I believe it helps to put ourselves in the shoes of the lower-level person in order to understand the dynamic of what and whom we are dealing with. The reason a gatekeeper is a gatekeeper is that he or she has been given a specific job to do. One type of gatekeeper is the administrative assistant. It might seem to us that the job description of an executive assistant is, ‘Don’t let anyone through under any circumstances.’ That is probably an exaggeration. It’s more like, ‘Screen out all the garbage calls, but if you find a good one, put it right through.’ I’ve found the best way to sell past the gatekeeper is to sell to the gatekeeper. Treat them with the same respect, and sell the value of your company, your people, and your solutions just as you would if you had the executive on the line. If the gatekeeper finds you worthy of getting through, they will often even help you with your approach.
Now let’s look at the other kind of gatekeeper. This is a lower-level person in some unit or department who calls you to request information, a demo, or a proposal. If they have been given the task of calling you by their boss, then they believe it is their job to prescreen you. In fact, the specific instructions from their boss may well have been, ‘Call a few possible sources, and when you find one or two good ones, then I will get involved.’ That’s standard management practice. So, let’s realize that pressuring them to speak to their boss, or worse yet calling over their head can make them look bad. It looks as if they didn’t do their job. What we have to do is change this psychology around. We need to figure out a way to make them look good.
Have you ever been in a client meeting, or in a conversation on the phone, when the person you are talking to interrupts you to say, ‘Could you hold that thought just a minute? I’d like my boss to hear this’? I’ll bet that’s happened to all of us, hasn’t it? What happened there? We probably stumbled onto something that the boss has been asking about or complaining about. Or maybe we said something that reinforces what the person we are meeting with has been trying to explain or communicate to their boss for some time. This does not have to be an accidental occurrence.
One of the main reasons we spend so much time in our workshops talking about value, how our customers perceive value, and the cause and effect of business value, is to help each of us to be more effective asking the questions that prove we are worthy of meeting their boss and other senior executives. When we start asking questions about Urgency, Motive, and Consequence, and how the specific objectives that he or she has been personally tasked with link to and support the higher-level goals of the company, we are perceived as someone who deserves to be talking to management.