospect (assuming that your solution will rule the day); if you present to whichever prospects will agree to see you; if you pitch when the buyer doesn’t have all of their ducks in a row, you’re not only wasting your breath, but potentially losing a sale.

Where does selling begin? Activate the buying journey immediately - Click To Read Article
Where does selling begin? Why do we begin a buyer conversation by focusing on finding needs? What are we gaining/losing by starting there?

Selling with Integrity - Click To Read Article
What, exactly, is selling with integrity? Is it about creating great solutions that make a difference in companies and lives? Or respecting and serving our prospects and clients and employees?

What is a Seller's Priority? - Click To Read Article
As a seller, what's your job? Are you working to close a sale? Feed your family? Continue living in the style you're accustomed to? Be the best? Make a name for yourself? Keep your job? Meet your quota? Your ego?

12 Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Don\'t Buy - Click To Read Article
Do you sit and wait for your buyer’s to close? They need your solution. They like you. They are OK with the price. What’s going on?

Don't make your issue the customer's problem - Click To Read Article
I use the USPO to pick up items people buy from my on-line store. It’s a simple process: I push a few buttons, and the package is scheduled to be picked up at my front door in about 3 minutes or less.

Marketing Automation can Facilitate the Entire Buying Decision Path - Click To Read Article
In order to sell more when using marketing automation technology, we need to enter the buyer’s decision path far earlier.

Do You Really Understand How Your Buyers Buy? - Click To Read Article
For decades, salespeople scrunched their faces when I mentioned "how buyers buy". I heard comments like: "I know what they need." or "I understand exactly how they buy: price, price, price." But sellers only close 7% of their prospects (and far, far less if using marketing automation).

A Buying Decision is a Change Management Problem - Click To Read Article
The sales model focuses on needs assessment and solution placement. Buying is a change management activity. They are two different activities, done at two different – and opposite – points along the buying decision journey.

Does the sales model do what we need it to do? - Click To Read Article
Sales has been around since the Serpent convinced Eve to eat the apple. And, unfortunately, the goals have remained pretty much the same ever since.

9 Easy Ways to Get Your Brand Recognized - Click To Read Article
To get clients, you either reach out to them directly, or have them find you. Here are a few ways to help clients find you.

Solution Selection: do we know how buyers choose one solution over another? - Click To Read Article
Your solution matches the buyer's need perfectly. You like them, they like you, you've had coffee/a meal/a powerful meeting or two. They talk about implementation and how they need to add your other product next year. And then they buy from someone else. Or not at all.

Forecasting Closed Sales: How You Will Know When a Buyer Will Close - Click To Read Article
As a sales manager, do you forecast sales that will close when your sales folks tell you they'll close? As a sales professional, do you forecast which sales will close when your contact tells you they'll be ready? Or when it seems to you they'll be ready? How accurate have you been with your predictions?

When Do Buyers Buy? - Click To Read Article
Buyers can't buy until all of the people, policies, market drivers, partners and historic choices that maintain their status quo have bought in to, and added their voices to, the changes that will result when they make a purchase. The time it takes them to manage this change is the length of the sales cycle. Your solution cannot be chosen until it's all figured out.

"My Job is to Start a Conversation" - Click To Read Article
I recently contacted a man who runs a marketing automation company, thinking there might be areas of potential partnership. And while he agreed with my ideas about helping manage the buying decision journey, his baseline business beliefs were well out of the range of mine. In fact, it was fascinating to see how the concept "helping buyers buy" - my trademark for decades - has become a battle cry for the sales industry.

Who’s in the meeting – and who’s not? - Click To Read Article
So many sales folks are targeting ‘appointments’ these days. I wonder if you know who actually is in attendance. And who isn’t but should be. As you enter your meeting, do you know what percent of the entire Buying Decision Team is there? What weight your contact has on the full Buying Decision Team?

Your Prospects Aren't in Pain - Click To Read Article
When I hear sellers say that buyers have 'pain' I ask how long it would take them to get to the hospital with a broken arm. "Immediately." Why? Because they're in pain. But buyers don't buy 'immediately' and have had their problem for a period of time.

Compensating Our Sales Folks - Click To Read Article
Our continued fascination with making an appointment as a precursor to making a sale is based on the belief that a buyer will buy based on the strength of the presentation. And although we get extremely low closing rates, we continue to do it and often throw more sellers at the problem, doing the same activity. That’s the definition of insanity!

Content Marketing: Is It Helping You Buy Me? - Click To Read Article
'Turn prospects into buyers with content marketing.' 'Create opt-in permission to deliver content through email using the drip/nurture system.' 'Deliver content to develop trust and authority.' What, exactly, do these claims mean? And how is this different from a pitch, or presentation, or a great blog or website?

