Buying Facilitation® Training
Learn from Sharon Drew to close more sales by helping buyers buy. More.
Guided Study
Work at your own pace with 26 self guided studies. More.
Much has been written about the skills sellers need in order to "make a sale." In this chapter, I will address my understanding of the thinking process buyers must go through in considering whether or not they need to buy.
I've been in the sales profession since 1979, when I tired of being a poor social worker for the city of New York and went to Wall Street. At that time, I innocently walked into the fiftieth floor corner office of the executive vice president of human resources at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith and announced to this surprised stranger that I wanted him to hire me. He did.
Merrill had what was considered to be the best sales training in the business: a one-month program that taught everything from wearing high socks (for the men) to not wearing dangling earrings (for the women). We were taught Traditional and Consultative methods with plenty of phone-skills training as a prospecting tool. I learned well. I opened 210 accounts in my first six months as a rookie in a bear market. My experience in London, however, as both a seller and an entrepreneur, led to my discovery of a key piece in the sales process, a piece never taught in sales training - the process buyers go through before reaching a decision to buy.
In my training programs, one of the first questions I ask sellers is whether they believe there is a sale without a buyer. To a person, they all agree: no buyer, no sale. Then I play a game with them. I put an invisible widget in my hand and invite participants to provide a reason for me to buy it. To make it easy, I offer them the option to decide what it is. "You can make it be anything you want it to be - and I'm an easy sell." They go around the room with this problem. Each person finds ways to convince me that what they have in their hand is the perfect item for me, starting conversations with: "Hello, Sharon Drew, I've got something here I think you'll like..." and they proceed to try to convince me that they have the answer to my life's desires.
No one thinks to ask me what I need! Even in a classroom setting, where they have already agreed there is no sale without a buyer, where the product can be anything they want it to be, where all possible choices are available to them, the sellers choose what they want to sell rather than find out what I need to buy! They assume they are responsible to create an answer for me. But people buy only when they can't fill their own needs with the resources at hand. When a salesperson approaches a prospect with a potential fix to a problem, there is no appreciation for what a prospect must deal with in order to change how she is currently handling that problem.
The course participants do with me what they've been taught to do: figure out how to position the product, decide the outcome before going in, and establish enough rapport to make a pitch and ask opening questions. Once participants recognize what I'm suggesting, they become quiet. The skills of sales have not traditionally included the buyer's decision-making process, at least not at the conceptual level. Sellers are generally happy to extend their thinking to how and why people buy. Until now, it just wasn't part of the job.
Remember a situation in which you were convinced that your prospect needed your product, but was not responding positively. Try to remember how you reacted to the opportunity to sell your product.
Or, How Do People Decide to Buy?
I've created an allegory based on artificial intelligence guru Roger Schank's Tell Me a Story in order to illustrate some tools, tips, and techniques I've learned to use to assist buyers in their thinking and decision-making processes. Though far fetched and somewhat "creative," the story offers an easy way to understand how and why we have to use questions to help a prospect discover what, if anything, she needs to buy. Here's my tale:
In my room I have a huge dresser. I am an active sports person and change socks several times during a day, so one of my larger drawers houses all of my white socks. Because I wear them under jeans, with workout clothes, with jogging shoes, and with boots, nobody really sees them. So if they don't match - given some are grayer or yellower or holier or longer or shorter than others - it's not a big deal. They are just thrown into the drawer and I grab for any two when I need them.
In another, smaller drawer, I have my colored socks. These are neatly paired: red with red, green with green. These socks are usually for show and worn only occasionally. I wear them with matching shirts or sweaters or dress trousers. They must match or I won't wear the outfit. (Crazy? Maybe, but it's my story.)
Let's say I go golfing annually to Pebble Beach and I have a great orange shirt to wear on the golf course. That means I have a pair of identical orange socks to match the shirt.
If a salesperson were to call me up and tell me she had a special on socks, my obvious mental reference would be to think about my large supply of white socks and tell her I had no need. (When we are asked general questions, our brains automatically default to the most familiar references. Therefore, a seller with the best socks in the world would have nothing to sell me.)
But if she asked me what specific types of socks I had, I would have to bring to mind the two drawers and explain about the two categories of socks. I would happily go into an explanation of how I grab my white socks, then go into an explanation of my colored sock drawer. If she wanted to go into specifics-and given I'm not so familiar with my colored socks as I am with my white socks since I don't use them as often - I'd have to go to my room to open my drawer and name all the different colors I have. Here's a red pair that I wear with this amazing shirt. And these yellow ones my son brought me from Rome. And the orange ones...oh my, there is only one orange sock here! Gosh.
