Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can't buy and sellers can't sell and what you can do about it

by Sharon Drew Morgen

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0964355396
• ISBN13: 9780964355392
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Morgen Publishing
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A New Approach To Better Sales

In Dirty Little Secrets, Sharon Drew Morgen has presented a totally new approach to sales. The premise of the book is quite simple: Success rates in sales are dismal and it is because sellers are focused on the wrong things. Current selling methods and techniques focus on identifying need, building relationships, fostering trust and providing your product/service as the solution. Ms. Morgen says that this model neglects to consider the transaction from the buyer's side and the steps the buyer must go through before they can make a decision. She has trademarked the term for her system - Buying Facilitation(R). She advances the premise that buyers will make no buying decision until they get buy-in from all parties that are in any way connected to the Identified Problem. She believes that buyers must work through all the problems of getting buy-in within the company before they can begin to evaluate the solution provided by sellers. They must work through these problems with or without the assistance of the seller. If the seller puts the sales process on hold and instead concentrates on assisting the buyer in working through getting buy-in, the seller becomes part of the decision making team. The seller can assist the buyer by asking facilitating questions. The seller must understand all the steps the buyer must consider before making a buying decision and be prepared to help the buyer work through them. The book is well written and gives plenty of examples as well as a case study presented from a conventional/consultative sales model, from the buyer's side in the Buying Facilitation(tm) model and from the seller's point of view using the Buying Facilitation(tm) model. According to Ms Morgen, using this approach will increase closing by 200% to 800% and shorten the sales cycle. It should be noted that the approach appears to be most effective in business to business sales where there is a long sales process involving big ticket items. The book gives you a great overview of the Buying Facilitation(tm) process, however you will need to go deeper than this book to implement it in your organization. She provides additional resources for those who are interested. If you are involved in sales, you really should read this book. The more you can help the buyer work through their internal, behind the scenes decisions that must be made before they can consider your solution, the better your results will be in terms of shortened sales cycle and higher closing rate.

This book kicks up the intuition meter

I'm a huge fan of Sharon Drew's books- her direct approach is refreshing and spot on. This book is her best work yet because it focuses on the hidden agendas that both buyers and sellers have throughout the sales process. Salespeople are still fighting for time with their stressed out, distracted and opt-out audience that when they finally get their 4 minutes of fame- they sell to those minutes but forget to think about what happens before and after. Sharon Drew climbs into the minds of the buyers and sellers and reveals "secrets" we need to know about. This is a must-have book for anyone who needs to kick-up their intuition meter and make sure they understand what is going on in the sales process.

Almost Everyone Prefers to Buy Rather Than Be Sold To

I've followed Sharon Drew Morgen's advice, in print, for years, and have read most of her published work. It really works. With the exception of "Question-Based Selling" (Thomas Freese) and "Socratic Selling" (Kevin Daley), most sales approaches are simply rehashed or reframed. Sharon Drew Morgen's "Dirty Little Sectets" turns the world of selling on it's head by facilitating the buying decision. In fact, she demonstrate how you--the salesperson--becomes a team member of the customer's decision-buying team ON THE FIRST CALL! Unheard of. Other traditional sales approaches typically develop trust after weeks or months of "trust-building" strategies. I'd suggest buying this fascinating book now.

