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Using Follow Up Effectively

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Do you attempt to follow up with prospective buyers because they haven’t contacted you when you thought they should? Do you know what is stopping them from contacting you? Or where they are along their decision path – their steps from idea to consensus, from change to choice, that buyers must address – while we sit and wait, hoping they’ll close?

With a focus on understanding need and placing solutions, you may have no idea what stage they are at: did you originally connect when they were first considering possibly fixing something? Or when they were comparing your solution to an internal workaround or their favorite vendor? Were they just seeking information to share at a planning session? I bet you don’t have all the data on this.

Buyers Don’t Want Us Even When They Need Our Solution

We tend to think buyers need our solution, but that’s only a part of the issue. They don’t really want to buy anything, merely to solve a problem. And they always start out by trying to find a way to fix the problem themselves (When we think they are stalling, this is what’s going on that we don’t see.); it’s only when they realize that a workaround isn’t sufficient, or their internal folks can’t resolve the problem, or their regular vendors aren’t around, or or or… are they willing to buy.

But they have work to do before they are ready – and cannot not buy, regardless of how great a fit your solution is with their need, until these steps are completed (and all sizes/types of solutions require some form of these):

  1. They must assemble anyone who will touch the final solution, (not obvious)
  2. get buy in and consensus from both decision makers and influencers, (not easy)
  3. manage any change a solution will bring. (complicated, even with a small sale).

Price is not the issue. Competition with other providers is not the problem. The problem is how they will manage the internal change your solution incurs (separate from the benefits of your solution). Read my article on the complete list of steps buyers must take before they can buy.

If you want to facilitate their decision making, and your prospect is aware they need your solution and they seem to be stalling, call with these questions:

  • What would you and your decision team need to address to manage the types of change that would be required by purchasing our solution?
  • How will you and the decision team know that an external solution might be more effective and efficient than an internal workaround?

I’ve developed Buying Facilitation® to use in conjunction with the sales model to give you the tools to help buyers manage the necessary steps to be ready to buy your solution. Use your follow up contact to help them figure out how to resolve any of these issues that might cause them to be stuck. Your solution is perfect for them; they just need help getting their ducks in a row so they can give you the order.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Mantra Design & Leadership Foundational Principles

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It’s safe to say that behind every effective business strategy are a series of underlying principles that provide for the foundation and guidance for its success and continuing prosperity. The four foundational business cornerstones I embrace and which I’ll speak to briefly are the following;

  • Commitment to business growth through organic innovation by funding research and development at investments of 10% or greater as a percentage of the company’s total revenues.
  • Develop and evolve your company’s product brands through your customer’s eyes.
  • Continuously improve your company’s products and technologies by focusing on the few truly strategic core platforms.
  • Hire smart, ambitious, get-it-done employees and lead them with emotionally intelligent innovation leadership skills.

Mantra DesignCommitment to growth

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About the Author

Dana A. OliverDana A. Oliver lives in Jacksonville, FL with his wife Linda and daughter “Lexi” Alexandra. He is the Senior Director of Research & Development at Medtronic’s Surgical Technologies ENT / NT division and has helped grow this business unit from $100 million to approximately $2 billion in annual revenues over fourteen years. He has approximately 30 years of experience in the field of medical devices, working for such companies as Medtronic, Genzyme, SIMS Level 1, Kirwan Surgical, and Strichman Medical. He has applied for over 30 patent applications and has been granted over 20 US patents to date.

Mantra Design – Innovate, Buy or Die!: Discover the Secrets for Profitable and Lasting Innovation reveals the secrets to identifying your customer’s unmet needs which in turn provide for premium priced, patent protected, market share leading products.

Mantra Leadership – Don’t Become the Emperor with No Clothes! highlights the emotionally intelligent leadership skills that can result in as much as 30% or greater in team productively.

Our Listening Biases Restrict Success

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The problem with accurately hearing what others mean to convey is not that we don’t hear their words accurately. The problem is in the interpretation. During the listening process, our brains arbitrarily filter out, or reconfigure the uncomfortable, unknown, or confusing, to make what’s been said match something we’re more familiar with. And it fails to inform us of its creative editing.

