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Change management and sales: influencing the buying decision path

Guest articles > Change management and sales: influencing the buying decision path

by: Sharon Drew Morgen

Until the people that will touch a potential new solution buy-in to altering the status quo (their policies, relationships, rules, past decisions, job descriptions, etc), they will not make a purchase or a change: they will continue the dysfunctional behavior through time, even when an ideal solution is right in front of them.

Does this make sense – to keep doing what is not working, regardless of the ‘rational’ choices that would resolve a problem?

Actually, it does. Because making a purchase, or doing something different, means

• some sort of change management to ensure that the new and the old work together
• helping folks who touch the current practices be willing and able to change.

Make no mistake: bringing anything new into an existent system - whether it’s a purchase or an implementation – is a change management problem.

A BUYING DECISION IS A CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

Sales, marketing automation, and the new telemarketing field, ignore the change management aspect of what buyers must accomplish and instead focus on figuring out how and what and to whom to push. And push we do.

Let me back track a bit. Givens:

1. sales manages the needs assessment and solution placement portion of the buyer’s decision.
2. neither sales nor marketing go behind-the-scenes, into the environment/culture in which the buyer lives, to help facilitate the non-solution-focused internal political or relational issues buyers must address to get the necessary buy-in to make a purchase.
3. buyers don’t know their route through the systemic decision path when they begin to think about resolving a problem.
4. the time it takes buyers to get the appropriate buy-in from all who will touch the solution is the length of the sales/change cycle. These are the issues we come smack up against as sales folks: when buyers try to push a solution into a group that haven’t progressed through their entire change management path, they offer objections and time delays as they figure out how to figure it out.

Buying Facilitation? is not sales, but it works with sales. It is a wholly different skill set that actually shows buyers how to manage the systemic change they will face when purchasing a solution or bringing something new in to their status quo. It not only teaches buyers how to get the requisite buy-in so their daily functioning won’t be compromised - managing the people, policies, technology, and old vendor, etc. issues – but shows them how to pro-actively manage the change that will happen once the new solution is on board.

A SOLUTION CAN’T COMPROMISE THE STATUS QUO

If the tech guy doesn’t want to outsource work; if the sales and marketing folks are not talking to each other; if the “C” level person has a favored vendor from 3 years ago; if there is already something in place that cost a bundle and the buyer merely wants to tack on yet another fix – if anything political or relational is going on internally that would compromise the system, the buyer will not buy: they will not buy if the system itself would be at risk.

Just as you are resisting adding Buying Facilitation? to your sales model, even though it would resolve so many of your sales issues (stops all objections, severely shortens the sales cycle, gets the Buying Decision Team collected in days), your buyers are resisting purchasing even though they need your solution.

Let’s figure out how to help your buyers buy. Let’s teach them how to manage their change so you can easily place your solution. What would you need to see from me, or know about Buying Facilitation? to know if it would be worth the change?

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation?: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation? - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions.

Contributor: Sharon Drew Morgen

Published here on: 07-Aug-11

Classification: Sales

Websites:

http://www.buyingfacilitation.com/

http://www.newsalesparadigm.com/