This is my “Writing Assignment 1” for the course “Writing in the Sciences“, from Stanford University.
It’s my book review of “Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it“, from Sharon Drew Morgen.
Where do buyers go when they have an urgent need, love your solution … and disappear in a black hole?
Sought a cheaper or different solution? Went to a competitor? Stole your idea? Or did nothing?
The book “Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it” (from Sharon Drew Morgen) holds the answer.
At first, you may think this is a book about selling. Not quite. It’s about the hidden world of how change happens and decisions get made, and ultimately, how buyers buy.
For Sharon Drew, buying is, above all, about change management. And buying creates change!
According to Sharon Drew “Buyers live in a system, and systems don’t like change. That’s why they have held onto their dysfunction for so long and not sought a solution sooner. The time it takes them to come up with their internal answers, and get appropriate buy-in, they cannot make a purchase. Dirty Little Secrets explains how systems create and maintain dysfunction, and how to help the system change in a comfortable way, so sellers can enter at this end and actually lead the buyer through their change management. They have to do this anyway – it might as well be with us. And then they’ll be ready to buy, with no competitive issues, no objections, and no price discussions.”
So, if all that change management must take place, before we can close a sale, what can we do to either speed up the process or help the organization manage the change?
The solution is the Buying Facilitation Method.
In the Buying Facilitation Method there are 2 phases in any selling:
- Buying Decision Funnel – we need to help buyers manage internal decisions for Buy-In and change, by helping them:
- Identify present and historic elements that maintain the Identified Problem;
- Decide if familiar solution provider can resolve the Identified Problem;
- Decide the criteria for choosing new solution provider, if necessary ;
- Recognize how to manage problem resolution – so that all stakeholders and policies can buy-in without fallout.
- Product Decision Funnel – sellers support choices to resolve the Identified Problem (this is usually where sellers begin!):
- What are the needs?
- What product or solution is best?
- How to implement it?
In conclusion, Buying Facilitation is about change management, not selling. It doesn’t replace the need of selling, nor your selling skills. However, it involves a new set of skills that allows you to close more sales effectively.
Therefore, if you want to learn how decisions get made, how change happens, and how buyers buy you must read this book. You will never be able to go back to the old way of just selling a solution.