As a result, we’re left understanding some fraction of what our Communication Partner(CP) meant to convey. So if I say ABC and your brain tells you I’ve said ABL, you not only have no way of knowing that you’ve not understood my intended message, but you’re thoroughly convinced you heard what I ‘said’. Obviously, this interpretation process puts relationships and communication at risk.

Case Study of Partnership Lost

While at a meeting with co-directors of a company to discuss possible partnering, there was some confusion on one of the minor topics:

John: No, SDM, you said X.
SDM: Actually I said Y and that’s quite a bit different.
John: You did NOT SAY Y. I heard you say X!!!
Margaret: I was sitting here, John. She actually did say Y. She said it clearly.
John: You’re BOTH crazy! I KNOW WHAT I HEARD! and he stomped out of the room. [End of partnership.]

As our brains haphazardly and unconsciously interpret for us, we naturally respond according to what we think we heard rather than what’s meant, restricting creativity, collaboration, and relationships.

How, then, do we have unrestricted conversations? Find ways to expand possibilities? Hear what others mean to say? Know how to take appropriate action, or negotiate creatively? I found the topic so interesting that I wrote a book on the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, the different ways our brains filter what’s been said (triggers, assumptions, biases, etc.), and how to supersede our brain to hear accurately (2 free chapters of What? Did you really say what I think I heard?).

Case Studies of Prospects Lost

One way our brains restrict our conversations happens when we enter with a preset agenda and unconsciously tell our brains to ignore whatever doesn’t fall outside the category. So when sellers listen only for ‘need’ they miss important clues that would exclude or enlist the CP as a prospect. A coaching client of mine had this conversation:

Seller: Hi. I’m Paul, from XXX. This is a sales call. I’m selling insurance. Is this a good time to speak?
Buyer: No. it’s a horrible time. It’s end of year and I’m swamped. Call back next week and I’ll have time.
Seller: ok.iwanttotellyouaboutourspecialsthatmightsuityourbusinessandmakeyoumorerevenue.

And the prospect hung up on him. Because the Seller used the traditional Buying Facilitation® opening for a cold call which welcomes prospects into a collaborative conversation, the prospect was willing to speak. But he lost interest when the Seller ignored his invitation and switched to taking care of his own needs with a pitch.

SDM: What happened? He told you he’d speak next week. And why did you speak so quickly?
Paul: He had enough time to answer the phone, so I figured I’d try to snag him into being interested. I spoke fast cuz I was trying to respect his time.

And this is a very simplistic example. Here is another one:

Halfway into a sales call, my client got hooked on his own agenda and didn’t hear reality:

Prospect: Well, we don’t have a CRM system that operates as efficiently as we would like, but our tech guys are scheduled 3 years out and our outsourcing group’s not available for another year. So we’ve created some workarounds for now.
Seller: I’d love to stop by and show you some of the features of our new CRM technology. I’m sure you’ll find it very efficient.
And that was the end of the conversation. He should have heard his intent and replied:
Wow. Sounds like a difficult situation. We’ve got a pretty efficient technology that might work for you, but obviously now isn’t the time. How would you like to stay in touch so we can speak when it’s closer to the time? Or maybe take a look at adding a few bells and whistles now to help out a bit while you wait?

By hearing and respecting the prospect’s status quo the seller would have created a ‘We Space’ where they both shared the same goals, and kept them speaking over time. Not to mention it would have been respectful. But the sellers, in both instances, only listened for what they wanted to hear and misinterpreted what was meant, and followed their own agenda at the cost of a real prospect.

We restrict possibilities when we enter calls with an agenda. We:

  • Misdefine what we hear so messages mean what we want them to mean;
  • Never achieve a true collaboration;
  • Speak and act as if something is ‘true’ when it isn’t and don’t recognize possibilities;
  • Limit our reactions and never achieve the full potential.

Here is a short list of ways to alleviate this problem (and take a look at What? for more situations and ideas):

  1. Enter each call as a mystery. Who is this person you’re calling? What’s preventing her from achieving excellence?
  2. Don’t respond immediately after someone has spoken. Wait a few seconds to take in the full dialogue and its meaning.
  3. Don’t go into a pitch, or make an assumption that a person has a need until they have determined they do – and that won’t be until much later in the conversation.
  4. Don’t enter a call with your own agenda. That leaves out the other person.