The new relationship between sales and marketing: it’s harder for the sales folks - Click To Read Article
Historically, sellers have been the one touching the buyer as marketers developed the brand awareness and hopefully brought buyers in - to be aware of the brand and trust it (or have some sort of mental relationship with it). Marketing has never been hands-on the way that sellers were when they made cold calls or went to client sites to make presentations. Sellers worked more with the buyer; marketers worked more with the solution, the brand, and the general demograph of possible buyers.

You have a buying process problem, not a selling problem - Click To Read Article
You know your solution. You understand your buyer's need. You know how to sell. So why aren't you selling more? Why aren't prospects closing more?

The Steps to Buying: remembering the human element - Click To Read Article
There are two distinct categories involving buying decisions: 1. the behind-the-scenes issues buyers must manage internally to get stakeholder buy-in for change and for going outside their status quo for a solution; 2. the solution-choice issues.

Resistance to change: inexplicable, irrational, and real - Click To Read Article
When it's time for us to change, we must make sure that we somehow integrate the new with the decisions and behaviors we've already created and maintain daily. Until or unless we are able to figure out how to reconfigure our rules and roles and relationship and ego issues, we will take no action at all - even if it means sticking with something that's less than successful. That's right: even with a 7% closing ratio, many many sales professionals would prefer to continue doing what they are doing rather than change and mess up what they have grown accustomed to and have rationalized and internalized.

He’s in a Meeting – or is he? Working with Gatekeepers - Click To Read Article
When I make cold calls I ask the receptionist to direct me to the person's assistant as she'll redirect me to the appropriate person, get me an appointment to speak with the original person, or tell me how best to move forward. The PA of a high level person is always smart, savvy in the ways the corporation runs, and knows what's going on throughout the organization. Not to mention they know exactly who to bring in and who to leave out: that's their job.

What’s the buyer’s responsibility? - Click To Read Article
I was going to call one of my books “I’d close more sales if it weren’t for the buyer” thinking that people would laugh at the silliness. But when I got an immediate standing ovation from 600 people when I said this, I realized that sales people believed it, ridiculous though it is. It’s like saying I’d have had a better birth if it weren’t for my mother.

All Decisions Involve Change Management: an insurance case study - Click To Read Article
Without buy-in, nothing changes. If the group or person deemed change necessary, it would have happened already. So whatever state the status quo is in is the preferred state: no matter what you think is wrong, or how your wonderful solution would make it better, it ain’t going to happen unless the status quo is willing to change. And change means change management is necessary.

Solutions are meaningless without Buy-In - Click To Read Article
Recently I was part of an Ideation session in which an insurance company wanted web ideas to better serve their customers. Ideally, they'd end up with functionality that members would find helpful in their health care decisions, offer great customer service through added benefits, and keep them involved with the agency. What an amazing experience helping the insurance company serve their members. The agency set up some extremely creative exercises and group planning that allowed creative ideas to flow and soar. People gave their best, served the client and each other, with great respect and passion. Fun, creative, and successful. Or so it seemed.

Heroines - Click To Read Article
We love our moms. Especially as adults, and especially as parents ourselves. It wasn’t until I became a parent that I ‘got’ what my mom must have gone through with me. We’re so narcissistic as children and young adults it’s difficult to get perspective, or to understand the courage it takes to raise children.

The Definition Game: name that concept - Click To Read Article
I had so much fun with you all in April with my Steps to a Sales Call contest that I'm going to run another one. This time I'd like you to use your own words to define my concepts re helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decision issues. I'd like to either 1. use your definitions in addition to the ones I use, 2. help you correct your mis-perceptions, or 3. redefine terms the way you're comfortable using them.

How not to make a prospecting call - Click To Read Article
A woman from Australia recently called me on a cold call. She started by calling me ‘Sharon.' For those of you who know me, I refer to myself as Sharon Drew. Folks who call me ‘Sharon' are either making a cold call, or haven't read my books or blogs. I have a long history with this problem, so playfully said, "Ah. You don't know me well. I call myself Sharon Drew and I use both names." [Note: for those of you who study Buying Facilitation® I suggest you begin calls with strangers by giving your own name, saying it's a 'sales call' and then asking who you are speaking with, even though you may have a name in front of you.]

The Steps of a Sale: from the buying decision to the close - Click To Read Article
Here are the steps in selling with Buying Facilitation® at the front end. The first phase helps decisions get made to promote buy-in, change, and recognition of what needs to be addressed. We usually wait for buyers to do this, but now we can help. Have a look at the steps, and see how you can add them to what you’re doing.

