Did you miss me?? I only kind-of retired. God knows I tried. I really did. But I found myself sitting on my couch crying for days, thinking I was useless, that I’d wasted my life and hadn’t made a difference in the world. After a few days of this nonsense I had an idea for a new book – using my ability to pull apart systems and create new choices, but this time in a field where our unconscious has been rather clueless: the field of hearing what others intend to convey (I know, I know – we all think we hear accurately. But as you’ll see in the new book, our brain makes it relatively impossible and easily tricks us.).

So for the last two years I’ve been reading, researching, and writing a book tentatively titled Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard to be published by AMACOM in the fall. It’s a personal development book on how we unwittingly bias and misinterpret what we hear, and how to correctly translate what our communication partner intends to convey (which might be quite different from what we think we hear) to enable collaborative communication. It’s a nice mix of snarky, new thinking, exercises, assessments, and funny funny stories. It’s about bias and assumptions, language gaps and memory tricks. Fun to write and hopefully fun to read.

Now that the book is handed in I’m feeling itchy. Same question comes up: What to do with my life? I don’t want to feel useless again, so after a long think I decided to do keynote speaking in sales and bring my original thinking about the hidden end of the buying decision path to a broader audience.

Seems many of the terms I coined in the late 1980s are now being used comfortably in the field. Most of you don’t remember the days when ‘helping buyers buy’, ‘buying decisions’ or ‘buy cycle’ were terms sales people laughed at me for using. Or they’d scrunch up their faces and say, “WHAT??” But now there’s a ‘there’ there. My mother used to say “Wait long enough and you’ll get everything you wish for.” She also added, “…unless you die first” which I’ll conveniently omit from this discussion given my age. So it’s time.

For over 20 years I trained my Buying Facilitation® model to many thousands of people globally – KPMG, Wachovia, IBM, Bose, Unisys, Kaiser, DuPont to name a few – to offer sellers an additional skill for those times they wanted to become actively involved with that part of the buyer’s buy-in issues that are normally hidden from sellers. My clients had great success, but I’m aware not everyone wants to invest time to learn.

As a keynote speaker, I will be able to share the ideas with a wider audience who want their sales and marketing teams to be inspired, understand the complete behind-the-scenes buying decision path and how to apply the knowledge to their field, and explain how to optimize the sales model.

My standard topics will be: Selling Doesn’t Cause Buying; Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell; Selling with Integrity: doing good business while doing business good. And of course, I can customize my keynotes to your conference.

So I’m back. Only this time, I’m not going to educate you. I’m going to inspire you to greatness. I’m going to give you the knowledge to sell with integrity, help buyers navigate the hidden buying decision path, and show you how to enhance sales to close more, faster, nicer by truly helping buyers buy and becoming a true Relationship Manager with a servant-leader-based value proposition. I might have gone away for a while, but I’m back to offer new insights. I look forward to serving you.

For interest or questions, contact Sharon Drew. Take a look at up my updated one sheet.

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