We should go into every meeting, or every phone call, with the intention, and the expectation, of earning access to other people within the company, and especially at higher levels. Starting with the first meeting, use the techniques we have discussed, and a few more still to come, to try to get beyond the person you are meeting with and meet the next person.
Here’s a helpful rule of thumb that has served me well: you need to get beyond the person you are meeting with or talking to, and on to someone at a higher level, within three meetings or extended phone conversations. It has been my experience that . . .
If you can’t ‘make the sale’ of why you should be meeting with more people at higher levels in your customer’s organization within the first three meetings, you probably never will.
You end up establishing a precedent that is very hard, if not impossible, to overcome.
If you meet with the same person four, five, or six times, and they still won’t give you any access, they must have a reason. It could be they want certain information from you so they can get credit for providing it. Just as often, the reason they won’t let you meet senior people, is that the project or the solution they are investigating or considering is tied to a bottom-up initiative, and the senior managers and executives don’t even know about it yet.
I can think of no more important piece of information we could ever learn about an opportunity than where the initiative originated. If that is unclear to us, or if we are plain wrong, everything we do could be completely misdirected and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Our objective should be to get up to the level where the Action Decision will be made as quickly as we possibly can. It’s important to realize that this is good for our client, too.
If a top-down initiative has trickled down to a lower-level person who is then asked or told to research and meet potential vendors, the executives would probably like a reliable recommendation sooner rather than later. If our sales efforts help to ensure that the criteria they use to select a source are consistent and congruent with what is important to the executives, then we have helped our client make a great Source Decision. On the other hand, if by our efforts a grassroots, bottom-up initiative is properly aligned with and tied into the higher-level corporate goals and objectives, then we help to make the internal sale that inevitably has to be made to get a bottom-up initiative approved, staffed, and funded.