Two Types of Decisions: Buy-IN, and BuyING - Click To Read Article
Recently someone told me that Buying Facilitation® is an old concept, that its been written about in books since sales books have been written, and that he's been helping buyer's buy for decades. Of course he has, except that he, like the entire sales field, has a paltry success rate - certainly under 10%. Why? If the seller understands the need, has the right solution, and has a great relationship, what's stopping the buyer from buying as often as they should? Why isn't the buyer deciding on the obvious solution?

Can a Techie Ever Understand a Customer? - Click To Read Article
At the recent ProductCamp in Austin, I heard a well-respected researcher make the following comment: ‘Techies will never understand customers.' That's quite a statement. And it's false. I used to run a tech company. We employed 48 techies, so I guess I can qualify as knowing a bit how they think. As they began doing their work as project managers, programmers, and systems designers, I heard them frequently say: "Customers are stupid. They tell me what they want, and then when I give it to them they don't want it."

We Can’t Understand Customers - Click To Read Article
I often hear sales, marketing, and change management folks talking about ‘understanding the customer.’ But what, exactly, does that mean? On the face of it, it’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s vital to ‘understand the customer.’ But it’s not so simple as just ‘understanding’ as there are so many facets to this. I must admit that when I hear folks using the term “understanding the customer’, it sounds to me as if they are seeking to ‘understand’ so they can sell or influence – using the act of understanding as part of a sales cycle.

Buying Facilitation® vs. buyer facilitation - Click To Read Article
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 issues before a purchase happens.

Buying Facilitation® and Sales: the dynamic duo - Click To Read Article
Sales is a great model for understanding need, discovering problems, and introducing/placing solutions. Buying Facilitation® is a great model for helping buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes political and relationship issues that must achieve buy-in before they get consensus to purchase a solution – you know, that mysterious stuff buyers go through privately while we sit and wait for them to buy. By using both two models consecutively, selling and buying becomes a very different experience than the one we are accustomed to: the timing is different, the skills are different, the outcomes are different, the relationship is different and the competitive and money factors fade away.

The Job of Sales Must Expand - Click To Read Article
Sales is a needs assessment-problem discovery/solution placement model. We use relationships and industry knowledge and well-conceived product data to align with prospects to help influence them to choose us. Now, with technology, we have even more capability to offer product data and find our what’s happening with the buyer. The internet, e-marketing, webinars, websites, are offering buyers whatever data they may need to choose. With our fabulous technology, we can track them, cookie them, send them stuff, entice them with blog posts. But at the end of the day, until or unless they make a purchase, we’ve done it all for naught.

MONEY OBJECTIONS: IT'S NEVER ABOUT THE MONEY - Click To Read Article
After having several conversations with a new prospect and his team, we all decided to move forward and get them trained in Buying Facilitation. As per our agreement, I wrote up a contract and sent it out to “Joe”. Then I got an email from him saying he needed to put the program on hold for six months at least, so that his new hires could prove their value and start earning money.

Decisions Are Never Emotional - Click To Read Article
Imagine if instead of believing that unexpected decisions are emotional, we assume they have a very specific reason, even if we don’t understand or agree. Then what? Is it just easier to believe the other person to be irrational? Do you remember, back in the day, when docs said that women suffering from PMS were hysterical and they needed to have a hysterectomy (that’s where the word ‘hysterical’ comes from btw)? They didn’t understand the physiology underlying the physical issues, and relegated the problem to emotions.

Facilitating Buying Decisions: a definition - Click To Read Article
Recently, I’ve noticed many folks using the term ‘facilitating buying decisions.’ First, let me state that we have a program by that title, that can be licensed to train in companies. It’s a very fun program, teaching sellers how to sit in a buyer’s seat and learn every aspect of how they choose vendors and solutions. Learners not only learn how their buyer’s buy, but I teach them the 6 most powerful Facilitative Questions to help buyers make a decision in their favor. Here’s a preview of one of the questions: How would you and your Buying Decision Team know when it was time to bring in an additional resource that will fit with the ones you’re currently using?

Make The Phone Your Best Friend - Click To Read Article
Do you believe that to close a sale you must ‘get in front of prospects?’ Why? Really. Have you ever asked yourself why? Do you tell yourself that you MUST have that eye contact? That ‘face-to-face’ juice? Do you tell yourself that if you’re not in the field, you’re not selling?

Get Onto The Buying Decision Team On The First Call - Click To Read Article
When I tell sales folks their sales cycle is double what it should be, they assume I’m lying. But I’m not. I’m just using a different model than sales to being my client contact: Given that the typical sales model builds in time delays and leaves the seller out of the behind-the-scenes discussions going on, there is no way to get onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call.