Here's Why You're Closing Ratio Isn't What It Should Be

Change is difficult for most of us and especially difficult for an organization full of individuals. Some of us resist, others encourage, others sabotage. If we want our organization to get change right, we've got to involve everyone who will be affected by the change and allow them to prepare themselves, their departments, and the organization's systems to handle the change in an orderly manner--or everything turns to chaos, and if chaos is an anticipated result, we simply won't institute the change no matter how potentially beneficial that change may be. Buying creates change. Whether purchasing a new product, replacing an existing vendor, or instituting a new program or service, when your prospects contemplate purchasing your products or services, they and their organizations are going to undergo significant change. Often that change never happens (that is, you don't make a sale), not because your product or service doesn't solve a real issue they have or because it won't improve their sales or because it won't improve productivity or reduce expenses. In fact, a great deal of the time purchases of products and services that have these very positive results are not made because the company can't handle the change--yep, even extremely positive change--the product or service will create. What does this mean for sellers? It means the way we sell is all wrong--or at least the way we deal with the concept of selling is all wrong. Sharon Drew Morgen in Dirty Little Secrets: why buyer's can't buy and sellers can't sell and what you can do about it (Morgen Publishing: 2009) changes the whole concept of the sales process. We sellers have been taught that we find a suspect, qualify them as a prospect, connect with them, identify a problem or issue, develop a solution, close the sale. Morgen says that this vision of selling is all wrong because it doesn't take into consideration the change management issues that must be dealt with before our prospects can commit to making the purchase. According to Morgen, when our prospects disappear--when they say "I'll get back to you" and never do, where they've gone is to deal with all of the behind the scenes issues they must deal with prior to making the commitment to purchase. Why do most of them never get back to you? Morgen says because they have not been able to get the people or the systems within the company in alignment to make the purchase. Worse, all of this change management stuff is stuff that we as sellers have little knowledge or understanding of. If all of this change management must take place before we can consummate a sale and it's all out of our hands, is there anything we can do to either speed up the process or help the organization manage the change? Yes, Morgen says, we can help facilitate the change by engaging the company--our buyer--with the Buying Facilitation method. This method, whose primary tool is Facilitative Questions, helps get all the necessary players withi

Fantastic Resource for both Marketing and Sales!

There's a terrific, provocative and challenging book on the stands today -- Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can't buy and sellers can't sell and what you can do about it. Sharon Drew Morgen's book unveils what lies beneath the buying decision process, layer by layer, until you finally get that Eureka moment that it's got nothing to do with the product. We, as marketers and sellers, focus on identifying triggering events, needs or problems and begin addressing those as a way to build relationships and get our prospects to buy from us. As I was reading her book, I realized that we're actually a bit late to the party and trying to sneak in through a side door. In Dirty Little Secrets, Sharon Drew shares a wealth of examples to help us understand what goes on behind the scenes. She puts clarity around status quo by showing that all "systems" have workarounds in place that keep things functioning, even if not optimally. Untangling those workarounds is often the barrier to making a sale. Sharon Drew writes: "Any Identified Problem shows up as a functioning part of the system, since it is indeed functioning in some capacity. At the point that the system determines that it needs to be functioning better is the point at which buyers are ready to buy. And the systemic elements that have kept the Identified Problem in place will fight for their lives to continue doing what they are doing." "No decision to purchase will take place unless the people and policies included in the workarounds buy in to change and the elements are redistributed in a way the system approves." The key is to help buyers manage their offline change issues prior to our attempts to focus them on solving the problem. When we don't do this, or our buyers can't do it on their own, the decision made is to do nothing at all. The system wins the battle to maintain status quo. Or they make bad decisions that perpetuate mistakes that slow their ability to gain successful outcomes. But what Sharon Drew does is show us exactly what we need to do to help them avoid these scenarios. Sharon Drew points out that the issue is often that buyers have tunnel vision when it comes to dealing with issues. They're simply too close to them to see the entire spectrum they must address to get true resolution. Our job as marketers and sellers is to help them step back and take an objective stance that enables them to see the entirety of everything involved in solving the problem. Dirty Little Secrets is all about showing you how to "facilitate the route through to the buy in process." Sharon Drew does a magnificent job of making this easy to understand. In fact, when I read it myself, I had a V-8, head-slapping moment. I believe a lot of us know this subject matter subconsciously, but I've never had a better way to articulate it and get to the root before I read Sharon Drew's book. And, in case you think this is just a sales book, I warn you - the insights can help marketers who are earnestly trying