Prospects are those who will buy, not those who should buy. Enter each call to form a collaboration in which together you can hear each other and become creative. Stop trying to qualify in terms of what you sell. You’re missing opportunities and limiting what’s possible.

About the Author

Sharon Drew MorgenSharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

Steps in a Buying Decision

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There seems to be a confusion about the meaning of the terms buying decision journey, buying path, buy-cycle, helping buyers buy, and buying decisions. These terms define a specific set of sequenced actions buyers take to enable internal consensus and change – change management issues, if you will – rather than define steps that address needs or vendor/solution choice which come later and are the focus of sales.

I coined the terms in the 1980s to describe elements of a change management process I developed (Buying Facilitation®) that coaches buyers through their behind-the-scenes change issues they must handle before they can buy – a consulting process to help them get their ducks in a row. With sales folks applying the terms to the purchasing portion of a buyer’s decisions, the vital change management support element, the element that makes us real coaches and relationship managers, the element that finds and creates real prospects and halves sales cycles, is being lost.

Let’s go through a mock buying decision process to show you what has to get done by buyers before they, well, before they become buyers. And by-the-way, this is all fully flushed out in my book Dirty Little Secrets.

How Do We Buy?

Pretend you are the VP of Client Services of a $15 million company and find your current website inadequate for your growth and strategy. Indeed, you want to go around your internal tech folks and hire an external vendor with a new vision. You must:

  1. Assemble and get consensus from the appropriate people to determine if there is any agreement to making changes to your current site.
  2. Determine if it’s possible to fix what you’ve got (to save the time, money, human capital) or figure out how to work with the internal Tech folks if absolutely necessary.
  3. Find budget.
  4. Discover the criteria everyone needs to meet to agree to what success will look like.
  5. Get the buy-in from those whose work will be effected by the change.
  6. Create a path forward to enable buy-in, collaboration, win/win, and a minimum of risk/resistance/cost for everyone involved.

Here are all the steps you’ll go through to discover a solution everyone can get behind:

  1. start a conversation with some colleagues to discuss the current site. Mention your thoughts to the VPs of Sales and Marketing as you’d all need to share budget.
  2. go on line and research your competition’s site; call colleagues for vendor recommendations.
  3. talk with the internal Tech guys to discuss your displeasure and see what they’re willing to do differently, closer in line with what you’ve learned from your research.
  4. have a formal meeting with VPs of Sales and Marketing and the head of Technology (the 4 of you make up the foundation of the Buying Decision Team (BDT)) to discuss ideas to move forward and upgrade your site, including bringing in a web design vendor. Huge pushback from Tech who wants to keep it in house.
  5. contact a few local vendors to ask them to give you a presentation about web design so you can better understand what’s possible. You meet with them alone.
  6. meet with the BDT to discuss your take-aways from the vendor presentations. Everyone wants to do more research and decide they want to add branding, SEO capability, and a blog. Everyone has different needs for a new site; the Tech group wants it done in house.
  7. meet with CFO (manages the Tech department). She opposes hiring external vendors.
  8. meet with BDT. Long meeting to get consensus. Everyone has different needs: Sales wants to push solutions; Marketing arguing re the content, SEO, blog, etc.; Tech guys hostile and uncooperative and won’t discuss external vendors. All agree to bring in more folks onto BDT: HR, Project Management, Internal Consulting. Agree to get CFO’s permission to at least consider external vendors. Decision made to add ‘branding’ and SEO to the list of needs. Group decides to look at vendors again. They agree to go online to gather additional data on the newly added criteria re branding and SEO and agree to bring in additional vendors to present.
  9. same vendors come in and give same presentation to you but now Sales, Marketing, and Project Management are present. Additional vendors present branding and SEO capability. Tech folks, HR, Internal Consulting don’t attend.
  10. BDT meets to discuss presentations and possibilities. Majority decides to use vendors to do all the work rather than in house, but need buy-in from CFO. Tech guy resistant.
  11. some group members prepare a presentation to convince CFO to use outside supplier and add new capability. Head of Sales is chosen to get Tech folks on board.
  12. HR works with you to understand all levels of change necessary and who would be involved. You create a plan that highlights everyone’s needs, the problem areas, areas of overlapping responsibility, budget issues. You hand this out to the full BDT for comment and email discussion.
  13. meeting set up with the CFO and full BDT to present your findings and needs. CFO reaches a compromise: use the Tech team to do the programming; vendor to offer plans for the design, branding, and SEO. You agree to meet with the vendors to see who would be most capable of collaborating with the Tech group as they’d need to hand over, and work with, the Tech folks. You all agree that the Tech team – not you, who initiated the idea – will choose the vendor they think they can collaborate best with.
  14. vendor presentation meeting #3. New vendors call you to gather information (original vendors never called to see if there were any changes to the original criteria, or if there were a different lead internal coach). None asks about the split of the work, or the need for collaboration. The one vendor who discussed collaboration was chosen by Tech team.