The Basis of Sales Has Remained Stagnant - Click To Read Article
Did I get your attention? Good. Because I’m serious. Most of you would laugh, tell me I’m wrong, that the sales model has been shifting and that the Internet has ‘changed everything.’ But what, exactly, has it changed? I believe that basically, sales has not changed since the beginning. Sure, the bells and whistles have changed: it’s far, far easier to get leads and interest; it’s much simpler to get your message out; it’s much quicker to find out whatever you need to find out about prospects. It seems to appear as if buyer’s buying decisions are different (they aren’t, we just know more). But all of this leads to… leads to what?

The Heart of Business - Click To Read Article
For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. There seem to be different names for it these days: the heart of business, corporate social responsibility, conscious capitalism, patient capitalism, bringing the heart to work. What it means, underneath all of the words, is that we recognize that we have a responsibility to care about each other, and the earth, and run our businesses in a way that end up with a net plus - not just increased profit.

Lead Gen Isn't Enough - Click To Read Article
Do you spend a lot of time collecting names that might be prospects? Do you spend a lot of money learning how to follow prospects on line, so you can guess where they are in the decision making process? Has all of this activity substantially increased your ROI? What you're forgetting - or ignoring - is that no matter what information the buyer needs, or how often they (and their colleagues) visit your site, or how deftly follow their activity with your ability to track ‘Digital Body Language,' at the end of the day, you will not be there when they sit down to decide.

Prospects Aren't Really Prospects - Click To Read Article
Sales has a goal: find a prospect with a need and sell a solution. You can call it anything you want, use all of the fancy terms about serving your client, be a Trusted Advisor or a Relationship Manager, do whatever you can to understand need and make nice. But at the end of the day, your job as a seller is to place your solution. Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume - and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry - that when we notice a ‘need' that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.' Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption.

Turning A 'No' Into A 'Yes' - Click To Read Article
I recently experienced a very clear example of Buying Facilitation®, when i used it to turn a failed buying situation into a purchase. I tell a shortened version of this story in my new book, Dirty Little Secrets; it bears repeating during this economic confusion when buyers are having difficulty getting to ‘yes’. I was at a client site running a Buying Facilitation® training. A part of the training includes real-time calls to clients prospects. In this situation, my client had requested that the team listen to me on a call first, so they could hear what BF actually sounded like real-time. They set up a phone meeting between me and a prospect who had called recently to say “Sorry. We won’t be purchasing your product,” after one year of 3 sales visits and 3 product trials.

The Future of Sales - Click To Read Article
For centuries, the sales model has been focused on placing a solution. Given the complexity of business these days, having the right solution to manage a ‘need’ is not enough to help buyers choose your solution. Buyers live in a very complex world now. With global stakeholders, economic downturns, enlarged decision teams, and an almost limitless number of options – all available at the drop of a hat – competition is far more complex than being addressed by us having a good solution and giving great service. And as a result, we’re having greater difficulty closing sales. We’d like to think it’s ‘the economy, stupid.’ But in reality, the problem is more complex.

Be The GPS For Your Buyer - Click To Read Article
Buyers have two identifiable responsibilities: * maneuver through their internal, behind-the-scenes buy-in issues to ensure a trouble-free change process, and * choose a solution that will address their stakeholder's criteria for systems excellence while maintaining the integrity of the system. Sales addresses one of these jobs, but not the other. In fact, we've never been taught the skills to help with the off-line issues buyers address: as per the explanations and skills offered in my new book Dirty Little Secrets, helping buyers maneuver through their off-line buy-in issues requires a wholly different skill set.

Why Sales Fail - Click To Read Article
Are your sales cycles longer than necessary? Are you losing business to the competition when you shouldn’t be? Are you having trouble differentiating yourself? Are you getting price objections when your product is clearly superior? If you face any of the above, it’s because you are using sales methods.

Why Open Questions Don't Work - Click To Read Article
For decades, if not centuries, we’ve written books about, lectured about, and trained about, the virtues of Open Questions. I’m here to denounce the myth that they are good in all instances: I actually believe they are used most effectively at the back end of the selling/buying cycle and have no role to play in the buying decision activity that occurs before buyers make their solution choice.

THE VENDOR PROBLEM: Managing Buy-in From The Outside - Click To Read Article
I don't know about what it's like for you as a vendor. But for me, it's become a hard place to be. This fact was brought home to me lately after spending the better part of a year working toward securing a contract for training a pilot in a large multinational, and needing to get a complex buying decision from different levels of managers who were being run ragged in their normal business lives.

