12 Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers don’t buy

Do you sit and wait for your buyer’s to close? They need your solution. They like you. They are OK with the price. What’s going on?

Here are the ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ of why buyers don’t buy, taken from my book of the same name:

1. Sales focuses on solution placement and needs assessment, and has no skill set to help buyers maneuver through their off-line, personal, idiosyncratic, behind-the-scenes planning and decision making that must take place in their environment before they can buy.
2. Buyers will make no purchasing decisions until they get buy-in from the components (people, policies, initiatives, groups) that are in any way connected to, or will touch, a solution to their ‘need.’
3. Until or unless there is buy-in, and the system is ready, willing, and able to buy-in to necessary change, buyers will not accept a solution no matter how great the need.
4. Buyers live in systems that operate, as all systems do, from the law of homeostasis, and thereby must resist if something new were to threaten disruption. To insure minimal internal disruption, buyers face internal change management issues as they bring in something new (a solution).
5. Until buyers understand and know how to mitigate the risks that a new solution will bring to their culture, they will do nothing. The system is sacrosanct; homeostasis is more important than fixing a need. New solutions can’t be purchased until a way is found to maintain internal balance. Includes internal politics and relationship issues.
6. Until all of the Buying Decision Team members have added their voices and fully defined the criteria that a solution must contain, buyers can’t make proper use of  solution information (i.e. pitch, presentation).
7. Sales, and the focus on solutions, enters the buyer’s decision path too early in a buyer’s decision cycle – usually before all of the Buying Decision Team is on board and has added their specific needs to the solution criteria.
8. Helping buyers maneuver through their buy-in and systems issues require a different focus, and a different skill set, than the one sales offers. Buyers don’t buy using a seller’s selling patterns. And the sales model doesn’t have tools to influence non-solution-related decisions.
9. Buyers buy on unique, idiosyncratic criteria that are agreed to by their Buying Decision Team – not on the strength of their need, your product, or their relationship.
10. The type of relationship a seller has with customers/prospects is a buying feature only once the buyer has determine how, when, why, and if they are going to buy.
11. Buyers seek a solution only after they manage their internal systems issues. Part of their decision/choice is the assurance that the new solution will maintain the ecology of the system.
12. At the start, buyers don’t know all the issues they need to manage as they begin the process of resolving a problem and choosing a solution.

Your current sales skills do a great job understanding need and placing solutions. But they don’t work with the behind-the-scenes non-solution-related change management issues buyers go through privately.


by Sharon Drew Morgen
http://sharondrewmorgen.com/