Tuesday, 09 February 2010

About Sharon Drew

Sharon Drew Morgen

Sharon Drew Morgen is the visionary and thought leader behind Buying Facilitation® the new sales paradigm that focuses on helping buyers manage their buying decision. She is the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity as well as 5 other books and hundreds of articles that explain different aspects of the decision facilitation model that teaches buyers how to buy.

Morgen dramatically shifts the buying decision tools from solution-focused to decision-support. Sales very competently manages the solution placement end of the decision, yet buyers have been left on their own while sellers are left waiting for a response, and hoping they can close. But no longer: Morgen actually gives sellers the tools to lead buyers through all of their internal, idiosyncratic decisions.

Morgen teaches Buying Facilitation® to global corporations, and she licenses the material with training companies seeking to add new skills to what they are already offering their clients. She has a new book called Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it which defines what is happening within buyer’s cultures (systems) and explains how they make the decisions they make.

Morgen has focused on the servant-leader/decision facilitation aspect of sales since her first book came out in 1992, called Sales On The Line.

In all of her books, she unmasks the behind-the-scenes decisions that need to go on before buyers choose a solution, and gives sellers the tools to aid them.

In addition, Morgen changes the success rate of sales from the accepted 10% to 40%: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle, and her books  – especially Dirty Little Secrets – teaches sellers how to guide the buyers through to all of their decisions, thereby shifting the sales cycle from a failed model that only manages half of the buying cycle, to a very competent Professional skill set.

Morgen lives in Austin TX, where she dances and works with children’s fund raising projects in her spare time.

Latest Podcast

Sharon Drew Morgen

Listen in as Sharon Drew Morgen talks about the future of sales and introduces some revolutionary thoughts around sales process that looks at sales from a more holistic approach..

Click here to listen!

Networking For Results

Testimonials

My sales cycle time used to average 9 months. Using your method, I got a new client within a WEEK of my first meeting with him.

Barbara Heyn, Atticus Consulting, LLC

Selling with Integrity describes the first new paradigm in sales. It offers a model for how to bring sould into sales, and teaches the hands-on skills to do it.”

Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

“Finally, a sales paradigm which supports our spiritual values and lays the foundation for the paradigm shifts occuring in business today.”

Ken Blanchard, coauthor of “The One Minute Manager”

“Morgen has done it again – described an exceptional approach to selling and made it clear and concise. Read this book [Selling with Integrity] and practice what’s between the covers. It will make your next sales call the most successful in your career.”

Larry Wilson, author of “Changing the Game”

“Morgen’s Buying Facilitation® is light years ahead of the rest of the field.”

Philip Kotler, author of “Marketing Management”

While you may have first developed your methodology for sales, it has proven quite valuable whenever I needed to question and listen for what was really going on with an individual or an organization.

Bravo and thank you so very much for your wisdom and passion with which you share it.

Michael R. Neece, Founder & CEO InterviewMastery.com

sdm
Be The GPS For Your Buyer

Buyers have two identifiable responsibilities:

* maneuver through their internal, behind-the-scenes buy-in issues to ensure a trouble-free change process, and

* choose a solution that will address their stakeholder’s criteria for systems excellence while maintaining the integrity of the system.

Sales addresses one of these jobs, but not the other. In fact, we’ve never been taught the skills to help with the off-line issues buyers address: as per the explanations and skills offered in my n...
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The Arrogance of Sales

Sales professionals face a lot of failure. You work very hard to discover plausible opportunities, understand needs, respect and care for prospects, and position your products so prospects recognize how your solution manages their need. You are good. You are professional. You are conscientious. Yet you only close a fraction of your sales; you seem to have no idea who to spend time on, who to let go, who will be able to buy, or who will have no ability to buy (even though they act like prospects)

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How Do We Sell If We Don't Understand Needs?

When people first hear about Buying Facilitation®, they ask: ‘But if we can’t ask about needs and discuss our solution, how do we sell?’

The short answer is, you don’t. At least not when you are accustomed to. Because that’s not the first thing buyers need from you. The buyer first needs assistance navigating around their off-line decision issues. See, we actually enter our buyer’s sphere far too early in their decision cycle. And we end up attempting to gather needs, understand, a

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Sharon Drew Morgen's Podcasts

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Selling and Buying Explained

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Help Your Prospect Buy

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The Future of Sales


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2/8/10 - Sharon Drew Morgen
The Future of Sales

For centuries, the sales model has been focused on placing a solution. Given the complexity of business these days, having the right solution to manage a ‘need’ is not enough to help buyers choose your solution.

Buyers live in a very complex world now. With global stakeholders, economic downturns, enlarged decision teams, and an almost limitless number of options – all available at the drop of a hat – competition is far more complex than being addressed by us having a good solution and giving great service. And as a result, we’re having greater difficulty closing sales. We’d like to think it’s ‘the economy, stupid.’ But in reality, the problem is more complex.

The only way to shift the results is to do something different. [You know the deal: According to Einstein, you can’t solve a problem using the same things that created it.] And sellers are kicking and screaming at the possibility of having to do something different. But I can tell you that doing what you are doing will keep giving you the results you’re getting.

Sales is no longer a robust-enough model. The future of sales lie in actually helping buyers navigate through their internal decision issues that often have absolutely nothing to do with a problem or a solution. We have been taught to believe that by understanding the ‘problem’ and having the appropriate ’solution’ that buyers will buy. We’ve never been taught that getting buy-in from the internal, behind-the-scenes cultural issues that buyers live with daily and are the cause of the ‘need’  are what determines purchasing habits. In fact, a buyer’s decision issues are managed, daily, by a plethora of internal people, policies, history, relationships, vendors, etc. that are independent of their need or our solution, and are well outside the sphere or influence of ’sales.’ But we know that, as that’s what’s stopping us from closing all of the sales we should be closing.

WE CAN’T MANAGE BUYERS’ RELATIONSHIP ISSUES

A prospect that a client of mine had been working with for a year finally, after 3 visits and 3 trials, decided to not purchase the product. I spoke with the prospect that was the head of Learning and Development: What stopped her from being able to buy a product that they loved? The new HR director was a very difficult person to deal with, and the prospect didn’t want to get into a fig
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