SITES AND TESTIMONIALS: Turning Referrals Into Business On The Net - Click To Read Article
We all gather referrals/recommendations/testimonials in the hopes that they will sway the opinion of others and help us get business. But how do we know what a prospect needs to hear in order to decide in our favor? Why do we assume that if we have a ‘good’ referral, it will meet a prospect’s criteria to choose us? Indeed, how do we know what will help our buyers buy? And, for the sake of this essay, how do we get the right material onto our sites?

Selling In A Gloomy Economy - Click To Read Article
What is the difference between selling in a robust economy and selling in a failing economy? A lot. But not what you think. * Your product is the same * Your pitch/presentation is the same * The buyer’s need is the same What’s different is the decision making process the buyers need to go through. Do they have a problem that needs to be resolved now, and the economy has mitigated the types of solutions they seek? Do they have a problem that can be fixed with a partial, cheaper solution, or with internal resources that can be modified to create a solution? Do they wait until…. until they have some belief that their business won’t be at risk?

Sales 2.0: 5 Things You Shouldn't Expect - Click To Read Article
Here's the good news: Sales 2.0 is good for driving people to you. By simply offering a webinar, a free e-book, a White Paper, or some incentive, you can get folks to your site. If your material is good enough, they will Twitter about you, link to your site, write you up on their blog. You can gather their data, have some sort of passive or active follow up, use the names on an opt-in list, and get hundreds or thousands of new names on your database. If you want new names and a large database, Sales 2.0 is for you. I know many, many marketers pouring their hearts out to develop wonderful content to send out as bait to attract attention. And it works: after your event, you can follow people up with an email, or hire a telephone sales group to follow up with a phone call. Allegedly, SalesGenius has a dedicated phon

PITCHING TOO SOON: how I got it wrong - Click To Read Article
I recently received notices of multiple purchases from the same man. On one form, he completed a questionnaire saying he was considering using some of the thinking within my Buying Facilitation Method® in a sales training program he was designing.

Marketing: New Ideas For A New Market - Click To Read Article
Now that we are all famous, what happens when we all have access and input to the same data? How do we find our target markets? And how does marketing change given our murky demographics? I have answers, and I’ll begin by being a bit provocative: information doesn’t teach someone how to make a decision. Indeed, I believe that ‘information’ is useful only when people have already decided they are actively seeking a new solution. It’s certainly useless as a means to convince someone to do something they weren’t going to do, don’t believe in, don’t understand, or who have people and policy hurdles that created a status quo that needs collaborative decisions and systems change to move forward.

Face-To-Face Vs. Phone Sales: A Case Study - Click To Read Article
I recently was halfway around the world, meeting a new business partner, and found myself in the midst of a seller’s nightmare: I had to do an in-person prospecting call on one of the world’s largest banks, with an unfamiliar business partner, with no idea of the reason behind the cold call, or the people who would be there. When I was picked up from the airport I was told of this meeting, and there was no one available to discuss anything with me until we were at the client site. Nightmare.

DECISION MAKING: How, Exactly, Do We Decide? - Click To Read Article
Columbia University is just beginning scientific experiments on my theories of how decisions actually get made, and how, or if, decisions can be influenced. I contend that there is a specific process the brain uses to make decisions, and this can be influenced by sequentially directing the brain to different sub/unconscious criteria.

Customers Don’t Know How To Buy – Or Do They? - Click To Read Article
A friend recently returned from the recent Sales 2.0 conference and told me of a complaint she heard several times from attendees: “Customers don’t know how to buy.” This, said by sellers blaming buyers for not behaving as sellers would prefer. Or not responding appropriately to seller’s selling patterns.

Cold Calling Works - And It's Fun! - Click To Read Article
I’m here to tell you that cold calling can be one of the most effective ways to meet new prospects. And a whole lotta fun. I know, I know. Most sellers eschew cold calling, preferring instead to network, get referrals, golf, meet face-to-face. Did you ever ask yourself why?

Buying Decisions: What Happens Behind-The-Scenes - Click To Read Article
For some reason, it's very difficult for sales people to think beyond 'need' and 'solution:' We tend to think that because the buyer's need matches our solution, and because we're professionals who 'care,' the only thing buyers need to do is choose our solution. But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our favor. We certainly would not lose as many sales as we do. The problem is that the buying decision is so, so much more complex than we can imagine as we stand on the outside looking in. Sales mysteriously treats an Identified Problem (my word for 'need') as if it were an isolated event. But it's not. There are ramifications to any change, and the ramifications are ones only buyers can see from the inside and we will never be privy to.





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