Product Description

Sellers often don’t close all of the sales they deserve to close. Why? The sales model itself fails to address the off-line issues buyers must manage before making a buying decision. Dirty Little Secrets takes the reader behind the scenes to understand how buyers buy, and offers tools to help them. Dirty Little Secrets exposes the problems with sales that have resulted in over 90% failure rates, and offers front-end decision facilitation tools to mitigate the failures. Until now, sales books have focused on helping buyers through the solution-placement end of the buying decision. No other book takes the seller through the behind-the-scenes issues that buyers must address before they get buy-in for a solution. This is not a sales book, but a sophisticated examination of systems, change, and decision making to help sellers close more, find more prospects, and greatly minimize the sales cycle. This book is essential for any serious student of sales. Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254994 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-28
• Released on: 2009-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review

Dirty Little Secrets

 

“This book is a dead-on analysis of how buying decisions get made. The examples are wonderful and I also love the personal style. The whole thing screams experience, wisdom, class, success, and authenticity.

—Anne Miller, author of Metaphorically Selling

 

“This book will disturb the industry; it pulls back the veil and we’ll never be able to go back to the old way of just selling. From now on, anyone who talks about sales has to mention this book—it’s too big to push under the rug. The book is necessary for any serious sales professional.”

—Jeff Blackwell, SalesPractice.com

 

“Dirty Little Secrets” takes us inside our buyer’s decision-making process where we discover the factors they need to address prior to making a decision – most of them having nothing to do with our solution.

- Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies

 

“This great book gives you powerful insight and practical steps to helping buyers have an easy time buying. It will alter everything you know about selling!”

—Chip R. Bell, author of Take Their Breath Away

 

Dirty Little Secrets is not a sales book. This is a book on the Hows of truly serving a customer.”

—Lee Glickstein, author of Be Heard Now

 

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

—Phil Kotler, author of Marketing Management

From the Author

What is stopping you from closing all of the sales you should be closing? Hint: it’s not you, it’s not the buyer, and it’s not your solution. It’s the sales model itself.

 

In this groundbreaking book, Morgen brings us behind-the-scenes as buyers navigate through their off-line decisions to get the necessary buy-in to purchase a new solution. As Morgen methodically explains, sales merely manages the needs-analysis and solution-placement end of the buying decision without addressing the change management issues buyers must go through: relationship issues, old vendor issues, policy issues, internal politics. Dirty Little Secrets introduces new skills to help the reader become the GPS system to the buyer’s decision route, separating the sales process from the buying decision process, and speeding the sales cycle dramatically. This is both a change management book, an expose of sales, and a how-to book on decision facilitation. As with Morgen’s other books, this book is well-written, well-conceived, and an important addition to the field.

About the Author
Sharon Drew Morgen is visionary author of NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, as well as Dirty Little Secrets, Sales on the Line and Buying Facilitation. She has authored over 800 articles on decision making, change management, sales, and decision facilitation. Morgen is the developer of what is considered to be the new sales paradigm Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that sits on the front end of sales to help buyers manage the off-line, behind-the-scenes issues they need to address to get buy-in to purchase a solution. Since 1988, Morgen has been the leader in the movement to help buyers buy, focusing on the buying decision rather than the need or solution placement. Morgen is an executive coach as well as an international keynote speaker, sales trainer, and decision strategist. She has been an outspoken voice in the Spirituality in the Workplace movement since 1990. She lives in Austin, TX. She holds patents on a search tool t and a pocket decider.

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Customer Reviews

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 within the company on board and leads them through thinking through the changes necessary to make the purchase possible.

Sound mysterious? This isn't rocket science but it's a far cry from light reading. Fortunately, Morgen makes it easier to understand by dividing the book into three sections.

The first section lays out the change management issue from the buyer's perspective. She gives us insight into the changes a purchase necessitates--from its impact on individuals to company politics to systems. She gives a great example of what a buyer must go through when making a simple purchase of a couple of extra dining room chairs (I'll leave it to you find out on your own by reading the book why it's so difficult to sell a couple of chairs).

Section two goes through the process from the seller's point of view, demonstrating where our traditional sales process has left us and our prospects high and dry.

And the third section details the Buying Facilitation method skills. Buying Facilitation is about change management, not selling. It is the precursor to selling, not a replacement for it. It involves its own set of skills that don't replace your selling skills but instead allow eventually using those selling skills more effectively and closing more sales.

If you really want to begin to understand why your closing ratio is so low, if you really want to know why those prospects never get back to you, if you really want to know what your selling process is missing, read Dirty Little Secrets.

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 to map content to buying stages reach even farther back to engage prospects earlier in the process in a more productive way.

Go Buy the Book!

The Sale Behind the Sale
Sharon Drew Morgen's book is a big step into a universe few salespeople ever knew existed ... the sale behind the sale ... what customers really do when they say, "We'll think it over and get back to you." If you've never heard that, then you (a) aren't actually a salesperson, or (b) you don't need this book. Sharon goes into great depth about the Internal Sale ... what goes on internally in an organization when Your Customer wants what you're offering, but must sell it internally in order to get a go-ahead. It's most revealing and talk extensively about the REAL process that goes on behind the scenes -- (1) "can we stretch our existing system a little further to cover the LATEST problem? (2) OK ... we can't ... what is our CURRENT vendor offering? (3) how do we present it to management ... the LAST time they weren't too happy with our request; how do we make it seem that the previous solution was 100% good, but (something we did or didn't anticipate) has overwhelmed it? It's a critical and informative analysis of why current sales methodology (SPIN, Solution Selling, etc.) still aren't cutting it, esp. in today's economic decline, and how to step into this critical but otherwise unseen world where sales live or die beyond our vision and our ability to influence.

In conventional sales process terminology ... it is a (very) elaborate Qualification process that examines ... via a creative dialogue with the customer/prospect ... just what the likelihood of getting a sale will be given existing solutions, internal politics, ability of the customer to field your product/solution ... even IF they buy it. It's very good reading ... esp. the second time.

However, Sharon's book has a significant shortcoming ... she fails to spend any significant time discussing ... how to raise customers/prospects interest at the onset. Her approach is essentially to construct an open, probing dialogue (dialogue goes beyond mere conversation) and use questioning techniques to unveil internal buying and political processes in order to influence them. But, her approach starts ... in the middle. There's no discussion of HOW you get to that initial point of raising the customer's/prospect's interest in your product or service ... so you can have that dialogue. She decries the conventional product-push/value prop approach saying that it marks the salesperson as aggressive and presumptuous and/or arrogant ("how would you know anything about our real needs", she would paraphrase the typical customer/prospect's reaction to the typical sales presentation). But she doesn't give us any guidance on how to get the sale started.

I value her book/concept (Facilitated Buying - her copyright) as the back-end, the real sales-engine, once the customer expresses interest in the product or service.

Steve R.