Sharon Drew Morgen

Leadership Involves Helping Others Decide

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Feb 8, 2010 Sales Related Comments

Tomorrow I do a webinar with the Business Management Institute called Executive Decision Making: Influencing with Integrity. How does my focus on a buyer’s decision making parallel with decision making in general? For me, it’s all the same: I believe that every choice, every new concept, every new action demands a decision to allow in something new and and supplement what’s already there.

So whether a buyer seeks a new solution and must get buy-in from the relevant people, or a user needs to use the new software, or an initiative needs agreement from the relevant team members to move forward, or a person may want to donate to one charity rather than another, new decisions are necessary or change won’t happen. Read More..

Lead Gen isn’t enough

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Feb 5, 2010 Sales Related Comments

Do you spend a lot of time collecting names that might be prospects?

Do you spend a lot of money learning how to follow prospects on line, so you can guess where they are in the decision making process?

Has all of this activity substantially increased your ROI?

What you’re forgetting – or ignoring – is that no matter what information the buyer needs, or how often they (and their colleagues) visit your site, or how deftly follow their activity with your ability to track ‘Digital Body Language,’ at the end of the day, you will not be there when they sit down to decide. Nope. The internal decisions that buyers make to choose a solution, to decide to make a change, to select one vendor or solution over another, are off-line. That’s right: you are not there when two department heads have an arguement about which vendor they prefer, or when the tech folks start clamoring to take over a project, or when a partner shows up with a good-enough solution. Read More..

The Heart of Business

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Feb 4, 2010 Sales Related Comments

For decades, I have been a proponent of, and keynoter in the field of, Spirituality in the Workplace. There seem to be different names for it these days: the heart of business, corporate social responsibility, conscious capitalism, patient capitalism, bringing the heart to work. What it means, underneath all of the words, is that we recognize that we have a responsibility to care about each other, and the earth, and run our businesses in a way that end up with a net plus — not just increased profit.

What, exactly, are the skills we need to help make a difference, to help people choose to do ‘the right thing’? I’m going to offer some new thinking that’s in line with my biases. Read More..

Facilitative Questions are NOT open questions

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Feb 2, 2010 Sales Related Comments

Sitting and listening to NPR Saturday afternoon, I heard someone say, “You need to ask OPEN/FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS.” For the 20,000 people who have studied with me and spent weeks learning how to formulate Facilitative Questions, and for the thousands who have purchased my latest book Dirty Little Secrets that has part of a chapter on this new form of question, you will be surprised that anyone would assume open questions and Facilitative Questions were remotely similar.

I suppose the good news is that, like the other terms (‘decision facilitation’ and Buying Facilitation®) I coined over the past 20 years, my thinking is being accepted into the mainstream. But the bad news, what I was warned about but didn’t think would happen to me, is that folks are interpreting the terms in any way they want, regardless of the real definitions. Read More..

Prospects Aren’t Really Prospects

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Feb 1, 2010 Sales Related Comments

Sales has a goal: find a prospect with a need and sell a solution. You can call it anything you want, use all of the fancy terms about serving your client, be a Trusted Advisor or a Relationship Manager, do whatever you can to understand need and make nice. But at the end of the day, your job as a seller is to place your solution.

Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume – and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry – that when we notice a ‘need’ that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.’ Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption. Read More..

Sales is resistant to change

By Sharon Drew Morgen | Jan 29, 2010 Sales Related Comments

Think about this: Dale Carnegie is the father of the current selling model. Why would I say that when there are such ‘new’ models as Permission Marketing, or SPIN, or any of the myriad selling techniques that have come along since 1937 when Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People? Why would I believe this when the internet has become such a powerful force in sales?

Because we continue (against any rational measure) to focus ’sales’ on solution placement (yes, yes, that includes uncovering needs and understanding buyers) when we have all of the data we need to understand that 1. we close a small fraction of our prospects; 2. we waste a huge amount of time for the relative success we get; 3. buyers who need our solutions do not necessarily buy. Read More..