Sharon Drew Morgen is a NYTimes bestselling author and the original thinker in the sales field. She has developed Buying Facilitation® to help sellers help buyers manage their buying decision path and focuses on making ethical business practices profitable. Her new work is in the area of listening – how people can hear each other. Morgen is a provocative speaker who offers audiences new ways to think through old problems successfully, and walk away with fresh ideas and solid takeaways to enhance their success.

As an adjunct to the sales model, Morgen has taught Buying Facilitation® globally. She has written 7 books on the topic, including Selling with Integrity, Dirty Little Secrets (why buyers can’t buy and seller’s can’t sell), Sales on the Line, and Buying Facilitation®. She has appeared on NPR, CNN, and CNBC as an authority on the buying decision process. She has personally trained 25,000 on five continents in Buying Facilitation®.

Morgen’s newest work is on listening, collaborating, and making sure communication partners hear each other to limit restrictions and maximize creativity, change management, and leadership.

Selling doesn’t cause buying

The sales model places solutions. But as our corporate cultures and buying decision team members get more diverse, giving prospects data about our solutions isn’t good enough. Buyers must get buy-in from many people before they have agreement for a purchase; the sales model doesn’t offer skills to facilitate the systemic, idiosyncratic buy-in process. In this provocative talk, Sharon Drew offers audiences a look into buying decisions from the buyer’s viewpoint, and adds a decision facilitation capability to sales to bring all decision makers together quickly; enlist the buying decision team on the first call and improve revenue eight fold by managing both ends of the buyer’s decision process.

Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

Selling and buying are two different activities. Sales only handles one of them and is not part of the buyer’s private, idiosyncratic buying decision process. As a result, sellers wait for the low hanging fruit to drop and close merely 7% of all prospects. Companies hire 5x more sales people than necessary, face delayed sales cycles, and waste 90% of a seller’s time. It’s possible to know who is going to buy, when: 80% of buyers will buy within 2 years – from a different vendor. The time it takes buyers to get the appropriate buy-in from the full buying decision team, and to shift the corporate culture to allow change, is the length of the sales cycle. This provocative talk exposes issues that prevents sales and offer ideas to enhance closing through helping buyers buy.

What? How to really hear what others want to say.

Did you know that we hear merely 30% of what is said to us? That our entire lives are biased by how well we can hear what others intend to convey? We pick our jobs, our spouses, our friends and neighbors according to our listening capability. In this very provocative talk, Morgen explains how we listen and what we listen for, how our listening restricts our collaboration, creativity, leadership, and success, and offers fresh ideas of how to have more choices and success in how we hear what others intend to convey.

Testimonials

Sharon Drew provided Qvidian’s Connect11 attendees with a very engaging, thought provoking and interactive session focused on leveraging Buying Facilitation® techniques to help manage the buying decision path earlier, and thereby drive higher win rates and increased sales effectiveness. Prior to the conference she spent quite a bit of time doing research and speaking with a few of our clients to make sure she had a clear understanding of our needs and possible solutions for us. We learned a lot, and were able to use her ideas to help us respond to our clients better.
Rich Berkman, VP Partnerships,
Qvidian

Sharon Drew’s Buying Facilitation® has helped us in two important ways. First, key members of my team have been trained by Sharon Drew. With that background we have been able to walk advisors thru a decision making process to determine what the clients would need on the product side, Buying Facilitation® teaches them how to work with the buyer to design unique, appropriate solutions that they would be willing to buy from us. As a results our advisors have been able to expand their practice and build meaningful leverage and growth. Our entire manager-of-managers platform has been developed based on what the advisors have gleaned from this collaborative decision making approach (Buying Facilitation®) and as a result we know how to help them to compete effectively for HNW clients in today’s marketplace.

Secondly, and this is where the long-term benefits are really beginning to pay off, our using Buying Facilitation® instead of conventional sales helps the advisors see that their deeply rooted “open-present-close-hope” sales methodology is not consistent with being a trusted advisor as much as it is with being a “broker” (a term they despise). Some of the braver members of the group are actually involving a member of my team (trained by Sharon Drew and using the collaborative decision making of Buying Facilitation®) to help buyers recognize their own criteria and figure out how to make their best decision using us as their supplier – all of this, early on in the sales cycle with their clients and it is providing them with success much earlier, and with more prospects, than they would normally have achieved using conventional sales methods. And it has been a very positive reaction. We are just now beginning to see the guard come down and the realization set in that this stuff works! It has been difficult given the cultural shift that has been required but things are indeed moving forward at a more rapid pace than ever.

We are still at the “aha” stage for the many. But as they see the power of helping clients make their own decisions rather than having to be the one with all the answers they are becoming more open to our advice and coaching. There is tough work yet to be done, but the skills we have developed thru Sharon Drew’s program have helped us become true agents of change, which is rewarding.

Jim Vaughan, VP Marketing, Operations (High Net Worth),
William Blair Select Investment Partners

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