THE LENGTHENING SALES CYCLE:
WHY IT IS HAPPENING, AND HOW TO FIX IT.

by Sharon Drew Morgen

Sales cycles have gotten approximately 50% lengthier over the past two years. This is a direct result of the increased complexity of the buyer's buying decision. In this essay, I'm going to introduce you to a way to mitigate this problem. But first let's see how the problem came into being.

Here's what's changed in our buyer's companies:

1. buying environments now include additional business partners, initiatives, and rules that they did not have to account for before now;
2. the economy is in a perplexing transition, and most companies are either losing market share, or sitting on cash because they can't decide whether to spend or save;
3. the global marketplace and availability of products makes competition fierce and product choice confusing.

Indeed, buyers don't know what – or who - their buying decisions must include, they don't know whether or when to spend money, and they don't know which product to choose.

As a result, here's what's been happening recently when conventional sales methods are used:

1. buyers hear a similar pitch from several vendors;
2. all else seeming equal, buyers will buy on price;
3. buyers will attempt to fix problems themselves before going outside to find a new product or vendor;
4. before deciding on a new product or vendor, buyers will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to manage internal change issues and seek to design a solution to maintain internal equilibrium.
5. buyers will spend an inordinate amount of time making spending decisions and vendor choices to make sure they manage all of the confusion in 1-4.

DO YOU WANT TO SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY?
The thrust of current sales methods remains 'information': if you pitch/present or market your product in the most advantageous way (product information), if the client clearly sees they have a problem that needs to be fixed (problem information), if the web design and marketing materials and brand are innovative and eye-catching (product information), if you are a true professional and can do a cogent needs analysis and implementation inventory (information gathering), the buyer should find it simple to choose you.

But buyers do not make purchasing decisions based on information. We know this because there is no direct line between how well you present and pitch, and when and how and if buyers buy.

When I used conventional sales tools, I was often disappointed when my buyer didn't buy after I did a fabulous pitch or presentation, or had a wonderful, warm, respectful relationship with my prospect, or had a good product that truly answered their business needs. I used to rack my brain thinking I'd done something wrong. Then I just called them a jerk – or worse. I really had no way to know who would show up and buy, even though I thought I had a reasonable handle on my 'pipeline. '

Now that I understand the full range of the issues, I know why it was so confusing to me: I didn't understand the need for clients to recognize all the elements of their unique situation, prior to making a buying decision. I thought my product and my selling capability would rule the day. I thought that if I could plainly see a need, and help my buyer recognize the need and how my product would resolve it, that they would know to buy. But, alas, that was only true sometimes.

I now realize that there are actually two phases to the sales process, and selling is the second phase. The first phase – Stage One - is the buyer's internal process that assembles and resolves all relevant company (or personal) elements so change can occur without causing disruption. Buyers must address this stage before they settle on a product or vendors. Stage Two is the buyer's choice of a solution that resolves the identified problem.

Indeed, each stage requires different skills: Stage One requires the buyer to become an observer to her own culture/environment and truly see, with new eyes, where she is at and what's missing from the entire landscape. Then she has to recognize how the internal elements need to be managed during the change process to avoid chaos when a new product or vendor comes in.

It is only when these issues are managed that the buyer will know what a solution must entail. Stage Two is the sales process that you're already familiar with.

R.I.P.P.
Let's examine the internal issues within Stage One of the buying process – the unique place where buyers decide from, and where the sales process has not been able to easily influence.

There are actually four components to a buyer's buying environment: Relationships, Interventions, Policies, and People. And sadly, because of the potential complexity of these components, and the idiosyncratic nature of them, we (as sellers) will never understand the way these elements influence the buying process.

But because we are outsiders who can see the broad overview of a buyer's needs, we can help the buyer understand the weighing of these issues, offer her the means to take a unique, broad perspective, and be a true consultant. Facilitative questions help position a buyer's thinking to make it possible for them to have an inclusive vision of all important ingredients that need to be managed. Questions such as: ‘What has stopped you from managing that until now?' Or ‘How does your management team plan on addressing that so they can be a part of the process?'

These types of questions – and the buyer's commensurate ability to discover their own answers quickly - will teach your buyer how to make a quicker buying decision: she'll be able to amass all of the thinking that needs to go into her unique change process.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are the four elements that each Stage One buying environment contains:

RELATIONSHIPS: buyers have several external relationships that they need to manage: vendors, stakeholders, and partners, to name three.

INTERVENTIONS: the outside influence that buyers have little control over: boards, media, global conditions, brand integrity, politics.

PEOPLE: includes highly personal, idiosyncratic and deeply held criteria: roles, job descriptions, management styles, beliefs/values, communication styles.

POLICIES: the structure it all operates within: rules, history, norms, goals, time frames, initiatives.