This is where many sellers go wrong. If they are able to get to the missing piece - and the majority of sellers are so busy pitching socks and taking care of their own needs to sell that they don't even get as far as the colored sock drawer - they go on to assume that their orange socks are the answer. Yet there are several potential scenarios here.
What if I no longer play golf? Then I won't need any orange socks. What if I just got a multicolored sweater for Christmas, and I don't have nearly enough socks? What if I won't be golfing any longer but have an orange ski suit and need orange wool socks instead of cotton socks? And what if my family owns a department store, and I can get all the socks I want wholesale?
For much of my thinking about thinking and the question-development process, which I'll be discussing in great detail throughout the book, I reference Roger Schank, who explains these things in far more sophisticated terms. From his research, he has found that our brains store information in indices. In Tell Me a Story he says:
The problem always reduces to search. A mind must be able to find what it needs to find, and it must know it has found it...If there is no way to find [it], it might as well not exist. (p. 84)
Basically, we store most of our information in a large general index - the white sock drawer as I'm calling it. As the information gets more specifically defined, it transfers into smaller, more specialized indices - the colored sock drawer - that have more specific but less-used information. In order for us to find this highly qualified information, we have to know where to search for it. Somehow, we have to be asked the right questions to get to the right index, because we only search for infrequently used information when we need different information from what is most readily available.
It is not until a prospect recognizes that there is a problem and searches for and finds the right index that she will know how or when or with what to solve the problem, or that she will choose to add an additional resource to her current environment. Rarely are people aware of all of this up front.
Let's look at the buying process. Before people will consider buying they must
Change presents disruption of the status quo. Teams, companies, families, and individuals-the decision makers in the buying cycle-would much rather fix what they've got than bring a foreign element into the system.
When a seller assumes that people will buy because she creates or finds a need and presents a case for her product, she is playing God.
In The Creative Attitude, Roger Schank states:
In order to want to know, one must find things one needs to know. You can't look for explanations, for new ideas, or for new generalizations unless the old ones have been found inadequate to account for some anomaly. (p. 12)
In other words, if a prospect's current status - her Present Situation as I call it - seems just fine, she has no need to look further. Two things can affect her thinking: either a change in the environment can cause her to seek a solution or she may realize that although the environment is the same, it's not functioning optimally. In either case, she needs to go through a process to find a solution and that will involve a brain search.
If change is imminent, there will be more of a push to find a solution than if there is no immediate need. Most of your clients know they need a solution and are searching for the best alternative. Yet the Buying Facilitation® process uncovers many undiscovered problems, which are accidents waiting to happen. Rarely do I speak with a prospect who is totally happy with her Present Situation and unwilling to look at improving it in some way. When all seems to be fine, and I ask, "Are there any conditions under which you would consider supplementing your current service with an additional resource?" people think about a wish list. And often people who are not actively seeking a solution take another look.
Now that you know your job is to bring a prospect to the colored sock drawer to help her determine what's missing and what's not, let's look at why people decide to buy.
It is important to understand that a problem your product or service might address is only one element in the broader picture, that I call the Problem Space. On the next page is an illustration of the problem, the Problem Space, and the Solution Space.
A Problem Space in a business setting is made up of the roles, rules, time factors, politics, sociology, budgets - the entire culture - of the company, and is defined in relation to who and what resides within it. The elements within the Problem Space are so unique to each business that it is virtually impossible for an outsider to understand how the elements interact. Most buyers cannot get a full view of a problem from their vantage point within the system - they often cannot see symptoms, causes, and possible solutions. Offering a product, which may or may not be the answer, is meaningless if there is no place for that product within the Problem Space. (We will explore the discovery process in Skill Set #6.)
As sellers, one of your tasks is to assist your prospects in understanding how their problem supports and is supported by the larger system. Indeed, people will only add resources when their Problem Space is defined and found lacking. They might not even look to see if there is a problem-or what, if anything, needs to be fixed or purchased - until there is a fire to put out, and even then defining the parameters of the Problem Space is not an easy task.
Since understanding the Problem Space is so important to a prospect solving her internal problem and potentially working with you to make a purchasing decision, I'd like to spend some time leading you through the thought process that helps prospects examine the Problem Space boundaries.
