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RainToday.com's Podcast: Marketing & Selling Professional Services

Selling your services involves more than getting prospects to like what you have to offer. It also involves the buyer getting agreement from all parties and agreeing to change. To overcome this roadblock, Sharon Drew Morgen, author of the new book Dirty Little Secrets, says salespeople need to learn how to facilitate the buying decision. Do so and you can dramatically shorten the sales cycle.

Specifically salespeople want to teach the buyer how to manage the decisions they need to make anyway and get on the buying decision team, Morgen says. Doing so differentiates you from your competition and makes it more likely the buyer will sign with you.

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(Time: 16:45)

Listener Feedback

Good insights here, but if a prospect is thrashing this much internally (and most are), why would they even be returning your calls? To some degree this sounds like the Samurai Sales or other systems that counsel handholding through stressful early uncertainty phases. But if they even allow such intervention, aren't they likely to seek a more neutral, disinterested party?

—Kent Vincent
Managing Principal, IS & R Services

Sharon Drew Morgen responds:
Every single decision that anyone makes—even just to cut your hair—has some internal, off-line, unconscious decision making that an outsider will know nothing about.

Sales treats a problem/need as if it were an isolated event and merely focuses on the area around the solution placement, with no skills to help the buyer maneuver through their internal, private issues that they are never a part of.

My Buying Facilitation(R) model is very disinterested and acts like a GPS system. And, as I say over and over in Dirty Little Secrets, this is NOT a sales model. This is a decision facilitation system.