This very simplistic and very normal decision path took a year in which the lead contact changed, the BDT members changed, the needs changed, the buying criteria changed. Happens all the time. And the sales model doesn’t manage this end of the buying decision path. We just come in at the end when all of the rest has been completed, or come in too early before the complete data set is agreed to or understood. Do you know what stage your buyers are at when you speak with them?

Sales Focuses on Needs and Solution Placement

Using just the sales model in the above situation, the potential vendors would enter too early to ‘understand needs’ or ‘get into the buyer’s shoes’, gather incomplete data (it wasn’t complete until Step 8) rather than facilitating discovery towards collaboration skills AND web design AND branding, plus addressing the CFO and Tech issues. And, the assumption would be that the entire Buying Decision Team – not fully formed until near the end – is already on board.

In this instance, sales is involved in steps 5, 9, & 14. As a seller, you’d give a great presentation, recognize a need, get along well with your contact, and assume you were ‘in.’ When you did your second presentation, you’d assume you were ‘in.’ And the rest is history.

If you used Buying Facilitation® this time waste could have been avoided for both you and your prospect. You would have begun your connection as a consultant, and on the first call helped the buyer

  1. recognize and manage the problems with the CFO and tech guy;
  2. design the make-up of the full Buying Decision Team assemble all of the appropriate people, and facilitate the discovery of the full set of needs at the very beginning;
  3. recognize all of the solution and change criteria the BDT wanted to meet as well as the change issues they would have to contend with;
  4. determine how to bring in a new solution and manage any change/budget/timing issues

and done a presentation only when everyone was there, in agreement, and a full understanding of what any work would involve. It all would have taken a month or two. And then you know what they will buy, when they will buy it, who to sell it to, and how to present it.

First facilitate the entire buying decision as a Buying Facilitator/consultant, then sell. Your sales will increase by an enormous percent and you will dramatically decrease your sales cycle. Remember: buyers have to do these things anyway, with you or without you. It might as well be with you. So add some new goals and thinking, and strap on some facilitation skills to add to what you’re doing with your sales model now.

This article is a minor examination of how to facilitate the buy cycle, buying process, and of how to help buyers buy along the full route of their decision path. For a more complete examination read Dirty Little Secrets or call me with questions at 512-457-0246.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

5 Email Missteps Every Online Marketer MUST Know

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Email is by far one of the best digital marketing solutions to have in your toolbox. However, with this approach there is plenty of room for error amid an industry rife with regulations; delivery, filtering and other technology concerns and a glut of ever-evolving best practices. While email marketing is definitely not rocket science, there IS a certain degree of skill and artistry involved in crafting a winning email campaign. Proceed with abandon and it’s likely you’ll end up wasting time and money on failed email campaigns.

Email campaign failure can happen for a multitude of reasons, and the 5 missteps listed below are among the most common and easily avoidable offenses that every online marketer should take proactive measures to avoid.

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About the Author

Kevin LaytonKevin Layton is CEO of Data-Dynamix, a premier source of demographic data, a go-to partner for delivering digital marketing campaigns and experts in advertising sales training that was ranked 1,226 on the 2015 Inc. 5000. The company partners with a litany of top-tier ad agencies and media groups across newspaper, radio and television. Kevin, author of the upcoming book, Building Your Digital Marketing Machine, is also a revered inspirational speaker on digital marketing, international business and business strategy. Reach him online at www.data-dynamix.com.