The easiest place to start is with the identified problem - the need for more hardware or the desire for more insurance coverage, for example. Why isn't the status quo still okay? Something must have happened to make the existing solution inadequate. The reasons for the inadequacy must be addressed, one at a time. The identified problem begins to show up as a piece of a string of other changes: staffing, reorganizations, or budgets, for example. More questions beginning with "how" and "why" and "what" will help to reveal the pieces of a larger picture. All of these pieces, which may appear to be peripheral to the problem, carry some kind of weight, with some elements more important than others. Even a simple problem like a toothache resides in a Problem Space bigger than the toothache itself. You have no way of knowing which elements carry more weight than others until you ask. Here's an example:
When working with a customer service department in a major steel company, I noticed much anger and disruption among team members. Long-term employees - upwards of twenty years - were becoming ill and entering the hospital, getting to work late, fighting with teammates. I was working with this group because customer complaints were on the rise, but I walked into a problem much bigger than anyone had imagined. I spent some time gathering information to get a clear picture of the Problem Space.
There had been a major reorganization several months before my arrival. The initial problem was getting people moved to the reorganization sites in the most efficient way possible: moving money was offered and travel arrangements were made through a company office. People were moved to various sites around the country after having been in their homes for many years. While there was disruption, the move occurred on time and everyone ended up where they were supposed to be without a hitch.
But no one had been asked what they needed, how they felt, what hardships their families faced, or who was left behind. The move was accomplished as a task: the job was to reorganize. People's lives had not been factored into the problem, which was now much bigger than just moving people. The initial problem of moving people efficiently now included a Problem Space filled with unhappy, unhealthy people, jobs not being done effectively, customer service problems not being handled appropriately, and increased customer complaints.
I spoke with people and discovered a very simple solution. At my suggestion, the customer service director called a large meeting and listened to people. They wanted to be heard - to gripe and complain, even to cry. Some had left behind teenagers in their last year of high school. Others left dying family members, or animals, or best friends. They needed to go through a grieving process and had not been offered a chance. The director spent time with them, recognized the problem, apologized deeply, and much to his credit, cried with them. The people were heard and acknowledged. The problems dissipated.
In this instance, the customer service director had not understood the size of his problem until there was a major "fire." The eventual solution encompassed more elements and effort than if he had situated the initial problem within a complete Problem Space.
At the outset, he might have been led through a questioning sequence that would have begun with the need to move the people and continued through all of the "people" issues that might come up during a move. Some questions might have been the following:
By starting with the problem and moving from there to the surrounding issues, the Problem Space becomes clear to the buyer. Remember: The buyer has the answers. You can't make a sale without a buyer.
Once you have supported the buyer in discovering the parameters of the Problem Space, you must then support her in examining a solution whose defined area - the Solution Space - is bigger than, and encompasses, the Problem Space.
For instance, in the above example, the initial solution was to bring me in to teach better communication tools to the customer service representatives to solve the problem of increased customer complaints. Once the Problem Space was fully defined as including personal issues left over from the move and not just customer complaints, the Solution Space was easy to spot: listen to the issues, hear the people on a personal level, get management involved, fix any lingering issues so people can once again be happy in their jobs. But there was no way to discover the complexities of the solution or the Solution Space until the entire Problem Space had been defined and each internal element examined.
Too often an inadequate solution is directed toward a problem. Sellers, especially, often assume their product will solve a problem and don't take into account all of the issues involved.
I had an embarrassing experience involving a too-small Solution Space at an in-house customer service training in a major union shop.
While on the floor with the customer service representatives, I noticed they would forsake all the skills they were learning when they received a call from a union member. Believing in a "We Space," I spent the better part of the next day teaching the reps about aligning with their unionized coworkers.
The next day I was called into the manager's office with one of the inside sales reps to relate the story of what had happened following my training the previous day. Apparently when a union man called to tell the rep he had a problem getting a product delivered on the promised date, she replied, "I guess we have a problem. What can we do to make it work for the customer?" (I must admit when I heard her respond this way I was quite proud of the rep for learning so quickly.) Ten minutes later the union member and his boss, the head of the trucking union, marched into the manager's office demanding the rep be fired.
"What is this we shit? Get her outta here."
This was the first time I realized the difference between a problem and the Problem Space, and it was a hard lesson. I hadn't known the parameters of the Problem Space - the rules and idiosyncrasies of the union - inside sales rep relationship - and my solution wasn't big enough. I thought I had something to "sell" without ascertaining what my client needed to "buy." I did not have enough perspective to view the problem in its entirety and in fact became part of the problem.
In defining a Solution Space, both the central and the peripheral issues must be addressed with great specificity for the prospect to be willing to look toward, and understand the need for, a solution. Again, until or unless the prospect is certain she cannot get her own needs met with what she has in place, she will not seek an external solution. People buy only when they can't fill their own needs.
It may be some time before you actually begin to believe that your product or service may in fact not be the answer. After all, there have been centuries of history of sales techniques that support you believing otherwise. Begin the thinking and just notice what happens when you introduce the new questions into your daily sales calls.
Think of prospecting calls you have initiated. Remember how you went about discovering the prospect's needs.
