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Book Review: The Dirty Little Secrets Of Sales
By: Staff
Issue: May 2010



Dirty Little Secrets, Morgen Publishing, 2009

Now and again, somebody adds something new to an overcrowded field and sales is certainly that. There are thousands of “How to be successful like me” sales books and a good few encyclopedia of sales methods. “Dirty Little Secrets” by Sharon Drew Morgen is neither of these, and as she says in the introduction:

“I’m going to introduce you to the missing pieces in sales—the dirty little secrets that have kept us locked-in to the type of results we’ve gotten used to. I’m going to teach you how to teach your buyers to buy.”

If you’re into business change, this is for you too. Selling and change, it seems, are tightly intertwined.

A basic problem in selling is that while the salesperson may convince a buyer the deal is worth doing, there are other people who need persuading, too. This is generally known, so what does this book add? Read on.

Morgen was a successful salesperson who became a buyer and quickly discovered that such people live in a complex world of competing needs, internal politics, resource constraints and more. And yet the salespeople who approached her did not really understand this, treating her like she was the only decision-maker and that she had full authority to sign on the dotted line without any internal consultation.

Her subsequent research found that yes, many salespeople did know the buyer had to get internal commitment, but the sheer complexity of this process was very seldom appreciated. What is also seldom known is that the buyer may not understand the complexity either, and it can be as frustrating for him or her as it is for the salesperson.

What Morgen shows is that companies are self-sustaining, complex systems and that sales attempts often rock the system boat, which rebalances itself by rejecting the purchase. You must thus address the system, not just the need—identifying critical problems that must be resolved before the sale can be completed.

Tricky, huh? No wonder so many sales efforts mysteriously bounce. To make things more complex, the selling company usually has a system that forces the salesperson into a certain way of working and may block him or her from effectively addressing the customer system. Double trouble, as they say.

After framing the problem, the book goes on to detail the Buying Facilitation method, including how to find the identified problem, use facilitative questions and more. It delves into practical psychology, unpicks how systems buy, and how you can teach the system to address its own issues. It is a very Socratic method, using questions to awaken buyers and others in the system and help them fix problems that will allow them to change, improve and (of course) buy.

What is gratifying is that Morgen spills the beans on the whole method, describing in detail and giving copious real-world examples of how it works (and how not doing it properly fails.) Too many other books have little real meat and are little more than thinly disguised attempts to sell the author’s consulting or training packages.

A word of caution: this is not simple stuff. Not everyone will go “aha” and understand straight away. It needs persistence and some faith, but the results can be so spectacular it surely is worth a good go. And yes, you could probably benefit from Morgen’s help, though she doesn’t push it (so demonstrating the power of the method!)

I’m not sure about the book’s title and I do hope bookshops know what shelf to put it on, as it is a star addition amongst a sea of repetition. “Dirty Little Secrets” is not a show-and-tell celebrity book, though it does show and tell salespeople how to multiply their sales by taking their sales hat off and facilitating the corporate buying process. It’s a tricky idea and not everyone will get it, but the results can be so powerful every salesperson should buy and study this book in detail.

In fact, it’s one of the best manuals on changing business minds I’ve ever found (and I’ve read a few), so it’s also highly recommended to anyone who wants to influence, persuade and move the thinking of other people in pretty much any complex organizational environment.

—Reprinted from ChangingMinds.org