Selling is changing, but is the change occurring quickly enough as customers become more informed and products and services become more readily accessible form a variety of sources?

As long ago as 1999 in her book ‘Selling with Integrity’ Sharon Drew-Morgen proposed Buying Facilitation’ as a new way of selling which continues to increase in popularity and which, up until the customer asks “so what is it you’ve actually got?”, is more akin to coaching in its process and skill requirements than it is to any previous selling method.  

Her ‘Relationship first, task second’ approach has the potential to  strike fear into the heart of many a sales traditionalist however I would challenge any sales manager or director that hasn’t done so yet to seek the truth of what makes their best people the best….not their call activity or product mentions; or their behaviours when accompanied by their manager , but the real truth…the truth they talk about with their colleagues at sales meetings or in the coffee bars and hotel lobbies where they meet other salespeople. They all know that people buy from people and the best of them are the ones that “Get on” with the greatest number of customers and have the best working relationships.

What they do better than the rest lies in their desire to serve their customers in getting the best out of their products and services; and that means that the service comes before the product in their minds and therefore their behaviours. In doing this they ask questions to help their customers to explore the furthest reaches of their minds in search of solutions to their own problems so that the solutions, and potentially the decision to buy, remain the ‘Intellectual property’ of the buyer. At no point in the process is there any coercion or a solution that is pushed onto them.  

This process of facilitating discovery is entirely consistent with the model of coaching that has the role of the coach as facilitating discovery by the coachee and avoiding giving advice. There is congruence too in this approach with the NLP “Beliefs of excellence” (Sue Knight, NLP at Work, 2007) that “There is a solution to every problem” and that “Everyone has within themselves all the resources they will ever need”. You see it’s only when a prospective buyer exhausts all of their internal solutions that they will start to consider external ones, and that’s when they may choose, as a part of their internal resource toolkit, to engage the help of the salesperson and his or her product in solving their problem. Up to that point in a selling discussion any attempt to offer a product as a solution may be met at best with a “No thanks”, a “Yes but” or a “Yes” which is really a “Yes but”. The “but” becomes the objection you’re going to have to handle and once you’re handling objections your weight is moving slowly to your back foot! 

Furthermore the customer relationship may be compromised by a perceived attempt at a pushy sale and the hitherto contrived nature of the discussion that preceded it. So it is worth your salespeople spending time exploring and understanding their customers’ problems, solutions and potential barriers to making change rather than telling them how to solve problems they don’t think they have and wasting their time defending a product proposition that the customer doesn’t think they need!

This will be music to the ears of trained coaches who are accustomed to facilitating discovery but how many sales organisations currently train their sales people in the fundamentals of coaching that could be so useful to them in their selling and the development of questions  that facilitate discovery rather than seek to manipulate? 

Just like coaching, “Buying Facilitation” is about helping the client to achieve their goals more quickly by helping them remove blocks to progress and find solutions to problems.

How might your salespeople react to a selling programme that didn’t allow them to give solutions, only to explore problems and help their customer to find their solutions? In our experience they find it refreshingly different to “Normal” sales training; empowering and motivating……and who doesn’t want a motivated and empowered salesforce? Application of this new selling philosophy seeks to improve selling outcomes by creating bonds between buyers and sellers based on a genuine desire to serve on the part of the seller. It removes tension from the seller-buyer relationship and can create a true win-win.

So in a world of extremely well informed buyers, many of whom still hold cynical stereotypical views of “Pushy reps”, now might be the time to improve productivity by making changes to the objectives and outcomes of your sales training by including “customer coaching” or “Discovery questioning”.  After all “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got!”