Note: not only will we not know the relevance any of these elements play within the buyer's buying decision, they will not immediately know the relevance of these elements. And hence the strength of your collaboration. Between the two of you, you will have the broad view and the narrow, the long view and the short. By the time you're done, you're in a collaboration process and there is no discussion around choosing a different vendor.

Once, one of my clients refused to respond to an RFP, knowing they were being used as a second bidder to an already-chosen vendor. What they did instead was send in a list of Facilitative questions – questions like: ‘How do you plan on organizing the communications among your global managers so when they face change issues they'll have appropriate access to each other?'

The prospect didn't have ready answers, but recognized they needed to get answers before they'd be successful (remember: these are NOT data-gathering questions for the seller, but questions based on supporting buyers in discovering their own answers.)

Once the prospect realized their new vendor couldn't answer the questions either, they fired the new vendor 6 weeks in to a multi-million dollar consultancy, and hired my client who ‘obviously' understood the real problems. No proposal was even necessary.

Remember this: the time it takes buyers to discover all of their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. They need to know how to make sense of their decisions. They will do it with you or without you. With you is quicker.

EFFECTING CHANGE FROM OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
As sellers, we are obviously outside the buyer's system. Even though we know our product, even though we know how a buyer will effectively use our product, and even though we know the range of the buyer's problem and why a buyer should buy it – and indeed have seen it hundreds of times before - we do not know how his company or team will go about managing all of the above elements to make room for a new solution.

Your product is not the solution. Your product is merely a piece of a solution that solves a business problem. And as obvious as it may seem to you, you will NEVER know what a buyer's buying environment needs to manage internally before they are ready to solve their problem.

One of the most difficult points for you to grasp is that in Stage One you will not understand what's going on inside a buyer's head, or at a buyer's desk. You might think you know, you might have heard something similar before, but you are not part of this buyer's unique system, not familiar with their roles and rules and politics and initiatives, and not able to effect internal change with your product even if it is the right solution.

And we've all lost business to surprising buyer-decisions when our product was obviously the right solution.

So I'm suggesting you add a new skill set for Stage One – complete with new beliefs, new ways to listen, new ways to see your role, new attitudes, and new expectations and outcomes.

BUYING FACILITATION REDUCES THE SALES CYCLE
Buying Facilitation is a method that teaches buyers how to manage Stage One. It uses a Facilitative questioning system that leads buyers through all of the elements that need to be managed in order for them to change, to buy something new, to add something different, to try a new vendor.

The belief behind it is that if the buyer can be helped in recognizing and managing whatever it is they need to address, the seller will not only be a part of the buyer's decision automatically, but will be put onto the buyer's decision team. And, the buyer will know how to buy much, much more quickly and thus eliminate the protracted sales cycle.

In order to facilitate a buyer's discovery through Stage One, here is the sequence you must lead your buyers through:

1. where are you? What are all of the elements of R.I.P.P. that exist that have created the problem and maintain the status quo?

2. what is missing?

3. what has stopped you from fixing this problem before now?

4. how can you fix the problem with known resources?

5. if you can't fix the problem yourself, how will you bring in a new solution that will not create disruption?

Until now you've assumed that objections, time lags, and price competitions were down to buyers dragging their heels, or being confused, or, or, or…. But when sellers push product information into a system that has created and maintains its own problems, the buyer pushes back. It is impossible for a buyer to agree and even care about the seller's information until they have taken care of Stage One.

The sales cycle will last until the buyer knows all of the answers to those questions. And with the complexity in business today, the buyer has a lot of answers to find. Teach your buyer how to buy. Stop selling so soon. Learn some new skills that take you out of the information push/needs analysis/assumption cycles, and truly learn how to help buyers learn how to buy you.

ABOUT MORGEN FACILITATIONS, INC.

Morgen Facilitations, Inc. continues to seek ways to support you in learning Buying Facilitation and in your sales forces having the new Facilitation skills available in any client/sales context.

Until now, we've only trained Buying Facilitation and other Decision Facilitation programs (presentation skills, negotiations, coaching); we are currently designing mainstream programs to suit learners who are more comfortable with standard material.

We have developed a Facilitating Buying Decisions course, and a Shortening the Sales Cycle program that can be purchased to train your internal trainers. Please contact us to discuss this.

We have also changed our training capability; while Sharon Drew continues to offer corporate training, she will no longer be running public training programs. As part of their licensing, the new Buying Facilitation trainers in the US and the UK may advertise public programs. Let us know if you have interest in learning Buying Facilitation in a public training with a trainee trainer - a person trained by Sharon Drew, and filled with the love, the skills, and the support that Sharon Drew would offer herself.

Thank you for your continued interest in learning Buying Facilitation. It's a pleasure to serve you.

website: http://www.newsalesparadigm.com
Copyright 2004 by Sharon Drew Morgen. All rights reserved.