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Sharon Drew Morgen
Facilitating Your Prospect's Discovery Process
by Sharon Drew Morgen
Our job is to help our clients find their best answers. We work hard at understanding what they need, what will solve the problem. We study the problem and all of its ramifications, call a colleague or two to discuss it fully, and come up with a solution that we think will fix the problem. We understand it's our job to offer the support and information that will lead the customer to his/her best solution.
Sometimes it's a piece of cake: it all works just as it should. The client agrees, rallies internal support, and helps get our ideas and solutions to meld with theirs, and helps us get the solution implemented. We collaborate over time. Change happens. |
But sometimes, it doesn't work at all: the client does something different than what was discussed; or doesn't call us back; or gets annoyed; or comes up with some internal mayhem that sabotages all the work we've done.
At those times, what stops clients from listening to us? Heeding our advice? Why do some clients stop calling rather than continue using us for ongoing projects? And just where do they find all of those new staff and stakeholders who suddenly offer input that renders our solution obsolete?
What's happening? Take your pick:- you didn't get systemic buy-in and work only with the identified client and his/her team;
- you delivered your sage advice using your favored communication patterns, without matching your client's patterns;
- you based your solution on what might indeed be the correct, rational thing to do but based it solely on data.
What sometimes happens is that we are brought in to clean up a piece of a much bigger pie. We are presented with facts, work with the facts, and use the facts as the basis from which to move forward. But sometimes the client doesn't initially grasp the far-reaching effects of what our solution would do to their cultural norms and beliefs and values. They didn't realize until 'too late' the assault our solution would produce on the entire organizational system, on specific egos or historic relationships, not to mention future ones. They didn't appreciate what havoc 'change' would deliver.
Selling vs Facilitating
Historically, we have used the information - data, content, facts and details - of the presenting problem as the basis on which to consider solution possibilities. However, 'information' is not the vehicle with which to solve problems. We can have all the data the world about a client problem, but unless the client understands how the problem resides within its culture, norms, beliefs, and systems, they don't have the ability to create a solution.
By using information as the basis upon which to help clients find answers, we are forsaking our pivotal roles as decision facilitators - a job that not only facilitates discovery, but also assumes responsibility to direct clients toward amassing, and making sense of, all of the necessary cultural criteria that goes into a congruent outcome.
When we do not fully comprehend that our role is that of guide, and when we try to have answers, what we end up doing is sales job - selling the client on our solution. We then end up using our selling patterns - how we position our conclusion - rather than supporting the buyer's buying patterns - the unique way any protected culture will unite to solve their problems. In other words, we're run the risk of doing it 'our way' rather than teach the client how to meet the standards and expectations that her environment embraces.
Let's spend some time looking at the differences between 'selling' a client on our ideas, or facilitating them in discovering the parameters of their solution:
The reality is, buyer's buy (ideas or products) only when they clearly recognize that what they are doing isn't working, AND when they can't fix the problem themselves, AND when the solution fits into their cultural norms comfortably. Period.
So long as we are operating out of our beliefs, our information, or our favored communication patterns (not to mention our need to be right), we will burn up those clients who do not match the way we view their world.
The trick is to teach the client how to make decisions in his own world, based on the criteria that exist in his unique culture, using our expertise as one would use a lightening rod, to illuminate the places where the answers might lie. The hard part, as a consultant and sales person, is to truly understand that we indeed don't have the answers, can't create a solution, and are hired just to be a facilitator.
I once did a training job at a large health-care supplier. The job was problematic, in that we were doing a pilot project that would have high visibility and major ramifications on their bottom line and on the way they ran their sales organization. I spent a huge amount of time with the senior people prior to the program, gathering information, creating relationships, walking them through the types of changes that would occur, and got 'buy-in' to make the changes.
When I implemented the program, and the results were just as expected, the lid was blown off the organization:
- The people I trained became six times more successful than their colleagues. How could they pay the course participants differently than their colleagues?
- The success of the project led to far fewer face-to-face visits with an astronomically high closing ratio (7% for the old method, 96% for Buying Facilitation) as sellers were only going to those folks who wanted to buy. As a result, the sellers were in the field less and on the phones more. Why were they now 'telesales' folks rather than 'true' sales people who made more face-to-face visits than phone visits?
- The course participants needed continued practice with their new skills. Who would supervise these new skills?
- The course participants ended up with mountains of additional paperwork due to their increased activity. Why did this group deserve additional administrative support when the rest of the staff had been asking for additional help for years?
There was such loud political fall-out that the success we garnered was moot. Within 2 months the group I trained was redeployed, rather than working toward finding a way to help these folks fit into the larger culture - not to mention finding a way to change the larger culture. Oh. They had a 600% increase in sales in one month!
Imagine the amount of avoidance of change and confusion it had to take to renounce a 600% increase in their sales rather than change their system!
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Sharon Drew Morgen is the author of several books, including The Competitive Advantage: Helping Buyers Buy, Selling with Integrity, and Sales on the Line. She is an international entrepreneur, speaker and sales trainer. Her clients include IBM, KPMG, and DuPont. She can be contacted at sdm@austin.rr.com.
To find more information on her latest book—Buying Facilitation(R): The New Way to Sell That Influences and Expands Decisions—and to reflect on your sales strategy, click here. |
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