Contest ends Monday: one more chance to order sales activities

A few weeks ago, I put up a contest. I thought we’d all look at the order of activities in a sales call as I see it: including both sales and a decision navigation, to help buyers recognize and manage their behind-the-scenes, private, and internal decision issues, and then make a purchase. In other words, adding the Buying Facilitation® model to the sales model (see recent post Buying Facilitation® and Sales: the dynamic duo), what would a seller’s activity look like.

Here are the original directions, and the list:

Below are 12 To-Dos, including the 10 steps of a sales cycle as I see them. They are out of order, and two of them (at least – probably three) are unnecessary. Please put them in the order you think they should be in, name the 2 or 3 that are unnecessary, and submit.

The first person to have the steps in the order that I believe is accurate as per Buying Facilitation® and how to help buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes decision and change issues, will get a free book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it. The winner will be announced April 26. Please submit your answers in comment section of the linked post on sharondrewmorgen.com. And if you want, we can have an interactive webinar about this afterwards. Let me know if you’d like to and we’ll set it up.

Prioritize this list of 12 activities, by including 10 and omitting 2.

Note: for those who plan to use my books to get the correct order, I’ve changed some of the activities and wording so they don’t directly match other lists.

• Develop marketing materials to professionally represent your solution either on-line or in person.
• Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect
• Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.
• Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.
• Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.
• Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.
• Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.
• Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.
• Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have them begin to examine how or if or why they would consider changing their status quo.
• Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.
• Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.
• Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Join the contest by making your order in the comments section of my contest post.

Since none of you got this right, so far (although a few of you got close!), I’m going to give you a few hints. 1. only make an appointment to see anyone when/if the buyer’s entire Buying Decision Team is brought together, otherwise you’re wasting a lot of time; 2. you have nothing to sell if  have no understanding of how to go about their off-line buying decision activities – so pitches don’t happen until late in the buying decision cycle.

Ok. Enough hints. Go at it over the weekend. Really think about the differences between WHAT a buyer needs to buy, and HOW a buyer (and their decision team) go about managing their internal craziness in order to get buy-in to choose a solution.  On Monday, I’ll discuss what folks sent me, and give you my list and explain why I put things in the order I put them in. Thanks, folks.

sd

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