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Shorten Sales Cycles in Complex Sales Environments
Written by Richard Cunningham
Help buyers discover the answers they need to understand and align all of their decision variables.
In complex sales, salespeople often find themselves negotiating their way through a web of decision influencers, conflicting initiatives, and multiple priorities. The time it takes prospects to align all of their internal stars and planets for a buying decision can create painfully long sales cycles.
In the audio book, Sound Advice on Sales Strategies, Sharon Drew Morgen maintains that conventional sales precepts are the underlying cause for this and the other problems salespeople are experiencing.
According to Morgen, we need to rethink effective sales skills. The new sales definition must help buyers make decisions.
Buyers no longer need us to sell product, they need help making sense of the ever increasing complexity within their environments, says Morgen. They need help understanding and supporting all of the elements that will face change when adopting a new solution.
When a group makes a purchase, it affects their system of rules, norms, relationships, and initiatives. Its vital that the inherent systems be maintained or it will fight to keep itself static, says Morgen. Buyers will wait until they understand how to maintain equilibrium before bringing in change.
The solution, says Morgen, is a new sales paradigm called Buying Facilitation. Buying Facilitation is a sequencing method that supports buyers in managing all of those idiosyncratic variables that make up a prospects status quo. Its basis is to expeditiously align systems the people, the management, the budget, the initiatives, and the partners in order to add a foreign element into the system without chaos.
Instead of basing your communications on discovering needs or pitching features to sell, teach buyers how to line up all of their unique decision variables and criteria to create a solution for themselves. In this way, youll become a true trusted advisor.
Sharon Drew Morgen, best-selling author of Selling with Integrity, offers sales advice each week in the free audio newsletter from Whats Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz/full_story.asp?ArtID=92
Richard Cunningham is a principal of Whats Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz, a publisher of business audiobooks and online audio programs on marketing, sales, and small business strategies.
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