CHAPTER 1

      WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME

      One thing is true for everyone; we are all buying and selling every day, even if we are not salespeople by profession. We sell our coworkers on a new strategy, we sell our families on a vacation spot we want to visit, we sell our spouses on a new car, restaurant, or something we want to see happen.

      The act of selling is one of the earliest professions known to man and was one of the first social means of interaction and communication. Prior to the selling experience, the only means of getting what we wanted was to take it. The strongest were supreme as there was no commerce, only survival. It’s what wars have always been made of! We are all born with needs; it is natural and now instinctual at this point of our evolution to strive to meet those needs, even if they are not just food or shelter as in the past. Selling (agreeing to common value to value) was the first form of communications allowing a transaction to occur that was beneficial to both parties. In this new experience, both parties remained physically intact and neither intimidation nor threat was used as the closing technique as they had been previously.

      Most salespeople realize selling is facilitating actions based on communication of a need, and value perceptions to satisfy that need. We have learned over the millennia that selling some solutions is easier than others, but understanding people and their perspective is paramount to success. Perspectives are key motivators for buying. So in order to have the right perspective, we must remember when it comes to selling or buying, we are all doing it and it is being done to all of us. If we make the effort in either selling or buying, anyone can relate to the perspectives and desires. The better we can honestly relate with the buyer, the faster we will succeed in learning their What’s in it for me? need, their Decision2Buy thinking process and how they will buy.

      We must get inside our buyers’ heads to understand how and why they purchase, understanding we all use the same processes, but different with value desires. To accomplish this, we developed the Decision2Buy process for selling. This process delivers a means for us to mirror our buyers’ processes and value goals of buying so we have the roadmap to the action of buying.

      The Decision2Buy process is extremely successful because:

      •It is based on human nature, is intuitive, hardwired, complementary, and it honors the buyer.

      •Buyers get what they want and they get it in a way they want it. The salesperson has a tried and true method for successful selling.

      •The buyer is the superstar and the focus of the whole selling process. Nothing generates rapport faster than inviting someone to share who they are, what they do, how they do it, and who they do it for.

      •Everyone wants to share what they expect from a selling situation. This is the single best way to define what and how the buyer wants to buy in a mutually beneficial structured manner.

      •The Decision2Buy process is about defining how a person buys, both personally and professionally. This means the buyer feels in control, the sale is based on stated needs or goals, the buyer works with the seller as a partner and the results are predictable.

      •It is visual, benchmark driven, customizable, flexible, repeatable, open for improvement, controllable, and a mirror of how the buyer purchases.

      •It takes the guesswork out of the sale for both the buyer and the seller.

      •It reduces the cost of the sale because sellers will only sell to their best prospects. Buyers only work with salespeople that understand their Decision2Buy process and goals.

      •The qualification process is incrementally better and faster.

      •The Decision2Buy process integrates with any CRM or software sales solutions, customization is easily done.

      •It integrates the three resources that make for a successful sale: Good people execution, integrated effective processes, and companywide enabling tools. Every industry and organization has unique attributes with some commonality in that they are comprised of people and processes to facilitate the buying of products and services.

      When you integrate the Decision2Buy process into your thoughts and actions, you will have an epiphany that can change your life. This awareness of our calculator and our buyers seems so easy, it is not. It is so hard because we must shut off the desires to meet our own specific needs (What’s in it for me?) and focus on other’s desires to meet their specific needs. Think of the old saying, “A happy wife is a happy life.” We can accomplish this goal with implementation of these new learned skills, the Decision2Buy process, with consistent effort.

      The sales challenge is to identify and uncover the process for a sale to occur by replicating and following the Decision2Buy process of your buyer. This uncovering is both on the business level, how the company purchases, and on the personal level, how the buyer uses the business process with their own internal Decision2Buy process to make the buying decision and execute it. An individual buyer’s personal Decision2Buy process must be integrated into the stated business’s purchasing processes requirements in order to be successful.

      Let’s agree on some definitions of the concepts we are going to cover.

      The American Heritage Dictionary defines sales as: Activities involved in the selling of goods and services. It defines salespeople as: Persons engaged in selling merchandise in a store or in a territory.

      The Thesaurus lists salesperson as a noun: One who sells. In a bygone era we would call people who were salespeople, merchants, traders or brokers. This is valid today but with a number