A new dawn for selling?

Selling has a bad press as a word. Probably you associate it with the clumsy, scripted intrusions of the call centre workhorse, desperate to tell you that you have ‘won’ a competition for which you never entered. Here, Jenny Rogers tracks the evolution of this sometimes useful, often maddening presence in our private and corporate lives.

You think about the bullying of the salesperson who coerces a naïve young couple into buying the kitchen they cannot afford, or the oppressive attention of the upmarket boutique saleswoman who is working on commission. Everyone has fallen for these tactics at one time or another, accompanied by its inevitable sequel – buyer’s remorse, the shaming feeling of stupidity, and the indignation at having been conned, which follows from buying something that you don’t want or need and at too high a price. Even so-called consultative selling is in essence a manipulative approach, designed to steer the purchaser through a narrowing process of options predetermined by the seller.

So how would it be to know that you could sell both ethically and successfully? When I read Sharon Drew Morgen’s books on selling it was a big moment of what the Americans call ah-ha! Because this is exactly what she offers. Sharon Drew Morgen is arguably the most advanced thinker in the world of selling. Her methods are staggeringly successful. Her case is that selling fails when the seller tries too hard to sell his or her product (and for product, also read advice/solution). Selling works, she says, when the whole process is turned on its head and the seller sees his or her role as facilitating the decision to buy. This is why Sharon Drew Morgen has called her method 'Buying Facilitation', the name of her latest book explaining her radical selling techniques and philosophy.

A further unique feature of her approach is that selling (remember that could be an idea as well as a product or service) gets stuck because the seller can never understand the systems perspective of making a sale. Only the buyer, who lives inside the system can do that because it is too complex and dynamic for an outsider to understand. Here is an example:

Let’s say that Pat is an HR Director who had invited us and two other consultancies to bid for some team-building work based on the usual kind of specification. But there has been a mysterious silence for some months with bland talk of ‘waiting till the financial situation improves to make a decision’. When we unexpectedly meet her at a conference, we have the following conversation (boiled down here to its essence), this time using a Buying Facilitation approach:

‘So how’s it going on the team front Pat?’

‘Still dreadful. Our behaviour is as awful as ever. I despair.’

‘What’s stopping you from first steps to getting things better?’

‘The Terrible Two.’

‘OK, who or what are the Terrible Two?’

‘The Chief Executive and the woman he’s having an affair with who’s also on the Exec team. We’re all paralysed with fear about cans of worms if we did anything like team-building. He claims he wants a better team but I’m not sure he really does.

[So Pat was extremely unlikely to disturb the system in her organisation by challenging her Chief Executive, not least because her own job depended on his patronage.]

‘What would need to happen to get the fear under control?’

‘The rest of the team would need to take courage and confront the gap between saying and doing. As I’m part of that, that means me too. In fact, could you help with that? Would you be willing to come and talk to him, with me? If that happened, I think he’d see it differently and we could maybe get something going.’

So getting a systems perspective on this issue was why we got this work. There was little point in doing what we and all our competitors had previously done – talk team-building programmes – in other words, sell our product. This is because the topic that preoccupied everyone had never been mentioned and could only be understood by people inside the system – people constrained by fear of the turbulence that might well be provoked by change.

In this conversation we were acting as authentic facilitator to the buyer, not simply as a seller of services. She may or may not have needed what we were offering. We may or may not have been the right firm to supply it. And that’s where the key difference lies.

You have to be ready to walk away

Sharon Drew Morgen’s method positions the seller as coach to the buyer, objectively helping buyers discover what they need to take account of when they are deciding to buy. It also identifies the variables in the system that need to be looked at once the purchase has been made.

She uses the notion of funnels to explain the process. In the upper funnel, the seller asks the buyer questions about the issues: what’s going well and not so well, what needs to be addressed before any change happens and what their buying criteria are. This is the Buying Decision Funnel and here the seller asks the questions. The pinch point in the middle is where the buyer finds out whether your service or product fits their criteria. Here you sell to those criteria – and only to those. In this lower funnel, the Product Decision Funnel, the buyer asks: How many? How much? When?

So what’s the key difference? In traditional selling, you are pushing your product. You are hunting and the buyer is your prey. You inevitably meet resistance and yes-butting – what the traditional salespeople call objections. With Sharon Drew Morgen’s method, you are serving the buyer and the result may be a sale which meets both buyer’s and seller’s needs. It is clear to both parties from the start that you can walk away if what you have is not what the buyer needs. Paradoxically, the chances of making the sale are very much higher. There’s all the difference in the world.