Guest Blogger Sharon Drew Morgen – HELPING BUYERS DECIDE

We have a new guest blogger in the ranks and while our worlds are different, her words ring true throughout the sales world.

One of the aims in sales, lately, is to help buyers buy. Unfortunately, we in sales continue to focus on selling a solution. And when we say we want to ‘help buyers buy’ that means we want to make it easier for them to make a purchasing decision and choose our solution.

But sales treats a need as if it were an isolated event. We haven’t been trained to realize that ‘needs’ arise in our buyer’s environments as part of a tangle of other issues that are going on. So a team building program is necessitated by a merger, by team members from disparate cultures joining together, by folks being laid off, by people being resentful they have been given new jobs, etc. Until buyers either resolve or garner buy-in from, the internal issues that necessitated the ‘need’ and hold it in place daily, they cannot bring in a solution without disrupting the other elements. And the time it takes them to do that is the length of the sales cycle.

Sellers must now help buyers manage ALL of the internal issues going on that have created and maintain the ‘need’ to begin with – not just gather info about the details immediately surrounding the problem. Especially in this economy where clients are risk-averse; their ‘need’ is that they can’t make a decision in a risk-averse environment, no matter how large, painful, or costly their Identified Problem. If we enter as true servant leaders, we can lead them through all of the decisions they need to make en route to excellence, and get onto their buying decision teams.

What’s so hard for us to understand is that the Identified Problem that our solution can resolve is a part of a larger system, and held in place daily by work-arounds. So the ‘need’ is actually part of the definition of the buyer’s system, not something separate. For example: a grossly overweight person buys bigger clothes, can’t fathom going to the gym until he loses some weight because he’s embarrassed, doesn’t go out as much cuz it’s hard to get around, etc.What is the Identified Problem here? All of it – although only ‘overweight’ shows up as the need.  So a seller who tried to ’sell’ to the need of weight loss, would have a whole system that had to be reconfigured before any part of the system would be willing to change. Hence, a gym membership would last a week. And we wouldn’t be truly serving our buyer.

What’s missing in the sales model is the need for the buyer – not the seller – to manage ALL of the people, places, things, thoughts, assumptions, etc that have created the status quo so it ends up imperfect. Unfortunately, since sellers don’t live ‘inside’ with the buyer, we can’t understand all of the biases, historic relationships and rules, etc. and our solution only supports a piece of the entire problem. But we can lead them through their decision factors that will help them change without harming the system. Remember that the integrity of the system is sacrosanct.

We must help buyers buy now. To do that, we must help them decide.

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