On Mondays I always talk about Buying Facilitation™. But I was so blown away from a conversation with Vanessa  DiMauro, a thought leader whose company Leader Networks does research and consulting specializing in harnessing the power of how new digital tools drive measurable business benefits, that I absolutely cannot think straight. She has stretched, expanded, confused, excited, and intrigued my brain so thoroughly, I feel like I’ve eaten a very satisfying gourmet dinner that had everything except the desert leaving me something more to anticipate.

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There are two distinct categories involving buying decisions:

1. the behind-the-scenes issues buyers must manage internally to get stakeholder buy-in for change and for going outside their status quo for a solution;

2. the solution-choice issues.

We are all very familiar with the latter: that’s what sales handles so well. But sales does not handle #1 at all:

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What is a content engine? And why is Avitage so busy?

Jim Burns, owner of Avitage is in the catbird seat. He has figured out how to tailor your content so it’s in line with how your buyers want it. That’s right: not just the way you want to explain it, but how they want it.

Not only that, he has made it possible to manage JIT knowledge sharing, organize content in modules mapped to sales conversations, phone/web meetings, use multimedia content , and he can make sure you have the right content on your marketing materials, your site, and all collateral sales/marketing tools as well as helping you handle your branding, lead gen, and nurturing activities.

Isn’t that cool? Can you tell I’m excited? As sellers we are so accustomed to giving all of the information WE believe is relevant, and forget that prospects might not need what we think is important and might need something different.

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This past week I’ve been attempting to contact technology companies that do sales enablement or some sort of sales force automation, in order to add Buying Facilitation™ to the front end as a ‘buying enablement’ capability. Imagine enablement software that could enter the buying decision journey earlier to add the human side of decision making into the work flow! Good idea, right? I think so. And so I made all these cold calls to find tech companies who agree with me and want to partner.

I usually like cold calling. Not this time: It’s virtually impossible to get through. Either you must put a (known) name into the dial-a-name (which works only half the time), or leave a message on the switchboard voice mail. Those are the options. Even though they say to push ‘0′ for the operator, there is no operator anymore, just voice mail. Once in a while someone actually answers, but that doesn’t work either, as I explain below.

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Unfortunately, the newspaper may be going the way of the dial telephone. I’m a journalist by trade, so this fact pains me greatly. But the truth is, newspapers haven’t yet discovered a way to re-invent themselves to remain relevant today. Technology just does too good a job making news available instantaneously.

Unfortunately, the same thing is happening with our sales jobs. With a focus on

• understanding need and placing a solution,
• attempting to understand what’s going on so you can place your solution, and
• handling objections, pitching solution, and overcoming objections,

you’ve lost the real nugget of what is possible in the role of a seller: true buyer support, time savings so buyers can fix problems sooner, and supporting them through the change management issues they struggle with internally.

By helping buyers navigate through the off-line, behind-the-scenes, political and relationship-based issues they need to handle amongst themselves before they can buy anything, you’d be a real asset to the buyer.

Right now, they muddle through this alone, and doing it with you would put you on the Buying Decision Team and obviously make you a Trusted Advisor. And it’s something the internet cannot do. And it’s the aspect of the buying decision journey that sales has never been privy to.

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For those of you who have read Dirty Little Secrets and love the concept of how change happens - and for those of you who haven’t read DLS and still love change models – here is my second podcast of the 6 part series Making Change Work that I’m recording with StrategyDriven Magazine and Nathan Ives.

This one starts, like DLS, with what a system is. Our buyers, our colleagues, our clients, all operate as part of a system, and the system is what resists change. Once we understand the makeup of a system, we can move forward with helping the system manage change.

Part 3, to come out in a couple of weeks, is about resistance and bias: why do people and systems resist change, and how do change agents bias the results, actually creating resistance.

For you sales folks reading this, the exact same issues apply with buyers: buyers work in a system of rules, relationships, politics, tech folks and engineers – and this system will fight to maintain itself rather than bring in a different solution. So in addition to listening to my Podcast series on Making Sellers Relevant, you may enjoy this series also.

For those of you who have missed Part 1, here it is.

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There are two aspects to a buyer’s journey as they consider a solution purchase:

1. getting internal buy-in from colleagues, bosses, and budgets to decide to make a change, figuring out how or what will be included in the change, and agreeing how to move forward;

2. choosing a solution and vendor.

In today’s buying decision journey, technology is beginning to ably handle the solution choice: Since sales focuses on the needs analysis and solution choice end of the buying decision, it’s easy-enough for the process of selection and information-gathering to be co-opted by the web.

That leaves the seller not meeting quotas, not involved until the very end after many of the decisions have been made, and not using their talents as purveyors of industry knowledge. Sellers are not entering the buying decision journey early enough, are too often reduced to order takers.

WHAT’S A SELLER TO DO?

The choices are:

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In conjunction with StrategyDriven magazine, and with Nathan Ives as the brilliant interviewer, I’ve recorded a series of 6 podcasts called Making Change Work. The first podcast is available below.

And, why am I recording a Change Management series? For those of you familiar with my decision facilitation model, you’ll recognize that it’s basically a change management model that helps buyers (or teams, or patients, or or) navigate through all of the unconscious, behind-the-scenes, private issues they have to decide on, en route to doing something different. After all, anything different means change. And any time we change, we have issues to manage within our status quo, so we don’t create chaos unduly.

ALL DECISIONS ARE CHANGE MANAGEMENT ISSUES

Whether you’re going to change your hairstyle, or buy a house, or adopt a new ERP system in your company, or bring in new staff, anything that will shift the status quo is a change management issue. Because the status quo is happy with whatever rules or relationships or technology already exists (or it would have been changed already), adding anything new upsets the apple-cart, so to speak.

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This post is for all the horrid customer service capability I run into when I call any place, any place at all it seems, with a complaint or query. Bad customer service has such a long tail that it’s just not acceptable anymore (if indeed it ever was).

These days, it’s so simple for angry customers to tell the whole world of a yucky vendor experience, and the results can be devastating: when the complaint shows up online – which it always does – it might make the difference between someone choosing you or choosing another vendor.

THE COST OF LOSING A CUSTOMER

What, exactly, is the cost of losing a customer? Do you know what it costs you to replace a lost customer, or manage the bad press from a viral complaint?

Take care of your customers. While it might be impossible to always run a perfect business, it’s certainly easy to give great customer service. In fact, it should be mandatory.

I’m going to share some horrific customer service issues I’ve had the past weeks, with some easy-t0-implement strategies to turn them around and make your angry customers into fans. While some of these examples involve technology, let’s not forget that we mortals create the technology and program it. And can change it.

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It’s so much easier for buyers to buy now. With the click of a wrist, or a jog of a fingertip, they can read about, compare, and purchase whatever they want. So buyer’s behaviors are changing. Or are they?

While their capability to attain data, or make the actual purchase is much easier, is their route to their buying decision different?

Do you know that point in a buyer’s decision process that they seek this information? And is there other material we could be offering at other points in the buying decision process?

DOES OUR SOLUTION DATA DRIVE THE BUYER’S DECISION?

Does our carefully branded data drive our buyer’s buying decision?

Well, yes and no. Obviously buyers must ultimately know if your solution fits their needs. But this is the last, the very last thing, that they need before they make a purchase.

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